'PewDiePie doesn't sing or dance'

Ruth Deller (@ruthdeller; r.a.deller@shu.ac.uk)

Kathryn Murphy (@kathryndmurphy)

Mainstream media representations of YouTube celebrities

Marcus Butler and Alfie Deyes on Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway

The magazine itself is filled with #content. There was a lot to take in. First of all, it comes with lots of fun stickers featuring all your favourite YouTube stars. There are also stickers with phrases that your average teen will know, including "The fleek shall inherit the earth," and "Eat tweet sleep repeat." I didn't know those phrases, but they sound nice. (Cook 2015)

Lauren Luke is not a very likely celebrity. A 27-year-old singlemother from South Shields, Tyneside, she lives with her 10-year-old son, Jordan, her mum, sister, twin teenage nieces and fivehighly affectionate dogs in a small pebbled-dashed house in ananonymous terraced street.

... among one particular demographic, Luke is very famousindeed. Teenage girls point and scream in the street, while othersshyly approach to ask: "Are you …?" … Not that great wealth hasyet started to accompany her fame. "I'll be honest with you," shesays, sitting in the front room of her home, "we don't haveheating on during the winter because it's … costly. So there's me,my mam, and my sister. And all the dogs. We use them forwarmth. I have a hat on, a jumper, a dressing gown and whatever.And my mam will turn round to us and go, 'Bloody hell, Lauren,you're meant to be famous! Look at the state of you!' It'spriceless."

...Her appeal is explained by her unaffected amateurism and greatcharm...(Adler 2009)

Deyes is here to promote The Pointless Book, a paperback described as an addition to hischannel and “a gift to his fans”. (It sits in that great tradition of gifts for which you pay £8.99to the person giving it to you.) It’s a bit like the activity sheets given to children in museumsand on planes to keep them quiet.... A case could be made for this form-stretchinghorseplay making this bestseller the Tristram Shandy of our age, but not a terriblyconvincing one. “What a load of shit,” says a security guard policing the event when I showhim my copy. The team around Deyes definitely is thinking of the next step, which is turning3 million followers into £3m, or a multiple thereof. Deyes makes a living from pre-rolladvertising, which he describes as “nothing substantial, but enough to pay the bills”. It maynot be Moby Dick, but with its self-promoting hashtag games and “exclusive digitalcontent”, the Pointless book is a canny piece of merchandising. (Samadder 2014)

Most of these celebrities carry with them the distinct look of someone whose parents takethem skiing on a regular basis, but their popularity knows few bounds and, as that chap inSpider-Man might have said had his character not been killed off in the name of plotadvancement, with great popularity comes a great big book deal. There are two tests whenapproaching books by YouTubers. In the first, you ask yourself if the book would ever haveexisted without the lure of a huge cheque, though it’s important to acknowledge that mostYouTubers will consider cheques old hat, and will only accept transactions made usingPayPal, Bitcoin and unicorn emojis. In the second test, you need to imagine these YouTubersin their 50s. When they spot a copy of this book on their shelf, do they react with anythingother than a sigh and “Well, it made a lot of money for very little work”? Add to that a thirdcriterion – is this book simply a festive cash-in con? – and you’re ready to go. (Robinson2015)

PewDiePie’s jokes, such as they are, are not funny; his wisdom, such as it is, comes in justthree flavours: trite, condescending, and trite and condescending. Peculiarly, among thedrivel, there’s also a strong sense of contempt for PewDiePie’s fans.Cheque test: FAIL Future bookshelf test: FAIL Con factor: 83%

Binge feels like a story that needed telling – rather than pages that needed filling – andpresents as strong a case as any for the positive power of YouTube celebrity. Uniquely,among this selection, it leaves the reader with a sense that there could actually besomething more to this social star than meets the eye.Cheque test: PASS Future bookshelf test: PASS Con factor: 3%

It’s bundled here (in a tin, for some reason) with The Pointless Book 2, a title whose lack oforiginality in the titling sphere will come as little surprise to anyone who has read KeriSmith’s spookily similar, marginally superior and significantly older interactive books such asWreck This Journal and Finish This Book, a format homaged to within an inch of its lifeacross Deyes’ two-volume non-extravaganza… the worst thing you’re likely to see in a tinthis Christmas, unless someone buys you a can of baked beans and miniature sausages.Cheque test: FAIL Future bookshelf test: FAIL Con factor: 98%

Girl Online is different to your standard ghost-written book, and that’sbecause of the implicit promise that Zoella makes to her followers. Theirrelationship is based on a fundamental understanding that she will behonest with them. These are teenage girls who worship their idol, andreally believe her capable of doing anything. To them, she isn’t a celebritywhose name will be used to shift a product; she’s their best friend. If Zoellatells them she is “writing a book”, as she did several times, they believethat she is doing just that. This is why they bought it, and why they are soproud of her. If this is not the full story then they have misled.

‘[B]ecoming a micro-celebrity requires creating a persona,producing content, and strategically appealing to onlinefans by being "authentic"' (Marwick 2013: 114).

‘As video-blogs supposedly capture ‘everyday life’ andvarious aspects of the vloggers’ ordinariness, theircelebrity relies more and more on what their ordinarinessis able to draw upon for its self-commodification… theYouTube celebrity simply highlights the tightrope walkedbetween ordinary and extraordinary, person and celebrity(a fact true of all celebrity)’ (Smith 2014: 257, 260)

Zoella and other YouTube stars could be on the verge of losing a heap of moneyafter it transpired they are hosting adverts for junk food and gambling on theirvlogs. YouTube celebs, also known as Vloggers, can be paid up to £20,000 to allowads at the start of their online videos. But, taking Zoella, 25, as an example, with anaudience whose ages range from 11 to 17, concerns have been raised that theseads are targeting youngsters... It turns out advertisement regulations don’t applyto vloggers as they do to TV shows. Even so, with Zoella, who has been bloggingfor six years after setting up her channel in 2009, posting out videos to herfollowers – of which she has amassed 7.7million on YouTube alone (that’s over4million more than biggest boyband in the world One Direction have, by the way),she’s inadvertently opening up a world of fatty foods to the youngsters.

Millionaire bloggers beg

for privacy

‘The hobby that made her famous’ (The Independent)

‘Zoella has found fame and fortune in sharing personal detail on the internet’(The Independent)

‘She spends at least six hours a day on either her computer or her phone. Plusthere are videos to shoot, events to attend and books to write. Some people,she's said in the past, don't understand that it's a "real job".’ (The Times)

‘… the very young-and-already-far-too-rich YouTuber Zoella.’ (The Sun)

‘Miss Sugg has also starred on the BBC's Comic Relief Bake Off specialalongside celebrity contestants Gok Wan, Jonathan Ross and Abbey Clancy.’(Daily Mail)

PewDiePie doesn’t sing or dance, no. PewDiePie has made his name—and a fortune—posting videos of himself playing video games…. Difficult as it may be to believe that online audiences throng to watch strangers play video games, Let’s Plays have surged in popularity… About halfway into his third video, [Matthew] Varroneunlocked a treasure chest that contained one of the game’s more unusual items: monster guts. “I just went out of my way to acquire the dead corpse of a monster,” he told his viewers, matter-of-factly. “What am I doing with my life?”

This week the earnings of Zoella, the UK's most successful vlogger, were revealed. WhenI read that she makes £50,000 a month, I was so suffused with jealousy that my legswent all bendy and I felt faint… Zoella is now so famous that typing her name does notinduce the red squiggly line of my spell check. (She is up there with Leonardo da Vinciand Che Guevara and Boadicea in this respect.) Zoella is 25 and very pretty with verygood teeth and she sits on the end of her bed with fairy lights strewn across theheadboard and basically shows off the items she has recently bought while offeringbeauty and fashion tips… I have just been to practise sitting on the end of my bed, andit turns out I'm bloody good at it; a natural… And I have watched Zoella's latest post,and have seen how it works, and how you might talk an audience throughTreaclemoon's honey bubble bath ("it doesn't smell sweet and sickly, although, smellingit now, it is quite sweet and sickly")…

If Zoella makes £50k a month, I'm

launching Debella

Reality television seemingly welcomes ‘ordinary’ participants into the mediasphere, and baits them with the high likelihood of fame, celebrity or, at the very least, mass exposure. However, this is conditional on their fit with the product at hand and its commercial imperatives as participants are embedded into a given programme and repurposed across its media with implicit marketing goals in mind....

While the goal might be to eventually link up with advertisers and parlay an online profile towards a broader public presence, self-branding through social media does not require initial affiliation with the ‘already powerful’. Rather, and to reiterate, what matters most is visibility and attention – and therein lays the critical importance of self-branding strategies and practices of micro-celebrity.

The scale of potential audience reach for ‘ordinary’ people through social media is such that popularity and prominence no longer rest on the go-ahead from traditional gatekeepers (editors, producers, etc.). (Khamis et al 2016)

But go the other way, up the list, and something strange happens. You pass through a kind of YouTube-fame singularity where the rules of normal real-world celebrity no longer apply. Most people over 30 haven’t heard of him, but he is a bona fide global celebrity of an entirely new kind: if you track his numbers on Google Trends, which is admittedly a very rough metric of fame, he ranks only slightly below Tom Cruise. He has no easily defined talent–he can’t sing, can’t dance, can’t act–but over the past six years Kjellberg has uploaded around 2,800 videos to YouTube, which collectively have amassed more than 12 billion views. Forbes estimated that in the 12-month period ending in June 2015, he made around $12 million before taxes…. As popular as he is, it’s hard to explain exactly what Kjellberg is famous for. His videos mostly show him playing video games and talking about them, and–as he would be the first to admit–he’s not even that good at playing video games… He’s totally unpolished, but at the same time his timing is consistently spot-on.

Most of the critical literature about PewDiePie focuses on the bad language and crude physical humor–and admittedly there are a lot of both–and the fact that he is, at the end of the day, just a guy playing video games and yelling. But they tend to ignore the fact that PewDiePie is actually very funny… It helps that Kjellberg lacks that air of glittery-eyed narcissism that afflicts many YouTube stars–that sense that they wither into lifeless husks when not on camera… What started off as a furtive hobby has turned into something that suspiciously resembles a job… So far, none of Kjellberg’s forays into other media has proved, definitively, that he can replicate his colossal online success elsewhere… Not that Kjellberg particularly needs to be a star outside of YouTube. He doesn’t have to prove anything. He may be Internet famous, but he’s getting real-world rich.