YouTube Stars Are Being Exploited!

Hey guys,

Did you watch Zoella's Winter Haul? That reminds me, I need to go buy those L'occitane cinnamon candles.

I have found that most of my money is spent on things I don't need, often pitched to me be YouTube stars. Companies use YouTube stars to sell their products, and the concept of being used is incredibly belittling of one's potential.

Do you believe today’s YouTube stars are being exploited or empowered?

Retweets, likes and subscribers translate into money in the eyes of companies and billion dollar industries. These incredibly powerful firms then exploit these social media stars and use them to sell their products. YouTube stars in particular develop a very personal relationship with their viewers. Their viewers watch them on a daily basis; they begin to trust them as if they had been long time pals. This trust translates into social media interaction (likes, retweets, subscribes, comments) and these social media interactions are then abused by companies, which translate this trust into money. YouTube stars are often incredibly vulnerable, they need financial support as many of them have not attended university (or cant afford it) and they are mostly unemployed, their need for financial support leads them to believe that advertising products that are genuinely good (not a scam) to gain a living is not a bad thing.

YouTube tells me I should love Tacobell and Topshop. Tumblr tells me I should watch the Hunger Games and eat In’n’Out burgers. Twitter tells me I should be obsessed with Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga and Obama. Instagram tells me where I should eat, what I should wear, where I should travel. Before I knew better, I trusted social media to ‘advise’ me on how to live my life because I was getting this advice from regular people, turns out behind closed curtains the same advertising companies are tugging at the strings of those social media personalities that are trusted by millions of devoted followers. Each and every social media website is utilized to gather data form the consumers, to see what they like and then through the interactions of the consumers they sell their product. The consumer is the marketer, this is dramatically different to how advertising use to work back in the day when it was a one-way conversation from marketer to consumer.

YouTube stars like Zoella, Tyler Oakley, Sprinkeofglitter (Louise) and Caspar Lee are all very famous and they all have one thing in common- they all work beneath several companies to help sell products so that they can earn a living. These mega-famous YouTube stars have millions of loyal fans: Zoella has 9,560,630 subscribers, Tyler Oakley has 7,774,630 subscribers, Capspar Lee has 5,360,430 subscribers and Sprinkleofglitter has 2,318,186 subscribers.

What do these numbers mean to them, what do these numbers make them feel? Exploited is the last word that would cross their mind. These numbers translate into cash for advertising companies: once a popular social media personal advocates or endorses a certain product, their millions of devoted and loyal fans whom trust their opinion would go out and get it to and that is how the amount of likes, retweeets and subscribers translates into money for these companies. Companies use social media stars to advertise their products, once they are done with them they move on to the next big hit in social media, leaving them feeling used up and worthless.  Social media sensations are forced to put every second of their life online for everyone to see and criticize, this criticism is very personal as it condemns every move they make in their lives and it often impinges upon their mental well-being. Behind the glitz and the glamour of having your sculptures made at Madame Tassuds and the roaring crowds cheering your names lie lost and broken human beings.