Joe Cosarelli explores the peculiar fame of YouTube personalities:
The rough edges of the Real Housewives, even, read as prepackaged and fake compared with the intimacy of a girl staring directly into the camera and cataloguing her latest shopping spree in more detail than you might have thought possible. Or of Jenna Marbles, a basic blonde with extra sass who tells her 13 million YouTube subscribers (more than Katy Perry, Miley Cyrus, or Taylor Swift) what’s going on in her life. Many teenagers today (girls and boys) find this a lot more interesting than what’s on television—not least because by watching, clicking, and commenting, they are the ones making performers into stars.
As with modern art, the thought “I could do that too” is in many ways more compelling than “I could never do that.” And entry to this new star system is as simple as signing up for YouTube, Twitter, Vine (the six-second-looping video service owned by Twitter), Tumblr, Instagram, or, most likely, all of the above.
But just because anyone can post a video doesn’t mean that anyone can build an audience. And the system for becoming internet-famous is just as brutal—maybe more so—than Hollywood. Offline, after all, there are gatekeepers, but also a whole system of talent management: huge marketing budgets propping up a star’s brand. Online, it’s pure click-driven democracy—your worth can be measured precisely, to the fan, so almost definitionally, the people who are racking up big followings are doing something really (though often bizarrely) impressive.
The Dish 