YouTube: Your New Favorite Sitcom
*Originally submitted November 28th, 2018 for a Television Studies course at DIS Copenhagen
In October 1938, over 5,000 people listened to Orson Welles’ groundbreaking performance of “War of the Worlds” on CBS Radio. Programs like this one eventually lead to the Golden Age of Television in America roughly ten years later. With each decade, the American sitcom has transformed and adapted, playing off of the success of previous shows, while also pushing the envelope and moving television forward. In 2018, 80 years after “War of the Worlds”, 30 million people watch more than 1 billion hours of YouTube daily. 300+ hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, with over 1.3 billion videos on the site today. While it has not yet surpassed traditional television in audience size, YouTube is most certainly the future of television and entertainment. Vlogger (video blogger) groups like the Vlog Squad and Team Ten have amassed tens of millions of followers across platforms like YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter. Primarily using the Vlog Squad as an example, it is clear to see how these groups have become the modern American sitcom. Through Youtube’s financial model, ad policy, and moderation of users, the reality aspect of the videos, and the incorporation of social media, groups such as the Vlog Squad have created a new type of television and entertainment, functioning as a sort of post-modern sitcom.
The Vlog Squad centers around David Dobrik, 22, and his group of twenty-something friends living and filming their daily lives in California. There is some debate over who is officially in the group, but the universally acknowledged members include Liza Koshy, 22, Jason Nash, 45, Scotty Sire, 26, Zane Hijazi, 26, Alex Ernst, 22, Toddy Smith, 27, Heath Hussar, 25, Corinna Kopf, 22, Kristen McAtee, 23, Matt King, 26, Carly Incontro, 27, and Erin Gilfoy, 27. Some of their recurring friends include Jason Nash’s girlfriend and YouTuber Trisha Paytas, 30, former Nickelodeon star and YouTuber Josh Peck, 32, and David’s childhood friend and live-in assistant Natalie, 21. Multiple times a week, each member of the Vlog Squad uploads a “daily vlog”, chronicling a day or a few days in his or her life in real time. Many of the members gained recognition and became friends through the popular app Vine, and moved to YouTube once Vine was shut down permanently. David uploaded his first vlog, entitled “PUTTING A PUPPY INTO THE MICROWAVE!!”, on July 30th, 2015, and in the coming years, the rest of his friends followed. What started as a hobby for this friend group has turned into a full-fledged and incredibly profitable reality show, extending to advertising, brand deals, merchandise, live performances, and podcasts.
Television in the United States has primarily operated on a commercial model, as opposed to the public service and state controlled models of other countries, meaning it is funded through advertising and commercials. Following this practice, YouTube as a service also profits off of a commercial model. The site shows viewers advertisements before and during videos, and there are banner ads all around the webpages. However, individual content creators also benefit from personal brand deals and sponsorships. Similar to how early television and radio shows would be sponsored by brands, such as Kraft Television Theater and the Goodyear Playhouse, an individual creator’s video may be wholly sponsored by brands such as SeatGeek, Audible, Honey, or Blue Apron, to name a few. However, YouTube and its users have run into many issues regarding sponsorships in recent years. YouTube’s financial model works in such a way that the platform itself allows for certain videos to be monetized depending on many factors, including audience, content, and subscribers. But if an individual YouTuber is posting a sponsored video, FTC law requires that they disclose this information by clearly labeling the title of the video with “ad” or “sponsored”. And per YouTube’s policy, creators “may include paid product placements, endorsements, or other content that requires disclosure to viewers (“Paid Promotion”) in [their] video content” as long as they check the “video contains paid promotion” box in their settings. But even though these rules are in place, they are not always adhered to. There is a large problem in the YouTube community with creators not disclosing when their videos are sponsored, and it can be incredibly deceptive to audiences.
With the help of SeatGeek, a ticketing company, David Dobrik has given away at least 8 free cars to his friends and family. He uses these sponsorships to create content and videos like, “SURPRISING BEST FRIENDS WITH 3 NEW CARS!!” and “SURPRISING MOM WITH A NEW CAR!! (EMOTIONAL)”. David’s only acknowledgement of the sponsorship is to say, “Thanks to my friends at SeatGeek…” but does not disclose the sponsorship in the title. It becomes problematic when users are creating content solely based off of a brand deal, sponsorship, or advertisement. Audience members feel as though they have built a close, trusting relationship with their favorite YouTubers, and can feel betrayed when they watch a video only to find out it was an advertisement. One prominent YouTuber and a friend of Dobrik, Casey Neistat, asserts, “If the content is good, ad or not, it’s usually appreciated, but transparency is very important when communicating with an audience that signed up for you, not the ads.” As sponsored videos become more and more popular, creators need to be careful to disclose these circumstances to their followers, so as not to lose subscribers and viewers.
While the 1950s are considered the Golden Age of American Television, programs struggled in the face of a harsh political climate and censorship problems that are still relevant in the industry today. The Red Scare in the 50s blacklisted many industry professionals for supporting communism, and lead to the demise of more than a few popular television shows. One exception, however, was Lucille Ball, star of the wildly popular I Love Lucy. She was confronted for having supported communism in the past, but was never blacklisted and her career was not affected. Because her show and production company were so lucrative, the network decided it would do “more harm than good” to blacklist her. YouTube acts as a sort of network that monitors the activity of its users, and punishes users for violating the community guidelines. Logan Paul, a twenty-two-year-old vlogger with over 18 million followers, is equally loved and hated within the YouTube community for his outrageous content. In December 2017, he uploaded a video to his channel entitled, “We found a dead body in the Japanese Suicide Forest…” In the video, he visits the Aokigahara forest in Japan, also known as the “suicide forest”. Shockingly, for both Paul and the audience, the vlogger stumbles upon a dead, hanging body and films it for his vlog. He speaks to the camera and reminds his young audience that “suicide is not a joke”, but at the end of the day, the video was posted to his channel of over 15 million followers at the time. Paul faced enormous backlash over this video, and after trending in YouTube’s top videos for days, he removed the video himself. YouTube did not remove Paul from the platform, and did not see the video as a violation of the guidelines. After the backlash, however, they removed Paul from its top-tier monetization system, essentially meaning he could still make money from views, but could no longer receive ads. The problem with this situation, just like Lucille Ball’s situation with her network, is that “economic incentives encourage platforms to be more permissive than they claim to be, and to treat high-value producers differently from the rest.” YouTube is more complicated than a traditional network because it is technically just a distribution platform, and anyone can create an account and upload content. But there needs to be a clear set of guidelines, and these need to be enforced equally across all accounts, whether big or small.
The 1970s saw a sit com revolution in the form of “reality” programming with All in the Family, a format that has grown exponentially through YouTube. All in the Family followed Archie Bunker, an unfiltered bigot, and his family as they navigated topics such as race, gender, sexuality, and politics. The show paved the way for sitcoms to tackle and discuss a wider range of issues by using “strong vaudeville humor without children present, delivered by a group of realistic characters who seemed, like the audience, actually to evolve as the years went by.” These factors helped blend pure entertainment and reality for the first time on television. On many levels, the very nature of YouTube is deeply rooted in reality programming. Vloggers and creators film footage of their supposedly real lives every day, and post this footage online for their millions of followers to enjoy. The Vlog Squad is a group of over ten individuals, all filming their daily lives from different perspectives. Fans of the group will get to view one event through the lens of many different creators and see all the details that someone else might have missed. They even talk directly to the camera and have special names for their followers so as to build a stronger relationship that transcends plain old entertainment. Fans comment on videos, giving creators live feedback into how they should alter their content moving forward. Really, it is a dual effort between vloggers and viewers to create the “best” content.
The two most prominent members of the Vlog Squad, David Dobrik and Liza Koshy, dated for around three years in the beginning of their careers. On both of their channels, which boast 26 million subscribers between them, they chronicled all the moments of their relationship over three years, culminating in a breakup video that trended at #1 on YouTube. Because of the nature of their jobs, it was necessary for them to make a specific video, posted to David’s channel and entitled “we broke up”. The video, posted five months ago, currently has over 46 million views from fans and non-fans alike. The video trended and received so much attention because it really showed people how personal a job as a vlogger is; nothing is off limits, because once you shut parts of your life off from your fans, they begin to lose that connection and trust. And on a real, human level, “the video’s popularity is not entirely thanks to the viewers who normally follow the everyday minutia of their favorite YouTubers. It’s gone viral because of how obvious it is that the two deeply care for one another.” The video skyrocketed to popularity due to a balance between the minute, everyday discussion of things like breakups, while also showing that these “celebrities” can have such a human, friendly, caring breakup. So while All in the Family helped introduce reality into scripted programs, YouTube has found a way to monetize the mundane details of people’s lives, largely due to this perceived connection between viewers and creators.
The 1990s saw sitcoms move undeniably into the theme of singles and the big city, following urban single culture and groups of young people in their twenties and thirties with no kids. The most prominent example of this is Friends, a sitcom that follow a group of six twenty-something best friends living in New York City. The show gained enormous success in the nineties, but it has transcended time and is still popular with audiences today who are able to stream the series on services like Netflix. TV columnist and culture writer Paul Flynn credits Friends with being “the last documentation of friendship in the pre-digital era.” The article continues, “In an age craving authenticity, the vision of a group of friends hanging out in a coffee shop and each other’s apartments… ‘must be so glorious if you are of a generation that has looked at friendship as something complicated, ethereal…and often very isolating.’” Flynn uses this explanation for why Friends has become so popular with a new generation, but this new generation has another group of friends to watch live their lives: the Vlog Squad. This group, too, is comprised of twenty and thirty year olds, living unmarried and with children in the glamorous city of Los Angeles; and unlike Friends, it’s not scripted. The members of the Vlog Squad fight with each other, go on crazy trips, hang out and play video games at each other’s houses, party, date each other, and break up with each other both on screen and in real life. This has also caused a new mentality in the younger generation. Not only do they watch and look up to YouTubers, they want to be YouTubers. According to a recent survey by British firm First Choice, “34% of kids age 6-17 would like to be a YouTube personality, while one in five wish to start their own channel.” David Dobrik, originally born in Slovakia, is from a small town in Illinois and dropped out of college to move to Los Angeles and start his YouTube career. Now, at 22, he lives in a multi-million-dollar house, has won multiple Streamy Awards, and is estimated to be worth $2 million. To his young audience, it looks like the perfect job: get paid to hang out with your friends, travel the world, and pull pranks on people. However, according to the report from First Choice, “96.5% of all those trying to become YouTubers won’t make more than $16,800 per year…In order to make a decent living, a YouTuber would have to receive tens of millions of views per month.” Young audiences are more than welcome to enjoy the spectacle of these creators’ lives, but need to be aware that YouTube is a job like anything else, and it is not an easy one. So while sitcoms like Friends in the nineties were able to make sitcoms seem like any normal friend group, twenty year olds today have used YouTube to turn their real life friend groups into entertainment for millions.
In the last decade, sitcoms have greatly surpassed the traditional formats and tropes, and perhaps the best example of this is the Norwegian television show Skam. Produced by NRK, a publicly funded public service broadcaster in Norway, Skam ran from 2015-2017 with great success, due in large part to the show’s use of social media. At the start of each week, while broadcasting Skam, a clip, conversation, or social media post was posted in real-time on the show website. New material was posted on a daily basis, with the content unified and combined into one full episode on Fridays. The main characters differed from season to season, and the fictional characters had social media profiles where viewers could follow their activities. All of these factors created a special and unique relationship between the show and its fan base. And again, while this was extremely successful, it was still a scripted television show. The Vlog Squad and other YouTubers do this themselves every day; their careers exist solely within social media. Their main avenue is YouTube, but they must all be extremely active on Snapchat, Twitter, and Instagram in order to maintain that connection with fans and give them an all-encompassing sense that they are involved in these creators lives. For the first time in entertainment history, fans have a direct line to their favorite “celebrities”, and these stars can comment directly back to their fans. Even in their videos, they are breaking down that third wall, and talking directly to their viewers, saying hello to them, telling them to comment below what they would like to see more of. In fact, viewers have so much access to their favorite creators, that they somewhat view them as friends, rather than untouchables. Sociologists Richard Wohl and Donald Horton originally coined the concept of parasocial interactions and relationships in 1956 to explain “how audiences developed attachments to media figures. It boils down to one-sided affection: a person invests emotional energy and attachment in a media figure, and they develop a sense of kinship and intimacy that makes them feel as though they know the celebrity—even though the celebrity has no idea that they even exist.” When Wohl and Horton coined this term, the phenomenon referred to people who were watching their favorite actor playing a part in different movies. But with YouTube, these creators are more or less playing themselves. And in another major shift, they actually do know the names of some of their followers through social media. In every video from every Vlog Squad member, whether it be David, Scott, or Heath, they shout out one of their fans directly and thank them for the support. Another thing to note is that some fans invest not only time but also money into these YouTubers, giving them an extra sense of entitlement. To support their channels, the members of the Vlog Squad have merchandise for sale, go on tour, make music, start podcasts and Patreon accounts, and more. So “because creators often earn money off their fans through memberships, Patreons, and other cash avenues, there are fans who feel entitled to specific details about the lives of creators or even specific content.” While it is great that fans have more access to their idols than ever, YouTubers need to be careful to strike a balance between creating what they want to create, and only creating what their audiences want in order to retain views and subscribers.
It is clear how YouTube vloggers have taken elements of past popular sitcoms and transformed them into something entirely different in the age of technology. The question then becomes, what happens next? Where do YouTube and its creators go from here? Interestingly enough, many of the most popular YouTubers have gone on to get hosting and acting jobs on traditional television shows. Hannah Hart of My Drunk Kitchen recently had her own series on The Food Network. Liza Koshy, a member of the Vlog Squad, stars as the newest host of the Double Dare reboot on Nickelodeon. Kian Lawley, former member of vlog group O2L, was cast in upcoming movie The Hate U Give before being replaced by popular actor KJ Apa. When asked how long he will continue vlogging, David Dobrik generally says he will continue until “something better comes along.” So it is curious that the people who built YouTube into such a strong and powerful community don’t necessarily see longevity in it for their careers. One thing YouTube has done to remedy this problem is their introduction of YouTube Originals and YouTube Premium, formerly YouTube Red. YouTube Premium is a subscription-based service offered by YouTube that offers ad-free streaming and original premium content by some of its most prominent creators, including Rhett and Link, Joey Graceffa, Gigi Gorgeous, Liza Koshy, SMOSH, and PewDiePie. Series such as Cobra Kai and movies such as The Thinning have gone on to be majorly popular with people willing to pay to watch them on the service. To understand the world and phenomenon of vloggers, watch the 2006 YouTube Premium documentary Vlogumentary. Ultimately, the future of these incredible creators is unclear. Will YouTube, the platform that gave them their start, be able to keep them through programs like YouTube Premium? Or will they pass and go to the networks or services like Netflix and Hulu in the hopes of joining a more traditional television program? So while their exact future may not be evident, it is important that the entertainment and media industries recognize YouTubers for the long-lasting contributions they have made to television, as well as permanently altering the relationships viewers have with creators.
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