Studio resident and vlogger Jon Aitken joined us on Friday 19 February to talk about the YouTube community, and how the site is dominated by a relatively small number of vloggers who have a vast number of followers. Alongside creating his own content as jonbehere, Jon recently started Flushing The Tubes - a platform for sharing interesting content by vloggers with less than 10,000 subscribers. Here are five things I learned:

1. Jon kicked off his talk by sharing the Urban Dictionary definitions of a vlog. These are the first four descriptions, which Jon generally agrees with:

“A video log. A journalistic video documentation on the web of a person’s life, thoughts, opinions, and interests.”

“The next in the evolution of narcissism”

“Simply put: a blog in video form, most likely found on www.youtube.com”

“Talking to the camera like it’s a person.”

2. Vlogging isn’t a new concept. The first ever video uploaded to YouTube was in 2005, by one of the site’s co-founders; Me at the zoo. Over a decade later, there are billions of hours of footage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw

3. We’re currently in a really interesting landscape where well-known vloggers; the most prominent example being Zoella; are bridging the gap between YouTube and more traditional media. Agents and publishers have noticed how profitable the market is, and last year Oh My Vlog! was published: a magazine devoted to the most popular vloggers. Many of the same vloggers have also released books and have won contracts as TV presenters.

4. Many vloggers identify themselves as members of a YouTube community, who engage with each other by creating content, watching videos, sharing and commenting. Along with the rest of the Internet, YouTube has its fair share of trolling behaviour. In 2014 this behaviour spilled out into real-life and the YouTube community was hit by a sexual abuse scandal that saw many girls reporting experiences of emotional and sexual abuse from male vloggers. The community voted with its behaviour, ceasing to watch the content of the alleged perpetrators.

5.  This January, Jon started a project called Flushing The Tubes. Jon and a small team of people are seeking out interesting YouTube videos made by vloggers with less than 10,000 subscribers, to showcase them on social media channels. Flushing The Tubes aims to “celebrate people who are doing exciting things, talking about interesting topics or challenging the platform in some way”.

Flushing The Tubes recently shared this vlog by HotPinkSun: Young and Disabled.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wn0TZaO-_Io

Jon makes videos about comedy, LGBT+ issues, facepainting, death and many other topics, but his most popular vlog is his Beachy Curls Tutorial, this one is a must watch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbFL5_xUyKc