In the age of social media, YouTube has become the unofficial arbiter of celebrity for anyone seeking a few minutes of fame, a following and a financial reward to go along with it.
But when YouTube changed its rules about who could make money from its ad revenue-sharing program, the move upset a sizable group of would-be video stars, who saw their income suddenly tank. One of those, Nasim Aghdam, grew so angry that she opened fire at YouTube headquarters in San Bruno Tuesday, injuring three people before killing herself.
In the end, the 38-year-old San Diego woman who believed her social media channels could change the world and promote “healthy, humane, smart living” went viral through an act of violence. Her reaction was extreme, but in other ways the Aghdam tragedy is emblematic of a new breed of celebrity. The path from nobody to star is now littered with hopefuls to the YouTube throne, folks eager to be discovered online in the way Hollywood stars once were.
“I have spoken to teens who were convinced if they kept working on their YouTube channel, someone would come across them and make them a star,” said Scot Guenter, professor of American studies at San Jose State. “Many youth think they are extremely talented even when they aren’t. … I’ve checked out the YouTube channels of some of the would-be stars I know personally, and my critical sense is they better keep their day jobs, if they have any.”
Justin Bieber may be the best known celebrity discovered on YouTube but he is hardly the only one. The highest paid YouTuber right now is someone you may have never even heard of – DanTDM. He’s Daniel Middleton, a 27-year-old from England, who pulled down $16.5 million last year after he parlayed his 17 million subscribers into a sold-out world tour. His niche: videos about games such as Minecraft and Pokemon. He unseated the reigning champ, Swedish vlogger Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg, who earned a mere $12 million last year after several controversial postings.
Aghdam, who believed she was being censored, filtered and discriminated against by YouTube, was angry that the platform’s shift in policy cost her a far smaller piece of the video pie. Google-owned YouTube, under pressure to crack down on offensive, hateful or extremist content, earlier this year tweaked its monetization rules, saying in a blog post that the company was working on assigning more human reviewers to monitor content, while assuring video creators their input would be heard.
That changed the game for legions of small video makers like Aghdam, whose channels included workout clips, graphic animal abuse videos and vegan cooking tutorials. It’s not clear how much Aghdam was making from ad revenue before the change, or exactly why the new rules pushed her out. But she was devastated.
“I’m being discriminated and filtered on YouTube,” she said online. “And I’m not the only one.”
Another YouTuber, Bite Size Vegan, agreed, writing on her own channel, “YouTube is trying to silence me! Help me fight social media censorship. Censorship of the truth and bias against vegan accounts is yet another extension of our global society’s willful denial of what we are doing to animals.”
They weren’t the only one upset by the changes.
“I’m an unapologetic YouTube fanboy,” v-logger Casey Neistat wrote in a post titled “WTF YouTube? taking away monetization???.” That is, he wrote, what “gives me such distress about this issue.”
“YouTube is kind of a monopoly…it should act as a public utility,” said Dennis H, a frequent YouTube user, in an email interview. “Many users want to move to another platform, but there are no big competitors yet. YouTube should consider this in the future if it doesn’t want to end up like MySpace.”
The intensity YouTubers feel about the online video giant worries some psychologists, who fear the gold rush to social media fame may have dark consequences.
“This is a significant concern in our new social media culture,” says Thomas G. Plante, professor of psychology at Santa Clara University. “Folks see others becoming rich and famous overnight via YouTube and other similar social media outlets and they conclude that they can too. When things don’t work out as planned, many become despondent that their fantasies have not been realized.”
While most people can take failure in stride and move on, vulnerable people may be unable to cope with this kind of rejection.
“We don’t know exactly what went on in the mind of the YouTube shooter,” says Plante, “but I am very concerned that there are many unintended consequences of social media that we are beginning to see unfold. ”
Of course, it’s hard to give up on the dream of YouTube celebrity when others have grabbed the brass ring. YouTube estimates 300 hours of video are uploaded every minute.
“If I was a betting man I would put my money on more of these stories in the future,” says Plante. “It is chilling indeed.”
Staff writer Levi Sumagaysay contributed to this report.
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