YouTube: Building a Profile
YouTube is not thought of as a traditional social media platform. Social Media platforms are usually believed to be a place where people gather to share opinions, memories, and livelihood with friends, family and whoever else may be listening. Over the years, YouTube has developed into much more than a customizable version of America’s Funniest Videos. YouTube has become a place to share knowledge. Current events are available at the touch of a button, and news networks are using it to share their content on a mass scale.
Currently, the most successful YouTube news/media account is The Young Turks. Now, most successful does not necessarily mean they have the most subscribers, it means they have the most consistent viewer base. TYT is a news organization that has won numerous awards including Audience Honor for Overall YouTube Presence in 2018. TYT’s success has sprouted from their YouTube channel. The informal and conversational style that the hosts use is very effective at targeting the younger audience that YouTube is littered with:
Here is how TYT organizes their channel on YouTube:
Like any form of social media, a pretty page is at the heart of success. If you do not appear to be professional, then nobody will care about your content. TYT is organized into sections.
Section 1 is the recent uploads:
This allows visitors to the page have immediate access to the newest, breaking stories.
Section 2 is a news show with a consistent host:
The consistency of having a host will make people want to come back (if they like the host of course).
Section 3 is themed playlists or series, in this case “Aggressive Progressive” appears first:
TYT actually has multiple different programs within their news channel. This gives subscribers a wide variety of content. This allows not only every aspect of news to be covered, but also a wide variety of viewers to be pleased.
TYT owns multiple programs across YouTube that are separate from their own page. Now, although this is quite effective in terms of marketing (promoting their pages through one another, shoutouts, etc.), this takes a huge staff and years of building a network. These are time and resources that the average YouTuber most likely does not have.
A way that the average YouTuber can use this strategy is to connect with other YouTubers that have similar interests and goals. YouTube is all about building communities that serve specific interests to specific audiences. Building a network with a common goal sprouts into a community that will increase traffic to not only your page but also to those in your connections.
When creating content, you have two options:
Uploading a video is quite simple, you just need content and a mouse. All you do is select upload video and follow the steps, it is quite easy, however there are some tricks to it.
Similar to Google, YouTube looks for key words in searches. Any YouTube content creator can choose and customize the tags that are associated with their video. Essentially, the more tags you have, the more traffic your video will receive.
YouTube live is primarily used by news networks to cover breaking stories or to cover events.
TYT actually has their own page for live videos, which is cool, but does not get as much of a reach as their main page which has almost 4 million subscribers. YouTube live is new and has not been proven super effective yet. Facebook live is definitely the more popular live streaming service in terms of news, because to be quite frank, most people get their news off of Facebook, not YouTube.
However, with that being said there still are channels such as TYT with huge followings. CNN’s YouTube channel has 4.1 million subscribers and ABC has over 4 million as well. Through YouTube, what started as a small media outlet has become as popular as two huge name networks online.
Our Project:
At the Tate Modern there was an exhibition of Media Networks that explores the impact of mass media. This exhibit includes a selection of pieces from artists over the past hundred years and how they have interpreted the impact of mass media that shapes our world. This display provokes conversation around feminism, consumerism, and the cult of celebrity. Some of the work is Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych (1962), Guerrilla Girls’ Do Women Have To Be Naked To Get Into the Met Museum? (1982), and Cildo Meireles’ “Babel” (2001).
Personally, we thought the Meireles’ installation of a tower made from hundreds of used analogue radios stacked in layers was incredibly interesting. The radios played various stations, creating continuous sound and inaccessible information. This exhibit relates back to the biblical story of a tower tall enough to reach the heavens, which offended God, resulting in God making the builders speak in different languages. This created poor communication because everyone was divided and spread across the earth. The tower inside the Tate Modern demonstrates this as it releases an eerie effect and creates a sense of confusion.
This arrangement is similar to the biblical story as the tower may continue to heaven and the use of incoherent news stations is similar to the different languages. The representation of technology and media networks is also relevant to our current day society and how our community is consumed by the media and news. Something that this specific art piece reminded us was that communication can be incoherent and things can be mistranslated or falsely communicated, thus it is important to do our research when relying on the media for our news intake.
