Wake up, get dressed, check email, check video comments, check video responses, turn on the camera and don’t turn it off until the day is done.

This is an average day in the life of vlogger Charles Trippy, who, along with fiancée Alli Speed, has shown everything from their dogs’ antics to their engagement to their over 385,000 subscribers on YouTube.

“I just try to live my life as I always have, but the only difference is I have a camera,” Trippy, 26, said in an email.

Trippy, like other YouTube celebrities, said he never intended to become Internet famous.

“I started making videos about five years ago just out of boredom at work,” said

“I just posted on YouTube to show our friends things way before it was even thought of that you could make any money, let alone a career, on YouTube,” Trippy said.

Trippy and Speed’s shared YouTube channel, known as CTFxC (Charles Trippy Friend Core), and web series called “Internet Killed Television” have a total of 135 million views and over 700 consecutive daily videos.

Trippy said he came up with the name for the channel while listening to the song “Video Killed the Radio Star.”

YouTube, which allows anyone to share and upload videos, was created in 2005 by former PayPal employees Chad Hurley, Steven Chen and Jawed Karim, according to the YouTube website.

“We saw an opportunity to empower everyone with the ability to use video online,” Hurley said in YouTube’s five-year celebration video.
In March 2010, YouTube hit 2 billion views a day. Google estimates about 21 million Canadians visit YouTube each month.

“In Canada, YouTube per capita consumption of video is No. 1 in the world,” Chris O’Neill, Canada’s country director for Google, told the Globe and Mail.

Jamie Wilkinson, former design and technology professor at Parsons, the New School of Design in New York City and co-creator of the website Know Your Meme, said there was a natural inclination towards wanting to share all the things he’d learned with his students after working with the Internet for 10 years.

In 2007, Wilkinson taught a graduate course in how to be Internet famous, where a student’s grade in the course reflected the amount of hits they gained on the Internet.

How to Become Internet Famous

Becoming a hit on YouTube can be a hit-or-miss endeavour. Trippy said his success on YouTube was based 90 per cent on luck and 10 per cent on networking.

But for Wilkinson, being successful on YouTube is not simply based on luck; rather, there is a science behind it.

According to Wilkinson, the most important thing an aspiring YouTube celebrity can do to become famous is be “prolific” with the number of videos they upload.

Wilkinson said he takes a “shotgun approach” to his work, which is to create as much content as possible.

“You’ll see a trend among people who are the biggest on the Internet,” Wilkinson said. “They produce a lot of work, and whether they do that before or after they got famous it is a really consistent pattern.”

Wilkinson also points out that we don’t see a lot of creators who’ve made really big projects. Rather, people make a bunch of things that are mediocre, then they hit their stride and start making things that are much better.

Wilkinson advises catering to the largest audience in order to reach the most viewers.
In order to gain notoriety on the Internet, you shouldn’t cater to very small audiences, Wilkinson said. Rather, he said you should try to make things relevant to the largest number of people.

“A big mistake I see is people making something that’s extremely niche that requires a lot of insider knowledge to get,” Wilkinson said. “[It] works in certain contexts but it’s generally a better idea to write about Lady Gaga.”

It’s easy to see why someone like Trippy is a big hit on YouTube, he said.

“People start to take advantage of new mediums,” Wilkinson said. “Video is the ideal format to reach people and it’s extremely engaging.”

YouTube, the Next Hollywood

There has been a recent trend for some of the biggest names in YouTube to flock to California.

Adam Bahner, known on YouTube as Tay Zonday and made famous for his song “Chocolate Rain,” said before he became a part of the YouTube community, he wanted to become a university professor.

“[Los Angeles] has kind of become the Mecca for people who have success on YouTube,” Bahner said in YouTube’s five-year celebration video. “It’s really like theatre in the 1920s, where everyone from New York headed out to L.A. to figure out, ‘What do you do with film?’ ”

“I was tired of dragging a 38-pound keyboard to open-mics in Minneapolis and realized I could reach a bigger, more honest audience by filming myself in my living room,” Bahner said in an email.

Wilkinson points to the fact that Hollywood seems within reach of many YouTube celebrities.

“The Internet is very much the low-budget version of what is done inside of Hollywood,” said Wilkinson, who sees YouTube videos as the training ground for people who want to break into mainstream media.

According to Bahner, YouTubers such as iJustine, DaveDays, RayWilliamJohnson and MysteryGuitarMan, who all have roughly 1 million subscribers, have moved to L.A.

Amateurs are becoming increasingly more important, said Michael Strangelove, a communications professor at the University of Ottawa.
Although these people are trying to make it big in Hollywood, Wilkinson said more often than not, he is contacted by Hollywood executives asking how they should break into YouTube in order to reach an online audience.

“They’re really interested in getting into Internet production and learning how to scale back their operations and tone things down,” Wilkinson said.

According to Strangelove, while the Internet is still secondary to television, more people are getting their content online.

Some of the top YouTubers are sustaining views that compare to network television, Bahner said. 

What we see today are other media enterprises trying to figure out how they will stay relevant, Bahner said.

According to Bahner, as broadband Internet becomes more ubiquitous and truly accessible everywhere, there will be a tipping point where a lot of current technologies like radio, satellite radio and terrestrial cable become obsolete.

“YouTube is where the critical mass is, and therefore, the money,” Wilkinson said.

More Than Just Pocket Change

This type of fame, regardless of how it’s achieved, can be alluring for some people, especially with YouTube’s Partner Program.

According to the partner help section of YouTube, “revenue is generated based on a share of advertising revenue generated when people view your video — the more views you get, the more money you’ll make.”

YouTube also states “there are no guarantees under the YouTube Partner agreement about how much, or whether, a person will be paid.”

However, Kevin Nalty, a YouTube comedian known as Nalts and YouTube partner, wrote in a blog post, “[The money] is not enough to cover the mortage for most, and it’s certainly not yet the reported $2.50 per 1,000 views.”

According to Nalty, YouTube partners earn a fraction of a penny per view, and how much money a partner is actually paid varies greatly on whether there are InVideo ads or accompanying flat square ads.

He also said YouTube partners are contractually forbidden to share their revenue.

Behind the Frame

Jin Kim, a communications professor at the Slate University of New York Plattsburgh, wrote his PhD thesis for the University of Iowa about user-generated content, focusing on celebrity culture within YouTube.

“Many YouTube users post clips not only to broadcast creative videos, but also to attract attention from others,” Kim said.

“Audiences not only purchase images of celebrity and make their role models out of them but also criticize or recreate them,” Kim said.

Wilkinson describes three types of Internet personas: some people who are trying to push their work, others who like to push their personality such as vloggers where they talk about their lives and feelings and the third kind who have it thrust upon them.

The third kind of Internet famous are people who don’t want to have their personality or their work be known because then they would have to deal with the consequences of this attention, Wilkinson said.

Infamous examples include Star Wars Kid and Antoine Dodson, accidental star of the “Bed Intruder,” one of the most viewed videos of 2010.

Trippy said people who know him personally say he can be a lot quieter in real life than on camera.

“But mostly what you see [on camera] is me, especially with the daily videos,” Trippy said.

Trippy also admits there are certain things he excludes from his videos, such as arguments.

“Yes, [arguments] happen,” Trippy said. “We’re human.”

“I usually edit out things that I typically will not want to remember . . . because I mean really, why would I want to remember the trivial things in life?” he said.

To those trying to get YouTube famous, Wiklinson said, “keep on hustling.”

According to Wilkinson, “a lot of the most memorable stuff out there is good because it ended before it got bad.”

“All things should have an expiration date,” said Wilkinson, who starts a new project if he can’t reach a certain goal.

“Very few people can totally blow themselves up on YouTube now with no external help,” Bahner said. “It does happen. [Comedian] Pyrobooby did it. But it’s uncommon.”

“Friends help friends stay relevant,” Bahner said. “This has definitely been the case with me and many others.”