For all the millennials out there, perhaps you remember your career aspirations as a kid. Some of you likely wanted to be firefighters. Others, astronauts. And there are probably a few people who even in preadolescence had the kind of civic-mindedness that impelled them toward a life of activism and world betterment. But I'd wager that not a single one of you had "Become a YouTube Star" on your childhood list of career goals. My how the times have changed.
In a way, YouTube presents the most egalitarian means out there of attaining fame and fortune. After all, it's not about who you know or what your family name is. Instead, the success of a YouTuber hinges almost entirely on his or her product. If content is done well, it has a shot at achieving virality. If it's not, it'll fall among the drudges of the site, a sad and strange place detailed here. Nobody wants to end up there. Everybody wants to be seen. Everybody wants views. But how do you get them? Is there some kind of equation? It doesn't seem like it. In fact, popularity on YouTube can seem pretty inexplicable: An exploding whale becomes BuzzFeed news one day, while a geeky dance overtakes the world the next.
Yet there are a few folks – a select few, we might add – who see consistent success on YouTube. In the sphere of eternal ephemera, they're the ones who stay afloat. Thanks to a list released by Business Insider, we can take a look at two of these YouTube stars, and try to understand how they succeed where so many others fail.
Jenna Marbles
Subscribers: 15.5 million
Content type: Zany confessionals, makeup advice, and self help
Why she succeeds: Marbles (actually Jenna Mourey) has built her fan base through plain old honesty and irreverence. Where other YouTubers might shy away from showing what they look like without makeup, Marbles glories in it. Yes, she's confident and bubbly, but she also has her fair share of insecurities, and isn't afraid to show those. What she reveals in her videos isn't a YouTube-ready face, but instead something that's unadorned and therefore highly accessible. One of her most popular videos, for instance, is a tutorial entitled "How to trick people into thinking you're good looking," in which she uses herself as the model. This is the kind of openness that's won her so many subscribers.
BF vs GF/PrankvsPrank
Subscribers: 11.58 million (between the 2 channels)
Content type: Crazy prank videos, occasional spirited rants
Why they succeed: The man and woman behind these two channels are real-life couple Jeanna and Jesse. The basic conceit behind the channel is that Jesse and Jeanna are engaged in an ongoing game of pranking one-upsmanship. One day, Jesse will exploit Jeanna's fear of spiders, and the next she'll retaliate by using glue for his hair gel. The thing that ultimately distinguishes these two from all the other countless prank channels out there is that, at the end of the day, what they do is out of love. Because they're a couple in non-YouTube life, the chemistry they have is totally organic, and subscribers seem to also enjoy the glimpse the videos provide into a relationship that is, at least as far as the content reveals, a happy and stable one.
Based on these two channels, it might just be that the magic two ingredients to YouTube success are having fun and being yourself. Just ask these yelling goats.
*Of course, most of the time, it's the random and haphazardly assembled videos that have the greatest success.
