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My Favourite Vloggers (and a reflection on how personal is too personal)

Well, I said I’d share a few of my favourite vloggers. I’m leaving off the ones that focus on bro humour because 1) Wired covered them off nicely and, 2) I don’t really like bro humour, even if it is the hottest commodity on YouTube.

The Shaytards

You can read my post about them here, but the long and short of it is that they are a nice, normal family that uploads a new video of their daily life each day. This makes them lifecasters.
The whole thing was spearheaded by patriarch (they are Mormons after all) Shay Carl Butler. His wife Colette also has her own channel called Katilette, which was the pseudonym she originally used. The kids are still working fake names - SonTard, PrincessTard, BabyTard, and baby Rocktard. Their baby has spent every day of his life on camera (well, I think they tape for like, twenty minutes a day so we aren’t entering Toddlers & Tiaras territory here.) An interesting thing about the fake names: they aren’t really a security measure. You can find the kids’ real names online. Every once in a while, Shay explains that he doesn’t want to read negative comments with his kids names in them. That said, the comments are overwhelmingly positive. Quite a feat for YouTube, which is usually has comments that read like a middle school bathroom wall.

Highlights:

• A trip to Disneyland
• Rocktard is born
• Shaytards Christmas Special
• Shay runs the LA marathon after losing 100 pounds (on camera)
• Katilette on bullying

Caseylavere

Casey is Shay’s brother. He is younger and his humour is drier. Casey and his wife Kayli, daughter Brailee and son Gage joined the Shay and his family in LA after he founded his YouTube production company/talent agency Maker Studios. He aims to upload about five lifecasting videos a week, and usually lands somewhere around two.
A true man’s man, Casey hunts and fishes, incurring the wrath of the 13-year-old girls who make up a large proportion of his audience. His wife Kayli has her own channel, HeyKayli, where she covers crafts, hair tutorials and her recent Oprah-style attempt at getting mentally and emotionally healthy after struggling with an eating disorder. She is the sweetest woman in the world. Imagine if Cindy Lou Who grew up and didn’t become Taylor Momsen, but instead became a sweet mom who loves to bake cookies and style her daughter’s hair - that’s Kayli.

Highlights:

• Casey and his wife Kayli frolic in the park
• The family visits a crappy-seeming amusement park called Lagoon
• HeyKayli on her eating disorder

The Mom’s View

I am not a mom, but this show doesn’t just talk mom stuff. It’s like The View would be if it were actually run by normal women instead of hideous shebeasts who are hungry for wedding freebies and cheap laughs. This is another one from Maker Studios featuring Kayli and Colette along with some other YouTube famous moms - but hey, they produce the best content. Also, this is where Colette and Kayli talk about their marriages most openly. (Fun fact: Kayli has always believed that she loves Casey more!)
Earlier this year Maker launched a mom vertical and this intimate talkshow (taped on Kayli’s couch but still high production quality and multi camera) is the result. They are starting to book higher profile guests and their audience seems to be growing.
Even though I have a sweet cable package, this show is the closest I’ve found in terms of filling the void that Oprah left behind. Sample wisdom: You aren’t raising children - you’re raising adults. BAM.

Highlights:

• Shay and Casey guest star and talk fatherhood (and Shay admits that if his house caught on fire and he could only save one person, he’d save his wife - and his kids know it)
• When is the right time to have kids?

My Housewife Life

Finally - one that isn’t from Maker Studios, but from a lovely homemaker (that’s a compliment) named Jen who lives with her husband Donald in Chicago. I discovered her when planning a recent trip to Disney World (you can read a little about why exactly I love Disney World so much here) and found some vlogs she made of her trip.
Jen is pure escapism. She is what I imagine I would be like if I stayed home - a Type A Missus who treats homemaking as a serious profession. She has an office where she films Birchbox openings and haul videos (which are all the more credible because she can afford to buy what she wants so she isn’t swayed by sponsorships) and wraps gifts. The wrapping paper behind her changes to reflect the season and upcoming holidays. Jenn also has a channel called OrganizedLikeJen where she shows people how to organize like a pro. These videos have changed the way I approach storage.
Jen is endearingly sweet and open about her struggle with social anxiety. She lunches with her mother at Neiman Marcus and gets excited by $5 eyeshadow. She shares my love of J. Crew and we have the same birthday. In the short time I’ve been watching her videos, her popularity seems to have grown. If I were Maker Studios, I’d be falling over myself to convince her to sign.
WARNING: Jen’s husband is a sweet nerd (again, a compliment) who lives to make her happy. If your own relationship is in a bad place, avoid her slice-of-life vlogs at all costs.

Highlights:

• OrganizedLikeJen magazine storage
• Jen’s Ulta haul
• Jen’s birthday vlog and birthday haul (her husband Don brought her presents/cake in bed and then they went shopping!)
• Disney vlog (skip to 16:46 to see her husband surprise her with an in-room Princess celebration)

PhamDamily

This is another family (Mom Jinger, Dad Phil, and their three kids) that produces almost-daily slice-of-life vlogs. Their appeal is similar to that of the Shaytards (in fact, Jinger is Colette’s best friend from childhood.) They recently had the unfortunate experience of announcing their miracle pregnancy (Phil had recently had a vasectomy) and then having a miscarriage in realtime. Not only did it made for riveting viewing and make me a more compassionate person (nobody close to me has gone through something like this, and seeing it up close really breaks your heart), but it raised a challenging question around lifecasting.
Building up a base of loyal viewers through vlogging means sharing intimate details and never letting anyone think you’re hiding anything. What do you lose when you give up your privacy? When your vlogs are daily or almost-daily, it’s almost impossible to keep important news to yourself without betraying the trust of an audience who believes they are seeing an accurate depiction of someone’s life, warts and all. Does this make going through a tragedy more difficult? I’d say - judging from the outpouring of love and support during this family’s miscarriage (and a similar outpouring I witnessed when fellow lifecaster CharlesTrippy discovered a brain tumour and told his audience about it the same day) - no.
The audience a lifecaster builds isn’t looking to see them fail. They are “along for the ride.” They are also behind a screen. When something terrible happens, lifecasters aren’t facing the equivalent of being bombarded with the uncomfortable (but appreciated) IRL sympathy that can come from acquaintances. They receive thousands of tweets, wall posts and messages from people who are rooting for their happiness and success.

Highlights:

• Announcing the new baby
• Date night

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Leave me an Ask Me Anything message (or contact me on Twitter @gillianlanyon) if you have any fave vloggers of your own to share.

Related articles

• Celebrity 2.0 and YouTube’s New Studio System (gillianlanyon.com)

Celebrity 2.0 and YouTube’s New Studio System

I don’t know if Celebrity 2.0 has been thrown around at a bunch of new media conferences. It’s sounds a little douchey, so it’s possible. But I was thinking about the concept earlier today when I discovered (like millions of other people) a YouTuber who hit it big with a song he covered, performed it on Ellen, landed a gig producing for Timbaland and then quit to sign with a YouTube production company I was already familiar with called Maker Studios.

Not too long ago, I read about how young people were using YouTube as a search engine and how they would rather watch online video than read content online - even when learning something new. At the time, I couldn’t relate to wanting to absorb information via video when I could just read it. Reading allows for skimming. And internet personalities seemed to flame out when the recession took hold. Remember Julia Allison? I imagine she is being quarantined somewhere for consumption or that cough Nicole Kidman had in Moulin Rouge. Indeed, lifecasting and Youtube celebrities seemed ridiculous. But then my sister Hilary (you should really follow her on Twitter) introduced me to the Shaytards.

A lot of the talk around the Youtube Partner Project focused on brands and celebrities, but the real stars of Youtube are people like LisaNova, KassemG and the Shaytards. You can read in Wired about how they’ve created their own studio system. While the focus of this article is comedy, the Youtubers with the largest and most loyal followings are lifecasters. What’s interesting is that the biggest audience for a lot of these lifecasters is teenagers – especially teenage girls. The most successful lifecasters on Youtube are the Shaytards. For those who know me - I know I talk about the Shaytards a lot (because they and people like them are the future of entertainment), but here’s a summary:

• It started when an Idahoan granite countertop installer and part-time radio DJ Shay Carl Butler decided to vlog every day of his 29th year – shooting, editing and uploading a new video every day of his life and his family.
• The name actually comes from a video where Shay danced in his wife’s unitard – not offensive!
• He quickly built a dedicated following (almost 1 million subscribers), the vlogs are into year 4 now and get around 160,000–200,000 views each – big events (like their Christmas vlogs and milestones can get over a million views each.
• The family went from being broke in Idaho to swimming in Youtube cash (content creators cash in on advertising once they hit a certain number of views) and living in LA when Shay became a founding partner in Maker Studios, which seems to be a smashing success and has opened a second office/studio space in NYC.
• To give some context – Playlist Live, an annual Youtuber gathering/conference, had Youtube as its primary sponsor in the past. This year Youtube was a secondary sponsor – because Maker is the primary sponsor. How does Maker make all this money? Maker provides a carefully selected stable of Youtubers with access to a studio, editing, a recording studio, royalty-free music, directors, a dedicated ad sales team, etc in exchange for a cut of their ad revenues. Unlike other networks (except Revision3), Maker makes all stats and earnings data available to content creators.
• Maker has started creating sponsored ad content using their artists’ own channels. Here is something Shaycarl did for T Mobile. Nothing too special (in fact, it’s a pretty brutal Toyota Swagger Wagon ripoff) but this really is the ultimate influencer grab. The artist excitedly tell his or her audience about the opportunity, gives the behind-the-scenes in their regular vlogs and then launches the video on their channel. The audience appreciates that the brand is supporting one of their favourite vloggers – someone they consider a friend.
• Recently they put together a deal with Weight Watchers – Shay and his brother (his whole family pretty much started their own channels, moved out to LA, and became part of Maker’s different verticals) shot an interview with Charles Barkely that aired on his channel. And no wonder brands are going directly to content creators – they can guarantee views.
• If you only watch one Shaytards video, make it this one. It’s the one Google trots out at press conferences when they want to prove that Youtube content can have greater depth and isn’t all AFV-style videos. The baby born in it has been on camera every day of his life so far. Just meditate on that for a minute.

Annnnyway, I am addicted to watching this family. And it’s not like they do anything fascinating. They are just a nice, normal (Mormon!) family. Anderson Cooper had them on his show a month(ish) ago and accused them of doing nothing more than uploading home videos. This made me think for the first time that Cooper is an Old, because the appeal of these videos isn’t that they are a complete product - it is that they are part of an ongoing project that will seemingly NEVER END. The vlog goes up every day without fail. It’s like 49 Up times a million. In real life, I recoil in terror at small children but from the safety of my couch, I have watched the four Tard kids mature and go back and forth between being shy and outgoing and exemplify the connection between personality and birth order. It’s fucking fascinating.

Overall, my media consumption habits have changed drastically in the last 3-6 months. I have considered getting rid of cable, and not because I can download the cable shows I want to watch.* Most of the shows I PVR have gone unwatched. Now when I get home and turn on the TV, it’s to watch YouTube videos from my subscribed channels. The content is more interesting than what’s on TV, and I actually care what happens to the people I watch.

I really believe we are in the last stretch of time when an amateur can make it on YouTube. Because of Maker and studios like it (not to mention celebrities who have realized YouTube can be a cash cow), production values have steadily crept up and newer users with full-time jobs and the copy of Windows Movie Maker that came bundled with their Dell laptop have trouble breaking through. If you are at all charismatic and have ever thought about vlogging, NOW IS THE TIME.

I’ll be putting together a list of my favourite vloggers soon. I’d love to hear who yours are.

*My love of reality TV and the great joy I get from livetweeting it will prevent me from ever getting rid of cable. So I pretty much am paying over $100 a month to have strangers favourite my cutting remarks about My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding and the Miss USA pageant. I am mildly disgusted by this, but also not really because I count this as “writing”

I done been Gawked

Getting quoted in a publication I’ve loved for so long, by a writer I respect so much, about two topics I’m so interested in has been a thrill. I’m working on a more in-depth post about why I find Mormons so fascinating, but you can read a teensy bit about it here. Also, you can find the Pinterest board referenced in the article here. And while I’m tooting my own horn, you should follow me on Twitter here.