Sunday Times sneer at YouTubers misses the point entirely

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 | By Vikki Chowney

Once again I found myself reading a national paper’s Sunday supplement yesterday and preparing to rant this morning. This time it’s the turn of The Sunday Times Style magazine and its article on the popularity of ‘haul videos’ on YouTube (usually posted by young women to detail their shopping trips in a show-and-tell manner).

The condescending tone used to introduce a quote from a 14-year-old girl’s effort I can just about swallow. The fact that her status as a YouTube partner is then deemed ridiculous enough to be put in quotation marks, let’s put aside.

But as you read on, the positioning of a few high-profile vloggers leads the author to dismiss this as “a new area, and one where millions of impressionable teens are being stealth-marketed by their own, ’real people’ peers.” The role played by marketing companies who send free products to the bloggers is presented as manipulative, and the girls (mainly) are positioned as fame-hungry pawns for the most part.

If we were to believe this piece – and let’s face it, many will – you’d think it was impossible for these vloggers to think for themselves. Yes, this is an absolute goldmine for brands, but denouncing it as something sinister is nothing short of sensationalist. It’s easy to judge. The girls are frighteningly upbeat and, yes, they’re very materialistic. But they take fashion seriously. While it’s not coverage of current affairs or politics, at its best it’s young women genuinely expressing their personal taste.

And what of unboxing videos? These aren’t mentioned once throughout the piece, even though they’re broadly accepted to be the inspiration for the creation of the haul video community. Why aren’t the people who film the opening of the latest gadgets and technologies tarred with the same brush?

The icing on the cake is the boxout entitled ‘Other weird online jobs’. Blogging agents top the list, as “a superstar blogger can earn £64,000 a month”. I’d certainly like to meet one who does. Second are reputation managers, who apparently “bury bad news so that when your name is Google-searched, only the glowingly good appears”. That was called search optimisation the last time I checked.

Professional seeders are described as kids who are paid big bucks to prowl chat rooms, forums, blogs and networking sites and plant viral campaigns. This exists yes, but plucking out a few bad apples sways the opinion of the masses in a way that’s just unrealistic. As the piece concludes, there are enough “haters” online to keep the puff in line. Although that in itself isn’t quite correct, the authentic will survive and this type of community will self-regulate.

The bottom line is that I love the utter hyprocrisy of this article in all its glory. Here we have a fashion supplement all but berating young girls, some of whom just want to share their wares with friends, others who have become worldwide phenomena, for clocking up millions of views a month on YouTube. We see them being dismissed as “stealth marketers who seduce acquaintances into buying their clients’ latest products”. I wonder if anyone would ever accuse The Sunday Times’ advertisers of the same thing?

As Viet Le said of this craze on NPR.org’s All Tech Considered blog back in February, “The simple fact is the economy won’t truly turn around until consumers start consuming again. In some bizarre way, these girls are at the retail front line, chins courageously up at the gloomy check-out counter. Frankly, if we’re going to get out of this slump, I (and we) might have to discover our inner teenage girl. So ladies, I salute you. Go forth and haul.”

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