Lifestyle of the Poor and Undiscovered

So as it turns out, I actually can make money mom and dad! All that time spent on YouTube hasn't been all for naught! Regardless of whether or not we journalists will end up working in our dream job (an on air reporter, a newspaper editor, a magazine writer, etc), if we try hard enough there's no saying we can't make money in another media: YouTube.

Michael Buckley, from YouTube's "What The Buck?" webisodes, described his rise to Internet stardom in a recent article by the New York Times. Buckley talks about how he started from a small salary on a TV station to a six digit paycheck based on videos from his living room.

Here's the website I found for some further information about becoming a Partner of YouTube and creating revenue from your videos: Click Here.

It's funny, there's a current subculture of YouTube stars these days, who all started the way Buckley did and picked up larger fanbases. Through their fans and social media, obviously, they've been connecting and getting together as sort of representatives of YouTube and their own little brands.

Because of their partnerships with the online medium, and due to their similar new lifestyles, these vlogging individuals collaborate ALL the time! If you spend enough time on YouTube, you'll start to see lots of familiar faces. This is one of my favorite guys who's done video blogging right:

Tyler Oakley- Just two years ago, he was spending every day making endless videos around his house by simply videotaping himself and bringing up talking points. He found some popularity online, but it wasn't until he made a video about the band One Direction during the peak of their rise to fame, that got him TONS of attention.

So that one is pretty silly, but now, a little over a year later, every person in the audience at the Staples Center for One Direction knows who he is (he also now designs and sells tee shirts like the one he's wearing)....

And yes, that booth was paid for by One Direction themselves, who he has now interviewed many times on television and online. YouTube has helped sponsor him to become a fresh face in pop culture, as one of the first people I, and many others, turn to for celebrity news and hilarious YouTube videos on a regular basis (see Drunk Pumpkin Carving...).

I'm always so happy for people like Michael Buckley and Tyler Oakley because their Internet fame definitely did not just fall into their laps. They worked on their image, consistently made videos (even when nobody was watching them) and utilized everything they knew about the Internet to connect their videos to the public. Congrats YouTubers, for being the new, quadruple-threat generation of media experts.