#hannah hart

Nearly two million people in the US cancelled their cable television subscriptions last year. With the maturation of services like Hulu, Netflix, WatchESPN, and your parents’ HBOgo password it’s never been easier to walk away from the insane expense of an all-you-can-eat-but-nothing-you-really-want-to cable subscription. It’s still a gamble though. While services like Netflix allow us to watch what we want, when we want it we’re still largely at the mercy of television networks, movie studios, and marketing departments to create content that we want to watch and then HOPE TO GOD that those creations eventually show up on one of our fancy streaming platforms. Netflix and Amazon are starting to hack away at that situation by producing quality, original content but even those shows tend towards high budget, high production value, once a year events. So Netflix and Amazon release a few 13-episode seasons of shows a few times a year; what do I do with the other 1500 hours a year? My answer and, increasingly, the world’s answer is simple: YouTube.

YouTube is no longer the exclusive realm of cat videos and America’s funniest home videos rejects. A vast network of YouTube personalities, content creators, show hosts, gaming commentators, make up tipsters, professional and personal vloggers upload an ASTONISHING amount of content to YouTube every single minute. Dan Dobi’s documentary ‘Please Subscribe’ takes a look at some of the most influential YouTubers of the time and goes through many of the misconceptions and commonly asked questions from those less familiar with the burgeoning entertainment space.

One of the first and most important points Please Subscribe makes is that yes, you CAN make a living on YouTube. When most people hear ‘I make YouTube videos’ they think of it as a hobby. “They mostly think I do it on the side and the rest of the time I’m a mechanic” says Craig Benzine of the legendary and influential channel Wheezy Waiter. What they don’t often understand though is that for hundreds of content creators around the world making videos is a full time job. And in the case of the high profile, high subscriber producers featured in the film it can be a quite lucrative one. Independent daily or weekly video creators with around a million followers can often expect to pull down $65k a year or more.

Please Subscribe talks with a variety of creators from different genres. There are comedy creators like Craig Benzine and Zach Anner. Personal vloggers like Mitchell Davis and (the totally amazing and soon to be legitimate star of stage and screen) Grace Helbig. There are music video producers, video game commentators, large scale, YT based production companies, even a full-fledged, twice daily YouTube news network. It really is an astonishing look into the adolescence of the YouTube partnership network.

Now, I say that this is the adolescent phase of the YT partnership program for a very specific reason: This film came out in early 2012. Three years may not seem long to most of us but it is a GALACTIC epoch in terms of Internet culture. Several of the creators featured in the film are not nearly as popular or influential as they once were. Some, however, are much MUCH more so. For example, Hannah Hart of My Drunk Kitchen fame is listed as having just over 250k subscribers in the film. As of today she has nearly SEPTUPLED that number to just less than 1.75 million and is one of the most popular creators in YouTube today. The same goes for Grace Helbig of DailyYou, with well over 2 million followers and 250 million views.

The film also pretty much only focuses on individual vloggers, only tangentially mentioning production studios like Maker. This paradigm has DRASTICALLY shifted over the last several years with the launch of massively successful, largely (if not fully) YouTube based production houses like Rooster Teeth, Geek and Sundry, and the Vlogbrothers veritable cornucopia of channels and shows. As successful and important as those core creators and their personal shows are to the story of YouTube, and thus to the film, this too is becoming less and less representative of what YouTube is and looks like today. And you know what? That’s a good thing.

Just like the vlogging community and personal shows developed by the creators in the film are better than the mire of cat videos and viral outbreaks that littered the infant YouTube, the long-form, professional quality content now coming in to its own is better than what came before it. Whether it’s semi-seasonal, original fictional content like The Guild, Red Vs. Blue, and the Lizzy Bennet Diaries,  or non-fiction juggernauts like Crash Course, Mental Floss, or… well… anything from Hank and John Green; it’s just better. This is hours of television quality content, direct to you, everyday, for free. And now with innovations like Chromecast (seriously: I consider Chromecast proof that there is a God and that He loves me very much) I don’t even lose the TV EXPERIENCE. I can build playlists on the fly and even flick through the virtual channels to see what my favorite creators have for me today. Its. Just. Better.

I even become involved in these people’s lives. I watch Rooster Teeth’s Achievement Hunter videos every single day. Now setting aside that Achievement Hunter even PUTS OUT a new video every single day and that its usually a half hour or more and is ALWAYS entertaining, I’ve gotten to know the people in Achievement Hunter as if they were my friends. I’ve watched Ryan Haywood have TWO children. I saw Mike and Lindsay Jones fall in love and get married. I’ve listened as Gavin Free went from a twatty manchild to… well… a successful twatty manchild and I LOVE THEM. I love them like they’re my real friends and THIS is what YouTube gives us that network television and Hollywood movies never can: Community.

Creators are involved with their audience. They talk and listen. They read comments and answer emails and participate in their forums, forever adjusting their style and output on the fly to give us more awesome and less suck. These are the kinds of shows we should be seeing, the kinds of personalities that should be representing our generation. In an age where major studios are so out of touch with their target demographic, I’m actually not worried. They can keep their big bangs and their matriarchal origin stories; I’ll be fine. I’ve got millions of friends to catch up with.

Please Subscribe is available on Netflix and YouTube is available everywhere that life is beautiful and just.

-Andrew