September 16, 2014

"The great promise of YouTube was its ability to cut out Hollywood-style intermediaries..."

"... but there are now more than 20 agencies and management companies competing to represent YouTube personalities, at least triple the number of three years ago...."
“Money changed everything,” said Naomi Lennon, president of Lennon Management, which focuses on YouTube personalities. Exploitation is now “an issue with our industry,” she said, because a lot of inexperienced video creators “are just believing everything these people are telling them.”

4 comments:

Tibore said...

"... a lot of inexperienced video creators “are just believing everything these people are telling them."

Internet video is experiencing a problem that's been seen elsewhere for a long time now. How many cases have young athletes been taken the same way? We're talking high school level (although the shady agents call themselves "advisors" at that point) and it's not inconceivable that it'll start to manifest among pre-high school aged talent.

Where there's prey, there'll be predators. It's unfortunate, but true.

jr565 said...

That all changed when people start putting up videos and movies and content made in Hollywood. If it was just cat videos you tube would never have gotten so big

The Godfather said...

I'm really out of the pop culture loop, but my wife and I do watch Dancing With The Stars, and on the first episode last night I saw that one of the "stars" was Bethany Mota, an 18 year-old who has a You Tube channel. I didn't know that this was even possible. But the world changes, and us old fogeys either get on board or sit on the platform and bitch about how better it was in the old days. I've chosen the latter.

sinz52 said...

This is similar to what happened with reality TV.

Initially, reality TV's draw was that it showed "ordinary folks" in new and odd situations.

But soon, some of those "ordinary folks" started appearing on more and more different reality shows. At least one of them has appeared on four or five different reality shows.

If this keeps up, they'll have to form a union, the Reality Players Guild.

In the case of YouTube, some fanfiction videos have had pretty good production values.

Of course they should go commercial, if they can make a profit off it.