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The Relationship between the Content Popular YouTube Creators Produce and the Age of
Their Audience
The Internet introduced blogging as a virtual diary that was open to anyone allowing
Internet users around the world to read about the personal opinions of others ranging from a
person’s daily life to conspiracy theories. Content creators then took these written blogs and
recorded themselves creating a video blog which on the Internet is known as a vlog. The social
media site YouTube is the largest platform for these creators to post their content. As YouTube
gained popularity, more and more creators became known throughout the use of the site gaining
more subscribers every day. The most popular genres have come to be Vloggers, Comedians,
Musicians and Makeup Gurus/Do It Yourself categories. Many individuals now have millions of
subscribers which has changed the content that use to posted for purely entertainment reasons
into a business endeavor leading to movies, country to world -wide tours, book deals and more.
Some creators have become more well-known than others through the use of multiple social
media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter showing that it takes more than appealing content
to run what is now their business. The Internet plays a large role in our culture as it has turned
into one of the main sources of influence especially for millennials. These creators have such
large fan bases that they are now vital influences in their subscriber’s lives with how they speak,
act, and look pondering the question whether or not subscribes are viewing appropriate content
for their age. This then prompts the question, what is the relationship between preselected
YouTube video content and their availability to adolescents and is this content age appropriate?
Blogging in Relation to the Creation of Vlogging
As stated above, blogging is the precursor to video blogging, or vlogging, as is the use of social
media in general. The article Social Media and Mobile Internet Use Among Teens and Young

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Adults is an exhaustive article focusing on multiple factors involving the Internet. These factors
include Internet availability to use of social networking sites, however the most pertinent
information to the study was that of blogging. In the summary of findings the researchers
discovered that blogging has become increasing less popular among both teens and young adults
between the years of 2006 and 2009 (Lenhart, 2010). The study was done with 800 adolescents
who were chosen as they are part of the Millennial generation defined by the authors of the study
as the cohort of adults ages 18-29 (Lenhart, 2010). The results were found through a
questionnaire that was filled out through a phone conversation. The questionnaire included the
following blog specific questions: do you use the internet and how often, do you create or work
on your own online journal of blog, and do you share something online that you created yourself,
such as your own artwork, photos, stories, or videos? (Lenhart, 2010). The results were found by
inputting the data into two different formulas in order to find the percentages of the results. As
stated above the results showed that Millenialls usage of blogs decreased through the years
(Lenhart, 2010). Even though the article was published three years ago this is still relevant as the
data showed a trend of decreased usage throughout the years providing room for YouTube to
become the new, updated, and interesting media to use. This research, though insightful and
extensive, does contain several limitations. First of all, the questionnaire was given over the
phone and included forty questions. This is very extensive and they covered all of their bases,
however, this could have been far too time consuming for many of the participants. If that were
the case then the participants may have rushed the researcher because they had more pressing
things on their mind like schoolwork or their job. Also, the length may have caused the
participants to start answering the questions quickly without much thought as they simpley did
not want to stay on the phone any longer. The average length of the time it took to produce one

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completed questionnaire was not recorded in the article which cannot rule out that as a limitation.
Also, there were only three questions pertaining to blogging, yet they declared that there was a
significant decrease in the use of blogging. The research covered many topics at once but it is
arguable that despite the exhaustive survey that every topic may not have been covered
sufficiently. Despite this, their results were still reliable and provided beneficial insight into
social media trends.
Blogging is a rather broad term as it can include micro-blogging such as Twitter, so a
thorough study cannot be done without examining social media technologies as a whole. The
article How Social are Social Media Technologies? A Linguistic Analysis of University Students’
Experiences of using Social Media Technologies focuses around how active and interactive
university students are on various social media sites (Gray, 2014). The research questions in this
study focused around how college students represented themselves online whether it would be as
an individual or as part of a group as well as do students describe this engagement as a learning
activity. Excel sheets were used to track pronoun usage, number of words used, self-mentions,
and group-mentions from twenty students on the social media they frequented the most (Gray,
2014). What the researchers found was that most activity on the media sites was done by
referencing oneself more so than referencing a group. It was also found that the students use
these media platforms to passively interact and learn about a topic. For instance, a student may
post on a blog they enjoy about books saying they prefer another author over the one referenced.
It was concluded through this study that a person can be interactive and anonymous at the same
time while acknowledging themselves as an individual. It was less likely for someone to refer to
themselves as a group. The conclusion also acknowledged that social media technologies are a
learning experience that should not be written off as a way to declare identities and involvement

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(Gray, 2014). This study was limited as the participants knew that they were going to have their
interactions recorded and examined. This may have caused some participants to modify their
interactions on the media platform. It may have been beneficial for the study to focus solely on
the content and what message was being portrayed including the responses to the message rather
than just the self-mentions and group-mentions. On social media platforms such a blogs it is
more about the responses to the content that shows how social the media is than how one refers
to themselves as they type.
Trends in blogging are also examined by observing different media like micro-blogs such
as Twitter. This article in particular focused around Twitter and the spam content that is
produced and distributed. The data the researchers used tweets that were accumulated over a
span of one month including over 30 million users and 113 million tweets (Almaatouq 2013).
The researchers used Twitter’s algorithms to determine the spam accounts and their success and
behavior. The results showed that the spam accounts used different behavior patterns and
strategies to reach their audience, but would be shut down as soon as they were reported enough
times. The results also showed that this time of repetitive short text spam message was used on
multiple media platforms such as regular blogs, that way they would reach the same users on
different platforms (Almaatouq 2013). The problem with this article is that is focused primarily
on the amount of spam and where it is on other media besides Twitter. It would have been
beneficial to know the exact content along with the frequency of the spam as this can affect how
often a site is visited by a user as well as the content that user is providing. The more spam
content may also be related to the decrease in blog use, which would have heightened the
research as well. Twitter is a very useful micro-blog to analyze and the article showed that the

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results were mirrored in regular blogs and other media, however the fact that they were not
examined as extensively leads to a limitation in the study.
The relationship between blogging and vlogging is that they are both centered on social
activity and personal thoughts. Because these are created based off of seemingly original content
or responses to original content, the question the article focuses on is what motivates the creators
and what is the relationship to the audience (Nardi, 2004). This article in particular is ten years
old which is rather dated, however it provides useful insight to the future blogging created. The
research was done by recording interviews with the participants whether they were in person or
over the phone. The researchers also created and maintained a blog for their on familiarity
(Nardi, 2004). The results showed that blogging was similar to radio. People were
communicating their messages without as much feedback as a face to face message would
receive. However, this also means that they found that those who were to respond were very
intrigued and involved in the conversation that had been prompted (Nardi, 2004). The
researchers discussed that a limitation in the blog itself is the layout and that you cannot easily
find what you might be looking at. It can be argued that perhaps the design is also a deterrent and
should have been examined as well. The researchers focused around groups that create and
maintain a blog finding that there were challenges with the design and content due to multiple
authors (Nardi, 2004). It would have been useful for the researchers to look into the content that
was being generated based off the replies to the group blogs as that would show if the audience
was also aware of the challenges between the authors. Even though this article is outdated it
contains pertinent information to the art of vlogging. Vlogging, in theory, contains the same type
of content that a blog does but is just being distributed in a different method. The same questions
from this article can then be related to the idea of vlogging. Is it created in hopes of a response

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and to generate activity, or is it more of an open diary where people can respond but should not
expect a conversation to be generated?
Almaatouq, A., Alabdulkareem, A., Nouh, M., Shmueli, E., Alsaleh, M., Singh, V. K., ... &
Pentland, A. S. (2014, June). Twitter: who gets caught? observed trends in social micro-blogging
spam. In Proceedings of the 2014 ACM conference on Web science (pp. 33-41). ACM.
Lenhart, A., Purcell, K., Smith, A., & Zickuhr, K. (2010). Social Media & Mobile Internet Use
among Teens and Young Adults. Millennials. Pew Internet & American Life Project.
Nardi, B. A., Schiano, D. J., & Gumbrecht, M. (2004, November). Blogging as social activity,
or, would you let 900 million people read your diary?. InProceedings of the 2004 ACM
conference on Computer supported cooperative work (pp. 222-231). ACM.
Thompson, C., Gray, K., & Kim, H. (2014). How social are social media technologies (SMTs)?
A linguistic analysis of university students' experiences of using SMTs for learning. The Internet
and Higher Education, 21, 31-40.