Culture: So What?!? In this ongoing series, we ask thought leaders from all walks of life to answer the question: What is Culture and Why Does it Matter? They each find their own creative way of doing so.
This Week’s Contributor: Hunter March turned a love for making creative videos on YouTube and internships into a rising career with top teen channel, AwesomenessTV.
[dropcap size=dropcap]W[/dropcap]hat is a YouTuber? I guess some of them are stay at home rock stars, others are 15-year-old fashion icons, but almost all of them started out lonely. Including myself.
We weren’t the popular kids in school. How do I know this? Because popular kids don’t talk to themselves in a poorly lit room… alone… for hours. And honestly hours is an understatement. We skipped dates (that no one asked us on) and parties (that we weren’t invited to) just to edit that week’s video. That’s dedication. It was our unpaid job to make our very few viewers smile on a weekly basis. We did what we had to do and we loved the attention we got.
We loved it so much that we shaped our lives around getting more of it. We taught ourselves how to use DSLRs (digital single-lens reflex for the uninitiated), that “windows” are actually professional camera lights, and that Starbucks Wi-Fi is free. We also just happened to learn that there is always a newer, better camera out there, that windows only turn on half the time, and that Starbucks closes too.
We learned Final Cut, Photoshop, Google Analytics, and studied SEO’s much more than we did our SAT’s.
And after that, we learned how to connect with people. We learned how to share the parts of our lives that scared us most and explore other parts that we didn’t know existed. And we learned that our viewers loved that, they respected it, they needed it just as bad as we did. We learned that our viewers want to be our friends as badly as we wanted to be theirs. And now, not only do our fans want to connect with us, but so do Fortune 500 brands and the heads of every major production studio because we are being watched…. a lot. Some YouTubers get more views on their micro-budget, weekly videos than most primetime television shows.
We are loved, we are hated, we are followed, and we are unfollowed. We have the power to change the world as we know it, all from our bedroom in our parent’s house. We don’t know what YouTube is, or what it will become, but we do know one thing… we are not alone.
Hunter currently hosts Awesomeness Hollywood, The Daily Report and #DearHunter on AwesomenessTV and maintains his personal YouTube page, HunterMarchFilms1. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram.
Top image: Hunter March on AwesomenessTV discusses his first kiss.