When Lucy Moon sat down with her therapist to discuss why she was feeling so low, she was on top of the world. A burgeoning career as a YouTuber was in mid-bloom: her subscriber count – an important metric on the site, and a sign of a creator’s popularity – was booming, and offers of work and brand tie-ins were rolling in. But all was not well. She wasn’t happy. The workload was rising; the pressure to be perfect in front of the camera was crushing. And the therapist was shocked.
“She was like: ‘I cannot believe you think this is normal, to be running this kind of operation for the first time with no career support,’” says Moon, a 23-year-old beauty-and-lifestyle YouTuber with more than 319,000 subscribers. “I meet so many YouTubers who say that.”
Despite the protestations of obsessive fans and dismissive naysayers, for the site’s most successful content creators, simply switching on a camera and spouting whatever comes to mind is no longer the entire job description. A YouTuber is a small-screen entrepreneur who must oversee growth in a highly competitive and ever-expanding market, win merchandise deals, broker brand tie-ins and often manage support staff.
The pace of the site’s success has outstripped the behind-the-scenes support for creators, leaving them to perform a growing number of tasks with little help, all while success is fleeting and based on an ever-changing engine running the site: the algorithm. YouTube’s long-standing lack of transparency about how its algorithm works has caused YouTubers untold hours of stress over the years, as they try to second-guess the constantly changing mathematics that govern how their content is displayed.
For more read the full of article at The Guardian
