Blogs are no longer an exciting undertaking. Anyone from your mom to your hipster brother might be inking their experiences and opinions on the internet’s infinite pages. Vlogs, however are not as prosaic, seeing as sitting in front of a camera requires guts.
By Remy Raitt
In South Africa the vlogging population is slowly growing. The top YouTubers in our country are young, outspoken and proudly South African, setting up cameras in their bedrooms and speaking on an array of topics. Humour is a strong theme in the local YouTube scene, with personalities like Derick Watts and the Sunday Blues uploading spoofs on chart-topper songs, amusing animations and prank videos.
From video diary to vlog
Cape Town-based vlogger, Theodora Lee has, at last count, 181 346 YouTube subscribers. Her uploads, which stands at 65 videos, mostly comprise of her sitting in front of the camera speaking to her “lovelies”, as she fondly calls them, about the coming-of-age issues young women face.
“I started in 2013, filming a bunch of different things from skits, vlogs to random chats about things - which people may have enjoyed, but I didn't feel it was 100% me,” she says. “When I started making more specific content, on advice and growing up, there was a good response and I felt like my channel had more purpose.”
YouTube’s local provocateurs
Nic Smal of the duo Derick Watts and Sunday Blues says they don’t consider themselves vloggers. Busting onto the YouTube scene in 2011 with their Braai Day parody of Rebecca Black’s Friday, the jokers have since loaded similar spoofs along with animations of their characters Hippo and Crocodile.
“We really didn’t expect all the shares Braai Day got,” says Smal. “We had this ‘well, this is weird’ moment. Then we realised people actually appreciate our sense of humour and from there it just snowballed. Since then we have just loaded things that we made that we found funny.”
Likes can be lucrative
Since their first upload Derick Watts and the Sunday Blues have gone on to create commercial success through their animations, music and theatre. They recently returned from the National Arts Festival where they performed to impressed audiences.
Lee agrees that there’s cash in vlogging. “In-stream advertising (that play before videos) and brand sponsorships give vloggers opportunities to make money,” she says.
It’s a global community
Sulaiman Phillip in an article for Media Club South Africa says; “Vlogs are part of a larger online movement that has given birth to online global communities. These communities are built on the idea that users are not docile recipients of content but are actively shaping their experience.”
Both Lee and Smal say the majority of their viewers are not South African. Both have huge amounts of North American and British followers.
Success is not earned overnight
Lee says a successful vlog is not an instantaneous undergoing. “Do it for the love and not for the views or the possible 'fame',” she says. She advises aspirational vloggers to experiment and not take themselves too seriously.
Smal agrees; “My advice is to just continue to create and always create for yourself. The internet is literally a vast gargantuan ocean, and it’s hard to get anything to float up to the top of it. You just have to create, create, create; there is such a varied audience out there, so while one person might slam you, the next comment could be something like “this is literally the best thing I have ever seen”.”
Do you subscribe to any vlogs? What are some of your favourites?