Don’t let the title dissuade you. With the surge of success, several Internet personalities have been found by creating and uploading content to YouTube, and our interest was piqued. So we decided to look into the true workings of video content creators and how they garner success and see how it compares to the traditional definition of an entrepreneur. Today, we’re going to see what it takes to be an entrepreneur, and do YouTubers, as they’re called, make the cut?
Alright, let’s start with the traditional definition of an entrepreneur: a person who organizes and operates a business or businesses, taking on greater than the normal financial risk in order to do so. An entrepreneur takes on the role of setting up and running a business or multiple businesses and taking the leap to being responsible for all the time and money required to start a company. Entrepreneurs have had success on many platforms, and in every industry, you can imagine, it seems YouTube is beginning to earn its place in the rankings.
Now, many people might be rolling their eyes when they hear about people who post videos of themselves on YouTube being famous and ‘entrepreneurs.’ However, the similarities between what they do and the amount of effort they put into their content beg the question. Are they not entrepreneurs? So let’s look at it from a consumer perspective and a business perspective to see which one gets the greater response.
Consumers.
As consumers, we look for content and products that will interest us and inspire us to make a purchase. When it comes to consuming digital content, we’re all looking for valuable content from multiple platforms, and of course, its value will vary from person to person. But the majority of digital content that everyone enjoys is comical materials spanning many topics.
For example, it doesn’t matter how old you were; we all watched the viral video “Charlie Bit My Finger” at least once. Don’t lie. We as consumers use the Internet as a faster and more interconnected way to find things that delight us and can answer some sort of need in our lives, even if that’s just 30 seconds of laughter.
When you choose to subscribe to a channel on YouTube, it’s like signing up for a newsletter from a business that you like and receiving updates about them. You display a vested interest in their content and what they represent, which helps them grow their business. The consumer role in this business exchange is to be a loyal ‘customer’ and keep interacting with their content and channel, which helps others find it.
The more content they create and spend time building up the awareness of their channel, the more successful their videos will become. Like brand marketing, they create a brand for themselves and continuously improve their brand awareness and grow their audience. As your efforts help their subscriber count improve and their efforts are recognized by YouTube’s monetization algorithms, the better and more exciting content they’ll be able to create.
YouTube’s decision to sponsor and monetize different channels relies on how many consumers are interested in the channel’s content, just like with any other business model. If people like the product, then the company has a future and the potential for investments. Consumers and their interests are the secrets to why YouTube has become such an important place for a new form of entrepreneurship and how this future of business will rely heavily on content creation moving forward.
Business.
As business owners, we take the seriousness of what it takes to start and run a business to heart and know how difficult it can be to work towards a goal of revenue and positive brand awareness. As entrepreneurs, we are all familiar with the long-burn for getting customers’ attention and earning profit from sales and marketing efforts.
As a YouTuber, it’s no secret that fame and success with this particular business venture don’t happen overnight. So you have to be patient and consistent with your efforts no matter how long it takes to see a return on them, and some never do, that’s just the way it is. As any content creator or marketer will tell you, you can’t create one piece of content and then sit back and watch how it does. You have to continue to produce new material to keep customers and audience members coming back for more.
Let’s look at the steps for starting a business and trying various methods to grow your audience, shall we?
- You come up with an idea that solves some kind of need or targets a particular interest faction on the market.
- You form a product or service that answers this and build a brand and business to deliver on this idea.
- You work hard to gain investment and revenue through customer attention and to share your brand with others.
- As you market and campaign to build your audience, you gain some monetary value for your company and start to earn revenue.
- Try your best to maintain and expand success in your efforts.
With this ‘outline’ of sorts, you could easily describe the path of a cleaning service entrepreneur or a YouTuber. The goals of choosing to start a business and becoming a YouTuber are very similar, and both employ the tactics of a business model to gain success. The money earned in a business venture comes from sales and partnerships, whereas on YouTube, channels make money from ads and sponsorships from businesses related to your content. Some YouTubers have even flexed their entrepreneurial spirit and started creating their merchandise to sell to their followers.
Conclusion.
Given that we’ve now looked at the efforts of YouTube personalities from both consumer’s and business owner perspectives, it’s safe to say that YouTubers are entrepreneurs in their own right. With their tireless efforts to grow their brand and even creating their products to sell to their followers.
They create content that serves a purpose in a designated market, promote their brand, work hard to earn monetization rights for their videos, and even work with businesses to achieve special deals for their followers.
So no matter your personal feelings about YouTube personalities and how much work they do, they are, in essence, entrepreneurs and content marketers.