Vanity Fair - The Often Perilous, Sometimes Lucrative, and Ever-Evolving Business of Being a YouTube Star in 2019
Emma Chamberlain is 18 years old and grew up watching YouTube videos. Over the past two years, she has entered the fray herself, becoming one of the most dynamic contributors to Google’s video-hosting behemoth, posting prosaic videos documenting her misadventures as a nascently independent adolescent. She vlogs trips to Coachella and fashion hauls and tours of Los Angeles’s many coffee shops. Her subscriber count hasn’t yet topped 9 million, but her videos regularly earn 5, 6, 7 million views each—an engagement rate that’s proved enticing to Louis Vuitton, which commissioned a video from Chamberlain for its 2020 cruise collection—and contribute to a very healthy teenage income. Though an imprecise science at best, the tracking company Social Blade estimates her revenue from views alone to be as high as six figures some months. She is as au courant as one can get on YouTube: cool, self-deprecating, exuberantly youthful (slightly world-weary), and utterly of the platform...