Youtube Hair Gurus: Do Advertisements On Their Channels Diminish Their Worth?

Before the advent of cinema, celebrities were those who had the good fortune of being born in an upper class or wealthy family.

Some great poets, painters, inventors, and scientist also managed to gain notoriety and become what we would today call a ‘celebrity’.

Now as time went on and with the advent of cinema and later television, celebrities were famous actors and actresses or musicians.

Many a starry-eyed young girl would leave school at 16 and make her way to Hollywood in the hopes of being ‘discovered’ and changing her life forever.

In the 21st century however and with the huge changes in the way we live, communicate and get entertained, celebrities have morphed into people who are just well known for a variety of reasons.

There are women who become celebrities for virtue of the fact that they have affairs with famous men, then there are those who are famous just for taking their clothes off for men’s magazines and then there are the celebrities of the YouTube variety.

Starry-eyed girls no longer have to go all the way to Hollywood to get discovered, all they need to do is post some videos on YouTube and cross their fingers. It worked for Justin Beiber, didn’t it?

Hair gurus have been around for almost as long as YouTube has been around. They are the women who are good enough to take time out of their busy lives to teach us how to deal with all aspects of hair care. We see them in their bathrooms washing their hair, in their bedrooms or living rooms styling and sometimes even out and about living with their new hairstyles.

In recent years, the popularity of YouTube as a whole has allowed some of these women to run their channels as businesses as well as hobbies. They are paid both by YouTube through the partner program as well as through any sponsorship deals that the channel owner is able to land on account of their popularity.

Many of the more popular YouTubers that you may have come across are actually able to make videos full time for a living.

I was watching a YouTube video the other day of the popular Taren ranting about the ‘The Ugly Truth About YouTube & Business‘. It’s a pretty long rant so if you have 30 minutes or so, watch it below.

If you cannot commit to watching it right now, the essence of the rant is that Taren clues us in on how a youtube guru makes money doing what she does. She finds it insulting that some companies contact her asking her to review their products assuming that she will take the time to use the product, sit in front of the camera to create the video and edit it without any compensation except for the benefit of having a free product.

She also takes issue with some of her subscribers who accuse her of selling out for doing paid reviews on her channel.

Somehow they believe that it compromises her integrity, even though she is always honest in her reviews and has no problem saying if she really liked the product or not.

This is a loaded question but does a YouTuber taking payment for product reviews diminish their worth?

In my opinion, I say absolutely not. If the YouTuber is honest about the fact that the review they are posting is ‘paid’ or ‘sponsored’ and they are completely honest in their assessment of the product, then it’s absolutely within their moral rights to get compensated for the work they put into creating the video.

Anyway, this issue tied in quite nicely with an article I was reading yesterday on Techcrunch (yes I am quite the blog jumper). The article alleges that Google pays adblocker plus, the popular ad blocking software, to show some ads to users anyway. Of course users of ad blocker have taken huge issue with this allegation.

Now I can see it from the point of view of the person who has downloaded this piece of software expecting it to work in blocking all adverts so having some appear anyway is not fair. Yet as a full time blogger myself who depends on dare I say it, advertising to make my living I can totally see it from Google’s side as well.

In a way, the people who complain that paid reviews on YouTube are wrong are similar to those who want to be able to surf the web advert free. They fail to realize the one simple fact that the web is what it is today because of advertising.

Remember back in the day when you had to pay a monthly/yearly fee to view content on many websites? That is what an advert free web would look like. You couldn’t just ‘Google’ anything and have millions of pages of free information on whatever topic you are interested in.

And it’s not just online, our entire world exists  in the form that it does because of advertising.

Without advertising money, some of the greatest tv shows of the last century would never have been made, memorable sporting occasions and a lot of other advances in technology and medicine would never have come to be without advertising.

It may not really seem that way but life is not all that straightforward for the popular YouTuber. In this day and age, our attention spans are shorter than ever.

We can’t be bothered to wait 10 seconds for a web page to load, we fast forward films to the ‘good bits’ and we don’t often read articles word for word. We just kind of skim through them, many of you will probably not even read this line!

Yet regardless how much these YouTubers love their hobby of making hair videos to entertain us, nobody has the time to work a full 8 hour day and upload 3-4 videos a week on YouTube regularly without being compensated for their time.

For a popular hair YouTuber, to remain popular she has to stick to a pretty regular (even rigorous) posting schedule. Lots of them are uploading a new videos every two to three days, or at the very least once a week just to maintain their current pool of subscribers.

Quite right too! With approximately 100 hours of video being uploaded to YouTube every minute, there is plenty of other distraction for the average surfer, many of whom also have busy lives and can be ruthless about removing ‘dead wood’ from their subscription lists. It’s just the way the world works.

One of the first jobs I ever did was a commission based sales job when I was 20 and I absolutely loathed it. The idea of selling and being sold to was repugnant somehow yet what I didn’t realize at the time is that we are selling and buying products and services all the time by default anyway.

Many of us go to work every day to make enough money to buy stuff that we want to buy. At our job we are selling stuff to people who want to buy it and these people are paying for it with the money that they made at their job selling more stuff to other people!

So Taren has not demonstrated an ‘ugly truth’ about how YouTube businesses work. In fact she has put forward a very elegant truth of how the world really works.

So stay calm as you drive down a highway being bombarded with billboards of advertising, stay calm as you flip through that magazine with advertising on every other page, calm yourself as you watch your favorite tv show but have to endure a commercial break every 10 minutes and most importantly, chill as you comment anonymously on your smartphone about how these YouTubers are no longer being ‘real’.