The YouTube Effect

One of the thing's I've noticed about myself since getting an iPhone is a dramatic increase in watching videos on YouTube. I call this the YouTube Effect. Before the iPhone, I would visit YouTube occasionally  to watch things like Lion vs. (insert name of soon-to-be-dead animal) and funny things that friends would send along.

As you may know, the iPhone comes with the YouTube app built in. (It is one of the apps that you can move around but never remove from your iPhone. Notice the X on the upper left corner of the Facebook App) I started out watching the most popular videos for the week, and after that I would check the most popular videos of the day on a regular basis. I soon found myself subscribing to different channels and following certain channels fairly regularly.

This iPhone-YouTube connection turned a casual YouTuber into a regular viewer. The YouTube Effect.

It's one thing to watch videos on YouTube everyday, but it's another thing to actually make a video every day. So I started to wonder why people would do this, and I learned that the top video bloggers make six-figure incomes. These are people with hundreds of thousand views every day. Here's a link to a NY Times article on the subject. I have a lot of respect for the work that the guy in the article puts in to his show (but I can't watch more than of few seconds of him).

This is getting long, so I'll just leave with some interesting people on YouTube:

Erin and Roxanne, they sing covers of popular songs. They got to the point where they recorded their own single and get to hear themselves on the radio. When they're not singing they work at a Chinese restaurant.

Christine Gambito, from HappySlip, she plays six different characters in her videos.

Peter Chao, (warning offensive language & content sometimes, does this make you want to see it more?)

Ryah Higa, this Hawaiian guy has some funny stuff.

Peter Schiff, boring unless you're into financial markets, insightful if you are. He predicted the housing bubble collapse.

Who do you watch on YouTube? Leave a comment and let me know, I need to feed my YouTube addiction.