Content area
Full Text
We are in a warm black-walled room in central London and the air is thick with perfume. A group of teenage girls looks from face to face, not sure who should introduce themselves first. To start with they are shy, clutching cups of tea and lip gloss, but as time passes they relax. The room gets even warmer. This is a studio in YouTube's offices, and these are amateur beauty video bloggers : vloggers. They are here to learn about lighting, presenting and networking. Then they'll eat cake.
For YouTube, these small-screen performers mean big business, in shades of pastel, lime and bronze. The Google-owned site continues to produce young ambitious celebrities - 72 hours of video a minute are uploaded by documentary-makers, musicians, animators, each with thousands of subscribers to their channels. But the fastest-growing subsection is the beauty vloggers. Two-fifths of British women are viewing online beauty tutorials, an industry that attracts 700 m hits a month.
Watching their videos one after the other, you risk slipping into a sweet sort of trance. They are all the same but slightly different. A young woman talks to you from the edge of her bed, fairy lights behind her, a pile of used make-up just out of sight. Piece by piece she will test the brushes, the lip glosses, and piece by piece she will make you her friend. In the process she might become a millionaire.
The most successful British beauty vloggers are little industries in themselves. They are Pixiwoo (make-up artists Sam and Nic Chapman, who have more than 200 m views on YouTube), their protegEe Tanya Burr (24 years old, with almost 2m YouTube subscribers), and Zoella (Zoe Sugg, 24, with 4.3m subscribers).
"While the typical YouTube age range is, say, 11-16, we have a really big range of people, starting from 16 right up to 65," Pixiwoo's Nic told the Financial Times. "Ours is a massive demographic of people who really want to learn. It also helps that our work is what YouTube calls evergreen content, which means it doesn't date."
There is money here, but it's hidden, a golden hare. Few seem willing or able to explain how it works. Last year, Google reported that a million YouTube users...