How YouTubers like Jamal Edwards took on TV

By Ryan Gilbey

The apple store that sits at one cobblestoned corner of Covent Garden in London is like Apple Stores everywhere – a trim, clean, brick-and-glass hall. Except that this one is on the site of the old Rock Garden, a clammy basement dive where fledgling punk bands (UK Subs, The Damned, the Undertones) once played nose-to-nose with their fans. No point getting sentimental about its demise. This is what happens; this is change. The middle-aged may gaze at the landscape and see the past. They think, or some do, “It was all Rock Gardens around here when I was young.” Tanya Burr, a 24-year-old video blogger, or “vlogger”, who held a meet-and-greet event outside the Covent Garden Apple Store earlier this year, can look at the same view unclouded by nostalgia, and see fun and potential. She can see the future.

A former cosmetics-counter assistant from Norwich, Burr has spent the past four years uploading weekly videos, in which she shares make-up tips, onto her eponymous channel on YouTube. (Unlike a television channel, a YouTube channel is an online depository for one person’s videos that fans can subscribe to, a bit like following on Twitter. It takes fewer than five minutes to set one up, a single mouse-click to subscribe, and both activities are free.) Burr recently passed the one-million-subscribers mark; by way of comparison, Ricky Gervais’s YouTube channel has around 330,000 subscribers.

Gervais doesn’t upload fresh material nearly as frequently as Burr. Perhaps he is busy with other things. But it’s still significant that one of British television’s best-known stars has a lower currency than some YouTubers – whether Burr, or a youthful media mogul such as Jamal Edwards, who founded the music and comedy platform SB.TV. In the future represented by Burr, Edwards and their like, all content is free, immediate and omnipresent. A vlogger takes a morning or an afternoon to make a video. It is uploaded in seconds. Subscribers can comment instantly. Mostly their comments take the form of praise, but they might also criticise, or suggest other topics to be covered in future videos – all of which it is prudent for a YouTuber to respond to. Acknowledge your audience, incorporate their ideas, and you’ve involved them automatically in the creative process: they’re yours.

Tanya Burr is being ferried between business meetings, but she has just enough time to talk to me on the phone. She tells me about her Apple Store event back in May; how several thousand people were so keen to meet her that they crowded the streets that snake into Covent Garden, how access to the area became impossible – even, she claims, dangerous. She had to curtail her visit almost immediately. “Some people were, like, ‘Oh maybe a hundred of them were your subscribers and the rest were just passers-by,’” she says. “Well, maybe some of them were passers-by, but if you look at their faces they are mostly teenage girls, which is my demographic.”

It’s understandable that Burr would dismiss the sceptics: she’s worked hard to get where she is. A YouTuber’s relationship with subscribers will be cultivated over many weeks and years, using every available means. The rewards are numerous: total creative freedom, the approval of one’s peers… and then there is the money. Monetising a YouTube channel means allowing ads to be attached to the start of each video and makes the creator part of the YouTube-partner programme; revenue is then divided between the creator – now a “partner” – and YouTube itself. The company won’t reveal exactly what the split is, since it differs in each case, but Zayna Aston, the head of communications for YouTube UK, tells me that “partners always earn the majority of the revenue.” (Online message forums cite a 55/45 split in the partner’s favour.) The more views a video gets, the higher the revenue. There is no entry-level to monetisation: YouTubers can sign up from their first video, as long as the content they upload is entirely original. Once ad revenue reaches around £100, their first payment will be despatched. Burr’s channel is one of thousands which can bank on a six-figure income from YouTube.

The audience is global. In America, YouTube superstars – those in the 10m-plus subscribers club – include Ray William Johnson, who provides comic commentaries for viral videos; comedian and sketch star Ryan Higa, aka nigahiga; and the irreverent Smosh duo, Ian Hecox and Anthony Padilla, who scored an early hit with a video in which they mime to the “Pokémon” theme. In Britain, the most successful vloggers tend to be white, male and middle-class, with pin-up looks and snazzy hair: Charlie McDonnell (charlieissocoollike), Thomas Ridgewell (TomSka), twin brothers Jack and Finn Harries (jacksgap), Dan Howell (danisnotonfire). Between them, they cover most of YouTube’s evergreens: comedy sketches, monologues, dares. If inspiration flags, food challenges – eating a tablespoon of cinnamon, say, or 20 Ferrero Rochers in a hurry – usually work.

When I first contact Zayna Aston about speaking to some vloggers, I assume they will be over the moon about my request. I actually picture them whooping and high-fiving because a print journalist wants to interview them. Then it dawns on me. Exposure is one thing they don’t need. They already have it: it just happens to exist within a world hidden from the view of most over-30s. “They’re happy to talk if they have time,” Aston tells me gently. “But you’re right. A lot of YouTubers have audiences that rival the highest [newspaper] circulation figures.” These vloggers have each accumulated 2m-plus subscribers and reached that level of celebrity where it can be unwise for them to venture into public places unaccompanied. They are pop culture’s hidden Biebers, its one-man One Directions.

As a 42-year-old father-of-three, I’m as far from their target audience as a Zoetrope is from an iPad; I’m not entertained by most of their work and I’m not meant to be. Part of the problem is that 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. Ploughing into it without a guide is like hunting for a needle among millions of haystacks in a hall of mirrors during a rave. Younger users can find their way around the site adroitly enough, but then we’re talking about the same people who can see in the dark in Hollister.

Any adult who takes the time to trawl through video blogs is likely to end up grinding their teeth at the technical tics (relentless jump-cuts, allusions to other YouTube videos), creative shortcomings (sketches that cry out for a decent script editor) and apparently compulsory mannerisms (a degree of self-deprecation that makes Hugh Grant look like Lee Marvin). There are exceptions: I admire the work of Khyan Mansley, a 25-year-old with a defiant, hangdog persona, killer timing and real range. His videos can be deliriously daft one moment – a bread-based martial-arts spoof is called “Violence Baguettes Violence”, while “All Cars are Girls” finds him breaking with convention by giving his new vehicle a male name – and brooding the next, as in his peculiar serialised narrative “The Intern”. But on the whole, watching YouTube videos doesn’t begin to compare to the thrill of seeing a carefully honed tele-vision programme, with its palpable layers of craftsmanship. I’m not expecting a “Sopranos” or a “Breaking Bad”, but is it out of the question to hope for a “Mighty Boosh”?

Even the most polished vlogs feel strangely incomplete. Occasionally there are even vlogger confessionals about how frightening it is to be in the public eye and that what they really want is to be liked – cue thousands of adoring comments from their audience. It’s fishing for compliments with an industrial trawler. But when a young woman from Norfolk gets more viewers than Ricky Gervais, it seems vloggers must be doing something right. According to the consumer analysts Nielsen, YouTube reaches more American adults in the 18-34 range than any cable-television network.

The most popular vloggers have reached that level of celebrity where it can be unwise for them to venture into public places unaccompanied. they are pop culture’s hidden Biebers, its oneman One Directions

Reports of the death of traditional television may be greatly exaggerated – it still pulls off the event moments, like “Downton Abbey”, the “X Factor” final or the Superbowl – but some of its signs are looking less than vital. As far back as 2001, the UCLA Centre for Communication Policy found that internet users were watching 4.5 hours less television per week than their off-line counterparts. In June, the BBC admitted that more than 428,000 British households had claimed exemption from the licence fee in the preceding year, as they no longer used television sets to watch live broadcasts. That figure represents only about 2% of the British audience, but it still amounts to a loss of more than £62m in revenue (and it’s slowly rising: up almost 2,500 from the previous year). Meanwhile Nielsen records that American 18- to 24-year-olds watch television for three hours less every week than they did in 2012 – the so-called “Lost Boys” of the traditional audience, the ones who instead spend their screen time adrift in World of Warcraft, or downloading sci-fi shorts from Machinima.

Admittedly, audience figures are unclear – more traditional television is available online, more people go online while they’ve got the telly on, and the rise of DVR (digital video-recorders) has further muddied the waters. But this much we know: although there are noticeably fewer television sets in our homes (1.83 per British household in 2012 compared with 2.3 nine years earlier), viewing is up in other forms – on tablets, smartphones, computers. These are threatening to make the living room a mockery of its own name: even when the family does get together in the same space, it may be to pore separately over a variety of different devices. In a report this year, Ofcom, Britain’s media regulator, called this "media stacking". In August, in his McTaggart lecture at the Guardian Edinburgh International Television Festival, Kevin Spacey called it "that warm glow of precious family time when we all come together to ignore each other".

Youtube’s London offices are ten minutes from the Apple Store at Covent Garden, in a tower comprised of lime and tangerine blocks: the look is Meccano for hipsters. The connotations of play extend to the bright ninth-floor reception, where a ping-pong table stands near the entrance to the employees’ library. There are banquettes to sit on, curving and rust-coloured, like sections of copper pipe. The ceiling is all exposed ducts and metalwork, like a leftover set from Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil”, but at eye-level everything is plywood and chipboard, some of it stencilled with the company logo. The decor strives for a work-in-progress feel, which brings to mind the line from “The Social Network” about how Facebook is like fashion: it will never be finished. The same cannot be said of everything. A selection of the day’s newspapers are scattered on a low table. Ignored by visitors prodding their iPads and smartphones, they may as well be archaeological relics.

Zayna Aston pours coffee into two mugs and steers me toward a pine bench in the canteen. Aston, who is 30, with long chestnut hair that any eight-year-old girl would get a buzz out of brushing, used to work for the talent agency William Morris Endeavour in Los Angeles. (Her most embarrassing moment there, she says, was trying to crack a joke in the presence of Larry David and Sacha Baron Cohen.) Noticing that after the financial crisis Hollywood lost its appetite for experimentation, she looked to the web for her next career move and ended up at Google, which in 2006 had bought YouTube for £833m.

She explains the housekeeping side of setting up a YouTube channel, and how to build and develop an audience by using back-end data. These are statistics that show everything from the gender, age and nationality of a YouTuber’s viewers, to the precise moment when they switch off; the idea is to use the stats to make future videos more popular. If that sounds like having a focus group at your elbow, Aston puts it another way: “Television is a monologue, but the internet is a conversation. It’s less like having viewers than a group of friends.”

We descend a few floors to the YouTube Space, a fully staffed production, editing and conference facility which partners can use free of charge once they pass the 5,000-subscriber threshold. The area, decked out in yellow and black, has a whiff of 1990s yoof television. A giant spacesuit looms over the hang-out area (a few sofas, a noticeboard covered in snaps of YouTubers, a communal kitchen). There are mock-submarine doors and lots of wire mesh: “Das Boot” set in a chicken coop. Down one corridor lies a string of studios and suites. In one, a man is delivering a monologue to camera in front of a special effects green-screen; in the next, two women gaze into open laptops that illuminate their faces.

I follow Aston into an office where men are stationed silently at computers. One of them is Steve Roberts, a former football coach who makes his living producing and uploading soccer-skills videos on his channel, STRskill School. Roberts has around 256,000 subscribers. He attempts to show me one of his most popular posts, then shakes his head at a digital obstacle blocking his path: an unskippable advertisement. “Don’t you just hate ads?” he harrumphs. “Um…” says Aston, stiffening slightly.

She takes me to the library, and introduces me to Sara Mormino, director of YouTube content operations. I find myself blurting out a question intended as my pay-off: “Is the internet killing television?” The slight catch in my voice makes it sound like I’m demanding the bad news about my biopsy be given to me straight. Aston shoots me the same slightly pitying look she gave my clunky, analogue Dictaphone when we first met. But it’s Mormino who says: “Don’t think of it as television versus the internet. It’s not a zero-sum game. There’s enough audience out there for everyone.” We are seated on a kind of circular pod, half-bed and half-sofa, a few feet from a wall-length window. It’s an awfully long way down and I feel dizzy.

Jamal Edwards is ordering breakfast in a Soho members’ club. This should be a simple matter. But he is not a simple man.

“Can I customise a breakfast?” he asks with tentative cheer. The waitress looks stumped. “What’s that?”

“Can I make my own? Can I have…” He scrutinises the menu. “Two pieces of bacon. Beans. Grated cheese on top. Parmesan or Cheddar, yeah? Eggs. Uh, medium – no, I mean scrambled. With cheese mixed in. And onions. Sausages. Toast. White, please.” He looks up winningly at the waitress from under the peak of his black-and-gold baseball cap. “That’s like a normal breakfast, innit?” She smiles and vanishes. “Customising it gives it that extra flavour,” he tells me.

I express surprise that he didn’t ask for Marmite on his toast. “Oh man, allow it!” he laughs, screwing up his face in disgust. Edwards is 23, and “allow it”, as any parent or teacher will know, means don’t allow it. Just as “bare” denotes plenitude and “sick” is a wholly desirable thing to be.

Edwards represents the next step from showing off on YouTube: showing other people. His channel and production company SB.TV gives airtime to musicians and comedy acts, some well-known, some utterly unknown – this year, he presented some of these acts at his own strand of the Manchester International Festival. The channel has 350,000 subscribers. Edwards himself is reportedly worth £8m. (As well as YouTube revenue – Reebok, Adidas and Universal are among those buying ad space on SB.TV videos – this takes into account sponsorship, SB.TV merchandising, Edwards’s run of e-books and a deal he signed with Sony to launch his own record label.) He says the objective was not to be rich and famous: “I wanted to live good,” he shrugs.

He is not the only one. Vice, a small Canadian arts magazine launched in the early 1990s, has exploded out of its print beginnings and become a new-media behemoth with hipster trimmings – and 3m subscribers on YouTube. Stylehaul is a YouTube platform which brings together 3,000 original creators of beauty and fashion videos; Awesomeness TV is a youth channel housing everything from video pranks to tips on buying back-to-school clothes at a snip. In the same way that Vice’s channel has diversified to take in international news, reportage and culture, Edwards has plans for SB.TV to branch out into fashion, gadgets, sport, even package holidays. He hangs out with Dr Dre, chews over business ideas with Richard Branson, interviews David Cameron and Ed Miliband.

At 14, he used his camera-phone to make short videos near his home in Acton, west London. One of the first was of a fox patrolling the grounds of his council estate. Edwards slapped a comical commentary on the top, uploaded it to YouTube and e-mailed the link to friends. He didn’t become a partner at that point because this was in 2005, when YouTube was not yet a year old and no one foresaw that it would become our second set of eyes. “I was just chatting rubbish over the videos and people found that funny. I didn’t know how to build up subscribers or anything like that. Back in the day I didn’t know that you reply to comments, which I do now.”

From filming foxes, he moved on to filming rappers and MCs. Not a natural progression, but one born of pragmatism and personal necessity. Edwards had been forbidden by his mother from venturing out to Wembley market, where DVDs of street-corner rappers were on sale for £5 or £10 a pop – “It’s a bit dodgy down the market and I wasn’t really allowed out of Acton” – so he took to filming and uploading his own videos instead.

Once word spread around the grime-music scene, which had been largely ignored by mainstream television channels such as MTV, Edwards began attracting approval from established grime artists. But the most significant decision he made was to brand his videos. Anyone can upload footage of rappers, but Edwards distinguished his by emblazoning them with a logo: SB.TV. The “SB” refers to his own MC name, Smokey Barz, about which he now expresses some embarrassment. “My bars, my lyrics, were on fire; so they left the others, you know, smoky.” He smiles bashfully. “Childhood error. It’s all jokes. Now I say SB could be Sunny Beach. Simply Brainstorming. Steadily Building the vision. Sipping Barcardis on a Sunny Beach while Simply Brainstorming.” Or merely Stupendous Breakfast.

Soon viewers were suggesting local artists they wanted to see on SB.TV, or offering Edwards creative advice: stand back when you film, turn the beat up a bit, that sort of thing. “It helped me.” Next he extended his roster by taking his camera to all corners of London. Did his mother know? “Half-and-half,” he says quietly, with a wobble of the hand, as though nervous she might still ground him. But it was that SB.TV branding that set his videos apart. “You put your logo in the corner, you make it stand out. I came up with different series-formats for the different types of videos I was uploading. F64 was Freestyle. A64 was Acoustic. People hadn’t seen that before. Brands give the viewer a sense that it’s solid – proper. It seems more professional than if it’s just a random video. You might see other freestyle videos but you won’t see F64 anywhere else.”

The brands widened Edwards’s reach. Under the acoustic strand, he helped break the more mainstream pop act Ed Sheeran (“My brother!” he hoots delightedly when I mention his name) and lent a push to the singers Jessie J and Nicki Minaj. Despite the spectacular growth of SB.TV, Edwards hasn’t stopped scouring the streets for performers; his camera may be more expensive now, but he’s still the one filming. “I was out there last night,” he says, gesturing vaguely toward the grungy grid of Soho streets. “I saw these guys that were playing music, so I went up to them and said, 'I wanna get you on SB.TV.' They were, like, ‘Woah! You work for SB.TV?’ I didn’t tell them who I was, I just said I know someone there. Dunno what they were doing but it sounded good. We’ll get them to do something. We’ll have MCs wandering in and out…” His plate arrives. “Never seen a breakfast like this!” he grins at the heap of food. Then a thoughtful pause. “I should’ve had another sausage.”

If vlogging ends up killing off television, it will be manslaughter rather than murder. The vloggers I speak to don’t want television to die. They’re like independent-minded offspring who have struck out in the world, but they still want the comforts of family to come home to. Television is where their visual entertainment began; they wouldn’t be vlogging without it. Many of them include it in their career plans. In one of the dressing rooms in the YouTube Space, where a mirror on the wall is framed by fizzing lightbulbs, I run into Khyan Mansley, the inventive vlogger who stood out for me from his foppish, floppy-haired brethren. He says he has been talking to production companies in America about working in television. “Television has real advantages,” he says. “Higher profile, more money, more opportunities.” Less control? “That’s something that’ll be new to me,” he admits. “But I really want to create longer narrative pieces, and there’s not much audience for that on YouTube. Everything there is bite-sized and digestible, and people are watching it on their phones. They want everything shorter and shorter.”

Jamal Edwards also sees television as part of his future. He had a positive experience when he was the subject of a documentary that Channel 4 screened as part of its youth-oriented T4 strand. “So many people saw that. Older people saw it, people in Newcastle…” He is in discussions about more projects. “I think I could do an SB.TV music show or come up with a format. I’ve got ideas. It just needs the backbone, the pulse, because I haven’t got the 15 years’ experience the broadcasters have got.” The interactive limitations of television don’t faze him. “We could probably get comments through an app,” he muses, half to himself. “That’s the way TV will survive in the digital world. Online’s more powerful right now. TV just needs to be fresher, to embrace online more by co-signing an idea that one of us has. It needs a little…” He makes a sort of “oomph” sound.

Can the traffic go both ways? When the omnipresent celebrity chef Jamie Oliver launched Food Tube, his own YouTube channel, subscribers stayed away in droves – until Oliver started including existing food vloggers in his shows. One of the most popular is the 45-year-old Christian Stevenson, a Washington-born former extreme-sports evangelist and Kerrang! radio presenter whose online moniker – DJ BBQ – gives some idea of his current enthusiasms. Not only will he come to your party and cook up a storm (as he has done for clients such as Bill Gates), he will provide the music too. On Food Tube, he is given to dressing in brightly coloured Spandex as he teaches his audience the secrets of cooking Sweet and Smokey Beer-Can Chicken (“Once you’ve shoved a beer can up a chicken’s ass, you’ll never…not…shove…a beer can…up a chicken’s ass”). His manner is a mix of the zany and the zonked; he’s like a hyperactive surfer. “Don’t forget to wash your hands, dudes,” he calls out in one video. “Salmonella sucks!”

The peculiarity of Stevenson’s career is that he has already had a successful stint on television. Ten years ago, he was the presenter of "RAD", a stunts and sports show which won the shabby British television station Channel 5 its first Bafta, and featured Stevenson indulging in relaxing pursuits such as wing-walking or hovercraft racing. “It’s like I’m going backwards,” he says when I phone him. “I reckon I produced or presented or voiced around 2,000 hours of TV. Then this whole YouTube phenomenon happened. Once I’d started the barbecuing, Jamie’s people came along and said they wanted to work with me. They were, like, 'You’re not known in the food world but we can change that.' I told Jamie I needed more skills and he said, ‘That’s the easy part. I’ll put you in the restaurants, I’ll put you in the butcher’s shop, you can learn all that but you’ve already got the camera skills.’” Stevenson had the presenting chops; he just needed to master the pork ones.

“Online’s more powerful now,” says Jamal Edwards. “TV needs to be fresher, to embrace online more. It just needs a little…” he makes a sort of “oomph” sound

He is uniquely placed, then, to explain the difference between the demands of online and television audiences. “Immediacy,” he says without missing a beat. “We launched Food Tube in January and we’re constantly having to change things to meet what [the audience] wants. You’ve got to have a garish thumbnail graphic, nothing artsy, because a lot of people watch on tiny screens. No titles – we had titles to start with, but they haven’t got time. We also do a food reveal early, so they know what they’re gonna get at the end. And we’ve gotta keep it snappy because their attention won’t last forever.”

What can television do to keep up? “Dude, if you could answer that…” He laughs at my question for longer than is comfortable. “Look, both those mediums are necessary. But the truth is, TV is getting its ass handed to it at the moment.” I’m surprised, then, to learn that Stevenson also has his eye on returning to television. Why bother if it is so moribund? “Um. I like TV. I still think there’s a place for it. I mean, I’m totally committed to Food Tube – but it’d be nice to find a TV show. The trouble is you go into meetings at Fresh One [Oliver’s production company] and the TV guys are there too, and we’re coming up with all these weird online ideas – ‘Let’s build the world’s biggest sound-system BBQ!’ – and the TV people are all, like, ‘Well, there are certain formats we need to adhere to…’ It’s funny watching our ideas get crushed.”

One early adopter of YouTube who also came directly from television was the comedian and director Adam Buxton, formerly of Adam & Joe – the comedy duo who brought a DIY aesthetic to their mid-1990s Channel 4 show. Buxton has his own YouTube channel and is also the presenter of "BUG", a live show in which he screens new and innovative music videos then reads out a selection of the most bizarre YouTube comments about them: a simple but effective way to have YouTube satirise itself. “BUG” was adapted into an eight-part half-hour series for Sky Atlantic, but has not been recommissioned. Buxton expresses disappointment at Sky’s decision. “Television is not the best medium for taking chances, especially these days,” he says. “Everyone wants something that’s going to hit quickly and crossover.” Asked in an interview on YouTube a few years ago how a young comic might go about getting on television, Buxton had spluttered: “Fuck TV! Who cares about television any more?” The remark, framed as a joke, sounded like nothing of the sort.

Even if its content is not yet as striking as its form, YouTube presents a promise of genuine revolution. It offers transparent advantages over television for any younger audiences and creators not married to the comforts and conventions of the senior art form. It is democratic and interactive; it is also dispersed across competing screens, some scarcely larger than postage stamps. What is not yet clear is whether there is space in the future for the thing we think of as television, or whether it will go the way of penmanship in an age of e-mail.

Yet the affection for television among the vloggers is genuine and poignant: their desire to see it endure, and the vim they could bring to it, may help it to survive and grow. Outside the Royal Festival Hall, overlooking the Thames, I speak to 28-year-old Kevin Simmons – one half of the presenting team of the African-American entertainment-and-gossip vlog The Skorpion Show, which has 120,000 subscribers. His meet-and-greet event is far smaller than Tanya Burr’s Covent Garden mêlée, but the 30 or 40 fans who have given over some of this sweltering Saturday afternoon in July to sing his praises on camera are no less excitable. Simmons, who later tweets a picture of us talking together, tells me that television was the bedrock of his childhood. “I loved watching television as a kid. Growing up, my mother had us on a structured schedule. So after doing homework or chores, the television was there. I remember Thursday nights very well on Fox. We watched ‘Living Single’ and ‘New York Undercover’ and then it was time for bed. Friday nights was ‘TGIF’ [the family-oriented scheduling block ‘Thank God It’s Friday’] on ABC. I wish they’d bring that back. It was great having shows to watch together as a family. Traditional television will always have a future. You just have to make it more interactive.”

Tanya Burr also talks fondly of her childhood television memories – she and her sister would cram in an hour of watching the CBBC children’s channel before their mother, a teacher who rationed their viewing, got home from work. “I don’t think television is over,” she says, “but the internet will come to equal it.” I ask if she can imagine any role for TV in her own future, and she thinks for a moment. “Maybe when I’m older, I’ll put my child in front of the television – when I’m doing my make-up.”■

Ryan Gilbey is a film critic for the New Statesman and author of “It Don't Worry Me: The Revolutionary American Films of the Seventies”

PORTRAIT: DANIEL SWALLOW

ADDITIONAL IMAGES: GETTY