LOS ANGELES — It’s a meet-and-greet worthy of an A-list star.
Outside the three-story bookstore at the shopping mecca known as The Grove, hundreds of mostly young women are waiting to have Connor Franta, a 22-year-old Internet personality best known for his diary-like monologues on YouTube, sign a copy of his memoir.
The irony of a YouTube star drawing a bookstore crowd isn’t lost on talent manager Andrew Graham.
“A year ago, I went to New York and tried to get a book publisher to take a meeting with me,” said Graham, who represents several mega-popular YouTubers. “I had one meeting, and they laughed at me. Here we are a year later at Barnes & Noble in Los Angeles with a New York Times best-selling author who is a client. I think that says it all. It’s a 180-degree turn.”
YouTube, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary this month, has evolved from a playground for kitty videos to a $20 billion visual menagerie.
Along the way, it has become an incubator for a new type of celebrity — a digital Brat Pack that is leveraging smartphone stardom to write books, drop albums, design products and break into Hollywood.
“It’s the most powerful marketing platform in the world for millennials,” Graham said. “If you’re trying to reach that audience of girls gathered downstairs, YouTube is the venue to do that.”
In recent years, YouTube has propped up people like Franta — “creators,” the site calls them — who attract millions of subscribers that watch their online videos and the advertising attached to them.
Their popularity is still eclipsed by music videos, which accounts for YouTube’s most watched clips. Yet the fandom that creators are inspiring, and the ad revenue they bring in, can’t be ignored.
Franta boasts more than 4.4 million devotees to his YouTube channel, where he speaks to viewers at least once a week about life, dating, candy, whatever. He began posting videos in 2010 while attending high school in La Crescent, Minn. Now, he’s releasing music compilations and a line of locally grown coffee.
It’s a form of celebrity that didn’t exist a decade ago, when YouTube was born and made it simple to post video online. Franta is young enough to have been inspired by the YouTube vloggers that came before him.
“There are guys like Shane Dawson and Phillip DeFranco who I was a fan of, and now we’re friends,” Franta said. “Do you know how awkward it would be to tell some of my friends that I watched them on YouTube in my bedroom before I knew them? It’s weird to think of it like that.”
The creators’ importance to YouTube is evidenced by the Google-backed site’s bankrolling marketing campaigns the past two years, featuring such famous (on the Internet) faces as Bethany Mota, Hannah Hart and Grace Helbig.
Google has opened production facilities in London, Los Angeles, New York, Tokyo and São Paulo for creators who have more than 5,000 subscribers to film videos. The studios are equipped with sets and equipment that transcend most YouTubers’ living rooms and webcams.
The spaces also serve as social hubs for creators. Several of them will host 10th anniversary parties Wednesday.
“For us, creators are the light bulb of the ecosystem,” said Kevin Allocca, YouTube’s head of culture and trends. “Sure, YouTube was originally known for viral videos, and that was great and still is, but if you want to be able to build a business, you need to be able to create a following. I think it’s a very different model than traditional media.”
The next evolution for online video has already arrived, with such sites and apps as Twitch, Periscope, Meerkat and YouNow making it easier than ever to stream live video.
“There’s a ton of opportunity for innovation there,” Allocca said. “As it becomes easier to stream and take advantages of audiences built on YouTube, there’s going to be some interesting stuff. It’s another one of those things that’s really hard to predict what will be next.”
