YouTube Marketing Effectiveness: Oprah vs. Pop Music

In The Entrepreneurial Vlogger: Participatory Culture Beyond the Professional-Amateur Divide, Jean Burgess and Joshua Green explore the characteristics of YouTube culture.  Burgess and Green write that the “real” YouTube had no market-related motivation driving users’ video production, and they argue that the site is most ideal for amateurs and ordinary individuals who seek personal expression.  Burgess and Green further support this concept by including a segment related to Oprah Winfrey’s creation of a YouTube channel.  In contrast to the average user’s personal expression video blogs, Oprah’s YouTube channel was created as a type of promotional strategy, with the intent of presenting the brand to the community in a controlled way.  Due to the channel’s lack of compatibility with many elements of participatory media, Oprah’s channel has ultimately been somewhat of a failure with the YouTube audience.

While the Oprah brand, even with its large level of media power, failed to impress users, some channels seem to have been more successful in marketing their brand via YouTube.  I am particularly interested in how this applies to today’s music industry, as an increasing number of bands seem to be successfully using YouTube as a means to expand their fan base.  In high school, my best friend went to a concert and saw the band We The Kings perform.  She told me all about her experience, stating that the band was somewhat decent, but she probably wouldn’t see them again.  However, at some point after that, she stumbled across the We The Kings YouTube channel.  After seeing the band’s regularly-posted vlogs, she became more appreciative of their music, and she still watches their YouTube videos and goes to their concerts today, five years after her initial concert experience.  She also shares videos from the channel often, bringing more new fans to the band’s YouTube page.   For this and other bands, YouTube appears to be a much more effective marketing tool than it has been for Oprah.

As of today, the Oprah Winfrey Network channel has 82,533 subscribers, while the We The Kings band channel has 86,694.  The Oprah brand, as widely known and powerful as it is, is has achieved less success that this relatively small band has found while marketing themselves to a niche audience on YouTube.  According to the writing of Burgess and Green, this variability in brand success happens for assorted reasons.  In this particular case, I would hypothesize that this is due mainly to the brand’s knowledge of how YouTube operates and the resulting difference in how the audience is addressed.  As the article mentions, Oprah’s channel did not allow unmoderated comments and did not directly address YouTube users.  The videos found on the We The Kings YouTube channel differ significantly because they are of amateur quality and often feature clips of the band’s daily life, as well as members of the band talking directly to the camera.  Also, rather than controlling user comments completely, the band often asks for audience input, encouraging their fans to interact with them.  By marketing themselves in this way, a band can appeal to music fans by giving them an in-depth look at the band members’ personalities and their life on tour, which is ultimately much more effective than professionally produced videos that don’t connect with YouTube users.