Climbing Numbers
There are certain numeric standards an amateur YouTuber must meet in order to even be considered eligible to become a pro-am YouTube Star. Digital storytellers on YouTube may begin with as low as a couple hundred to a couple thousand views and maybe even a handful of subscribers (who are probably their own family members and circle of close friends). Their success depends on the responses from their anonymous, but global audience.
Take Jenna Marbles for example. She is an average, young woman who began her journey in 2010 by making short videos on just about any topic she wanted to talk about when she turned on her webcam. Her video from one year ago remains to have under a half a million views (currently on Dec. 8, 2011) her "office update 2 mov" video has 308,423 views. This is rather a low count compared to the amount of hits that she has been consistently receiving.
Take Jenna Marbles for example. She is an average, young woman who began her journey in 2010 by making short videos on just about any topic she wanted to talk about when she turned on her webcam. Her video from one year ago remains to have under a half a million views (currently on Dec. 8, 2011) her "office update 2 mov" video has 308,423 views. This is rather a low count compared to the amount of hits that she has been consistently receiving.
It has only been a year, but Jenny Marbles has moved over to the pro-am side of digital storytelling. For now, her video that was posted only two months prior has amassed 7,868,857 views. The result of this could be due to her upgraded editing, longer, more planned story structures or maybe a mesh of both these elements sprinkled with more brazen humor. All we know is that this video is merely one piece in her string of digital stories that regularly receive anywhere from 4-30 million views per clip.
Higher view counts also means that there should be an increased number of followers who loyally watch the user's videos. Many amateur YouTube stars dream of accumulating 1,000+ subscriber. The growing number of subscribers could be used as a gauge of how successful their YouTube career is coming along. As of Dec. 2011, Jenna Marbles looks like an overachiever with her current number of 1,757,163 loyal fans who have subscribed to her channel so that they could tune in to her new videos posted every Wednesday.