Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

The vlogging fantasy

My friend’s ten-year-old daughter has a new hobby. Like many of her school pals, she hopes to become a video blogger — a ‘vlogger’. She has started to record clips of herself for others to watch, share and ‘like’. She showed me a few, then gave me a list of famous vloggers to watch: JoJo Siwa, iJustine, Noodlerella, Zoella. Their names sounded so bizarre. But they are totally familiar to tweenage girls.

Like an earnest marketing executive, my friend’s daughter then explained to me that it was all a matter of numbers. If her videos are viewed 40,000 times on YouTube, she can have adverts placed on them; 100,000, and companies would start sending her products to promote. One million and she’d be a bona fide YouTube star. Her most recent video, about a doll she had been given for Christmas, had 11 views. There was still a way to go.

This seemed a peculiar phenomenon but my friend’s daughter is not alone. In fact, her dream is perfectly normal for her generation: one in three children between the ages of 11 and 16 have uploaded a video to YouTube. In a survey last year, 75 per cent of the children asked said they wanted to be YouTube stars. The research also revealed that many of the children would rather learn video-editing than history or maths.

Who can blame them? Vlogging can now be a well-paid career. Unlike the more traditional dream jobs — pop star, doctor, footballer, astronaut — it doesn’t take much effort. All it requires is a smartphone and gallons of youthful self-confidence.

There are plenty of people with that. The 27-year-old British vlogger Zoella and her boyfriend Alfie Deyes have both made millions from their respective channels. Ryan, the six-year-old American host of the YouTube channel RyanToysReview, made £8.5

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