Heavy viewers, few interactions: YouTubers’ relevance in the lives of Portuguese teenagers

ABSTRACT

YouTube is one of the most popular websites amongst the Portuguese youth and their homegrown stars, the YouTubers, are beloved entertainers. This paper presents a qualitative study based on four focus groups with 36 teenagers, aged 12 to 16 years old, and it has three main objectives: to understand their motivations for using it; how this platform (and its contents and authors) interplay with their identity and socialization; and to acknowledge their perspectives on YouTube and YouTubers. It concludes that the sample is made up of very regular viewers, with critical insights on the platform and its contents and creators, but who, despite this overall popularity amidst friends and the easiness of ways to share their interests, regard YouTube and YouTubers as funny entertainers for more individual practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Identity
• sociability
• socialization
• teenagers
• YouTube
• YouTubers

Acknowledgments

This paper draws on the European research project Transliteracy - Transmedia Literacy. Exploiting transmedia skills and informal learning strategies to improve formal education, funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 under grant agreement No 645238 (Transliteracy – 645238/H2020 – Research and Innovation actions).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ In its About Us statement, which has been changed, as also mentioned in this paper.

² That is, forms of participation, such as liking, that are primarily designed to quantify things rather than to welcome diverse and more creative expressions of the users’ agency (Schäfer, 2011).

³ According to YouTube Help (https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/72851?hl=en), to be eligible to monetize videos through the Partner Program, the channel must have more than 4,000 valid public watch hours (counted within public-listed videos) in the last 12 months, besides more than 1,000 subscribers.

⁴ Regarding the procedures for creating a sample consisting essentially of adolescents, it is important to state that both the youngsters and their parents/guardians had full knowledge of the different stages and purposes of the project. They all read and signed an informed consent regarding the research design – namely how the youngsters’ data would be protected and its confidentiality assured – and the different activities in which the sample could be involved. The overall ethical procedures were approved and validated by the lead team’s university (Clinical Research Ethics Committee, reference number 2015/6358/I) as well as by the European Commission.

⁵ The questionnaire and the overall fieldwork guidance is available at: https://repositori.upf.edu/handle/10230/33909 .

⁶ It is important to remember that the original fieldwork was not devoted to YouTubers, namely to calculate how many were followed by each student. Therefore, the mentions counted were the verbalizations that, eventually, generated discussions and reactions involving more youngsters.

⁷ This student had a channel devoted to video games with around 300 subscribers at the time. He was the one that presented himself to the researchers as a YouTuber. Despite not being eligible to be part of YouTube Partner Program (see note 3), this 14-year-old boy stated that he was having some benefits from sponsors – namely easier access to video games to be reviewed.

⁸ The source of one of the YouTubers whose preference was not reaffirmed was one of the students absent. Therefore, only one youngster did not reassert the watching – or, at least, the following – of a channel mentioned in the previous year. In fact, the student from the junior class from the urban school (apparently) did not even recognize the channel: when one of her colleagues suggested that she was of the followers of that channel, she stated “I don’t know who she is”.

⁹ At the time of the fieldwork of the overall research project, the Swede PewDiePie had more than 56 million subscribers. Wuant had more than 2 million and Tiagovsky half a million.

¹⁰ This can be explained by the greater English proficiency of these students, especially the older ones in the urban school. In a previous work within the same project (Pereira et al., 2019), YouTubers were regarded as relevant informal learning ways to develop their knowledge of foreign languages.

¹¹ All quotations were translated from Portuguese into English by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Horizon 2020 [No 645238].