Journal of Asian American Studies

From Going Viral to Going Professional: The Emergence of Partnership

YouTube’s video sharing culture is not often associated with professionalism. In fact, quite the opposite. Whereas professional video production connotes corporatization and creative constraints, YouTube connotes a space of possibility free from restrictive impediments. This dichotomy was particularly resonant during the rise of Web 2.0 in the early to mid-2000s when immersive social networking websites were in their infancy. Despite the dramatic reconstitution of labor in the digital economy since early Web [End Page 393] 2.0, YouTube manages to maintain an ethos of amateurism since the site mainly consists of nonprofessional everyday people.

Christine Bacareza Balance puts pressure on the “unstable division between amateur and professional” video production on YouTube by attending to the circulation of viral media content.¹⁰ Asian American content creators, Balance explains, have cultivated a broader media presence through viral videos that engender “unexpected or accidental” affective affiliations with viewers while undermining the “discursive containment” of the model minority myth.¹¹ Viral videos circulate through their capacity to “exude an air of amateur production—versus the slick, professional, and therefore controlled aesthetics of mainstream Hollywood or television sources”—that appeals to a sense of “authenticity and earnestness.”¹² Since Asian Americans make up such a key demographic of YouTube’s popular content creators, Balance sees the viral as a heuristic to explain why Asian American vlogs, web series, and musical covers have been well-received by Asian American and non-Asian American viewers. From “an audience-centered analysis” rooted in performance studies, she interprets the circulation of viral videos as being dependent on a mutual process of identification between performer and audience.¹³ A viral video utilizes emotive signifiers, or what Balance calls “emotional hooks,” that allow it to “infiltrate,” “infect,” and “replicate” like a virus across YouTube’s mediascape.¹⁴ Through their circulation, viral videos have the potential to challenge the stereotype that Asian Americans are inscrutable, emotionless, and robotic because viral videos show them to be “performing the affective labor of transforming alienation into humor, hate into love.”¹⁵ However, while Balance implicitly attempts to repurpose the virality of Asian Americanness by describing it as a valuable cultural form imbued with affective possibilities rather than as a toxic threat (as it has historically been conceived) to white American industry professions, virality itself and the affective communities that it inspires unexpectedly or accidentally among users do not really exist apart from professional corporate industry imperatives.

From a performative standpoint, viral videos might seem to make it possible to “imagine other types of value” that skirt the corporate logics of mainstream media as “unexpected or accidental” forms of digital ephemera that travel along the affective registers of YouTube’s performative landscape, but from an institutional standpoint viral videos in fact pinpoint the very site through which professional industry labor not only broaches but also co-opts YouTube’s culture of interactive participation.¹⁶ Viral videos are highly constructed and susceptible to exploitation by professional advertising and media corporations. Currently, the YouTube “Trending Tab,” an algorithm-based feature introduced onto the platform in 2015 to promote [End Page 394] popular viral videos, has been widely criticized by news outlets and YouTubers alike for being overrun by corporate entities looking to market their goods and services.¹⁷ The creation and circulation of viral content can thus be boiled down to strategizing around algorithms. But even before the existence of the trending functionality, corporate entities influenced viral content. When interactive social platforms emerged during Web 2.0, YouTube appealed to professional industries looking to disseminate viral marketing campaigns, a marketing strategy in which professional advertising agencies adapt their content to the generic conventions of existing media platforms to advertise their brands, goods, and services.

Bree Avery’s YouTube channel, LonelyGirl15, epitomized viral marketing in the mid-2000s. Sitting alone in her room talking to a stationary camera, much like Christine Gambito would do later, Avery presented an endearingly quirky personality that conveyed a sense of vulnerability and authenticity that spoke to many young viewers searching for a relatable online web presence during Web 2.0. Her videos went viral. LonelyGirl15 was the most subscribed channel on YouTube in 2006 and 2007, and brought YouTube into the public spotlight when the United Nations asked Avery to participate in their global anti-poverty video campaign. However, Avery turned out not to be an everyday user but a professional actress named Jessica Lee Rose who was part of a team of writers, actors, producers, and advertising specialists associated with Creative Artists Agency LLC, a massive American talent agency. LonelyGirl15’s success launched Rose’s acting career, and Creative Artists Agency would go on to attract clients like Will Ferrell, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Chris Pratt. In short, viral videos have been co-opted by industry professionalism since YouTube’s earliest days.

Recognizing the profitability of its platform, YouTube instituted a user-based partnership model that would reconstitute the entire landscape of cultural production on the site. In October 2006, Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion. Google worked with its new subsidiary to increase user participation rates to maximize profits. This project resulted in the formation of YouTube’s Partner Program, which launched in 2007. The Partner Program generated participation by incentivizing content creation and user interaction. YouTube handpicked thirty to forty of its most popular content creators to become paid partners. The partnership selection process was highly centralized. On May 3, 2007, YouTube explained the process in a post on its Official Blog, the company’s hub for platform updates and direct line of communication to its users.¹⁸ The post explains that YouTube conferred partnership to content creators deemed most likely to produce immediate and sustainable profits for Google, YouTube, and their advertisers. Partnership status granted users the ability to share in YouTube’s [End Page 395] advertising revenue by monetizing their videos. Money accrued through video monetization provided user-partners with financial support to produce more immersive content. Incidentally, the Partner Program was only available to users in the United States and Canada.¹⁹ It was not until 2012 that eighteen more countries would be added to the program, with Japan being the only country representing Asia. The geographical boundedness of this institutional formation draws attention to the highly differentiated developmental histories of cultural production on the platform as well as to the disparate emergence of social media influencer cultures around the globe. Nevertheless, as user-partners in the United States and Canada quickly discovered, partnership was lucrative. Michael Buckley, a prominent gay YouTuber who hosted the popular “What the Buck!?” show, quit his full-time job in September 2007 shortly after receiving partnership. Like most user-partners at the time, he reportedly netted around $100,000 per year.²⁰ The Partner Program turned amateur everyday users into an emergent kind of media professional who expanded viewer growth and boosted revenue shares for YouTube.

The Partner Program placed content creators into a precarious professional position on YouTube. Traditionally, the term “partner” describes executive-level professionals in, for instance, business or law firms who possess shareholding rights. In these workspaces, “partner” designates a formal workplace identity. A partner’s professionalism is defined by her responsibilities to organizational management, corporate well-being, and financial profit making. For YouTube content creators, though, “partner” means something different. Partnered content creators are not executive-level professionals, do not hold rights to the company, and do not even work in YouTube’s brick-and-mortar offices. Instead, they are an independent ad hoc network of contingent laborers who possess merely influence within the YouTube community. In other words, unlike traditional executive-level business partners, YouTube’s user-partners are lower-level contract laborers who are identifiable through their dual role as customers and suppliers of YouTube. As customer-suppliers, user-partners are expected to consume YouTube content while also promoting certain forms of consumption that cultivate watch time and active participation on the platform. They adhere to a kind of professionalism that weighs YouTube’s corporate policies alongside their own conceptions of original content that fit within the platform’s professional system. For user-partners, then, professional amateurism manifests as both an occupational relationship and an aesthetic relationship to YouTube that holds in tension their mutually informed association with corporatized professionalism and individualized amateurism. The Partner Program inculcates a business model that allows [End Page 396] YouTube to appear user-friendly while maximizing profits without giving away rights to the company. Since other popular social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter either do not have identical user-based partnership models or have only recently integrated some iteration of partnership, YouTube offers a unique media space to understand how corporate growth models not only shape content creation and cultural production but also redefine our sense of professionalism and amateurism through the ways that YouTube interpellates amateur content creators into professional codes of conduct. The Partner Program turned YouTube users into professional amateurs whose precarious position between amateurism and mainstream industry professionalism enabled a professional amateurism that reveals the complex institutional mechanisms that uphold established mainstream industries amid the rise of content creators and content creation on new media platforms in the digital economy.

With this capacity to cultivate professional amateurism in place, YouTube could effectively endorse specific types of content (and therefore specific forms of cultural production) that would appeal to viewers and creators alike. Not only did the Partner Program’s partnership model determine the kinds of content that would attract viewers and boost participation rates, but it also affected other content creators who looked to the new user-partners for examples of the kinds of video performances that could lead to their own partnership deals. So, when Christine Gambito entreats her viewers to embrace what it means to be Asian American by exploring their Asian heritages, she directly impacts how other content creators would come to form their own content.

Although the Partner Program would seem to legitimize minority content creators hoping to break into the entertainment industry, the rise of Kevin Wu (KevJumba) on YouTube shows how online success can incur long-term repercussions for Asian Americans looking to professionalize in mainstream media. The Taiwanese American YouTube personality, who aspired to be a mainstream entertainer, became an internet sensation and a relatable public figure for Asian Americans in 2007 and 2008. Similar to Gambito and Avery, Wu performed in his bedroom and spoke to a stationary camera on his desk while mixing serious discussions on stereotypes with carefully timed jokes and caricatured impersonations of his family and friends. His videos took up the difficulties of being a male Asian American high school student, and addressed his experiences being raised by immigrant parents whose cultural beliefs clashed with his American upbringing. His typical performances blended the vlog genre with casual sketch comedy, as exemplified by a popular 2007 video titled “I need help with the Females,” which comically addresses questions from [End Page 397] his male high school viewers about how to attract young women their age. In the video, Wu tells his viewers that he is so suave that “girls are killing themselves to meet” him.²¹ He jokes that he has to use “quick Bruce Lee attacks to keep them away” while acting out an awkward faux kung fu move.²² Immediately afterward, though, he confesses that he actually “sucks with the ladies,” and admits that women are just as confusing to him as they are to anyone else his age.²³ Wu then recommends that his viewers study women by observing their habits objectively from a distance, invoking the stereotype that Asian American men process information analytically without emotion, like scientists. During this sequence, Wu performs as a woman putting on makeup while voice-over commentary reminiscent of a National Geographic documentary is overlaid to evoke a scientist observing “girls in their natural habitat.”²⁴ For Wu’s 2.8 million channel subscribers, this video exemplifies his willingness to subvert his own masculinity by deploying Asian American stereotypes and self-deprecating humor. Although Wu seems to confirm stereotypes of the ineffectual Asian American male and perpetuates a representation of a woman who is defined in relation to the male gaze, his blending of the vlog and sketch comedy genres allows him a discursive space to highlight the constructedness of racism and sexism. His channel was so popular in 2008 that it was ranked third on YouTube. The popularity of Wu’s videos led to his own partnership deal with YouTube and opened up opportunities in mainstream markets beyond YouTube.

Wu’s appearance on broadcast television demonstrates how the Partner Program interpellates him into the role of a professional amateur whose online success ironically makes him appear ill-suited, rather than well-suited, for mainstream entertainment media. In 2010, Kevin Wu and his father, Michael Wu, were selected to appear as a team on CBS’s The Amazing Race. Vincent Pham and Kent Ono commend the way that YouTube affords Asian Americans a platform to earn “opportunities offline, gaining attention from both brand marketers and networks [in] traditional media outlets.”²⁵ Traditional media industries, they assert, make “it possible to migrate to and from non-mainstream (i.e., Internet) to mainstream contexts.”²⁶ Pham and Ono rightly express some ambivalence, too, because once Asian Americans access mainstream media they lose control over their representation and become subject to the long-standing stereotyped representations that pervade mainstream media. Indeed, throughout The Amazing Race, CBS constructed Wu as a cold, emotionless model minority who strove for perfection in each challenge. Meanwhile, his father was represented as a bumbling Asian immigrant unfit for the physical demands of the race, repeatedly failing to adapt to the race’s different challenges. For Pham and Ono, Wu is able to address CBS’s misrepresentations of him [End Page 398] by uploading his own vlog commentaries onto his KevJumba channel following each episode. YouTube, they conclude, “helps flatten power relations” by providing Wu a platform to speak directly on sensitive topics such as race and the media.²⁷ On the whole, Pham and Ono diagnose the ways that mainstream media subjects Asian American content creators to racist stereotypes, even as it affords them access to the mainstream. YouTube thus offers a space for minorities to recuperate a sense of agency over their self-representation. However, the notion that Wu possesses a distinct latitude on YouTube to redress racial stereotypes risks overlooking the irony inherent to such a viewpoint: since stereotyping in professional mainstream media compels Asian American content creators to migrate back to online media spaces popularly coded as spaces for amateurs, Asian Americanness becomes more associated with amateurism than with mainstream industry professionalism. This dynamic depends on a content creator’s identity as a minority because white nonminority content creators do not need to use YouTube as a space to correct stereotypes. Minority content creators, in other words, experience YouTube in decidedly different ways than their white nonminority counterparts. Mainstream media corporations therefore not only legislate the forms of representation that appear on network television and dictate which content creators are most likely to migrate across media spheres, but also cultivate the perception that some content creators are more suited to remain professional amateurs rather than to become “real” industry professionals.

As YouTube grew, the Partner Program increasingly played a role in determining which content creators could access opportunities in mainstream entertainment and which would remain professional amateurs. Partnership existed prior to 2007, but it was exclusive to corporate businesses that invested in YouTube. Like any ordinary individual content creator, corporate businesses have YouTube channels, but they generally upload content geared toward marketing their own brand. This content often appears as some form of advertisement, whether it be a commercial for a new product or a trailer for a television series. The content functions as an extension of the company’s profit-driven professionalism. While corporate partnerships distinguished corporations from individual everyday users, these kinds of business partnerships were the earliest partnership models on YouTube. With their financial backing in place, these business entities could determine the guidelines for subsequent partnership models. In this way, even though user-based partnership models gave some leverage to individual creators, corporate advertising and entertainment partners still had sway over the types of content that would be appropriate for monetization. [End Page 399]

These were not small corporations either. Less than a year after its founding in 2005, YouTube was the seventeenth most trafficked website in the world, with around seventy million videos viewed per day.²⁸ In June 2006, NBC contracted a partnership deal with YouTube to promote its fall 2006 television lineup, which included shows like The Office, 30 Rock, and Saturday Night Live.²⁹ In turn, NBC promoted YouTube on its network broadcasts. Chief marketing officer of NBC John Miller acknowledged that the “YouTube and NBC partnership symbolizes what can happen when traditional media companies and new media companies find common ground.”³⁰ Partnership allowed mainstream entities to capitalize on expanding market shares. By 2008, other corporate partners included CBS, ABC, MGM, CNN, Universal Music, and the NHL. Nearly from its founding, YouTube operated symbiotically with major broadcast media.

What this means is not only that corporate gatekeeping has always played a decisive role in determining who “makes it” into mainstream markets, but also that corporate gatekeeping implicitly designates certain spaces like YouTube to be the very arenas where content creators have the latitude to “do race.” YouTube’s corporate partnership model operates in tandem with user-partnerships not simply to generate new possibilities for Asian American participation in mainstream media. Instead, it operates as an institutional technology that regulates Asian American performativity and culturally codes them as a professional amateur labor force. The Partner Program appears to work in favor of minority content creators by setting the foundations for them to access mainstream markets; yet, at the same time, it mediates how discourses on race circulate in popular culture. Wu’s experience on The Amazing Race unveils how YouTube comes to be perceived as a space where a minority feels free to correct CBS’s portrayal of him because YouTube’s partnership models set the conditions for these kinds of cultural production to emerge. CBS and YouTube brokered a partnership deal in 2007, three years prior to the 2010 filming of The Amazing Race, so it is not all that surprising that Wu and his father were selected to appear on the series. Since Wu’s season, CBS has chosen many more YouTube content creators to be contestants on the show, including Erin Robinson and Joslyn Davis (Clevver), Tyler Oakley, Burnie Burns (Rooster Teeth), Ashley Jenkins (The Know), Matt Steffanina, and Blair Fowler (juicystar07).³¹ Surely, CBS’s decision to include Wu on national broadcast television legitimates his hard work and popularity online, but it would be shortsighted to credit his entrance into the mainstream to Asian America’s collective impact on the YouTube community. If we ignore how YouTube’s institutional structures align with the mainstream media industry to cultivate minority media personalities, we risk taking the cultural production of [End Page 400] minority content creators at face value rather than contesting the systems of power that inform their cultural production.

By associating certain media spaces with minorities, YouTube’s partnership structures invariably affect how minority content creators relate to audiences through their video performances. For Asian Americans to relate to a broad viewership, they must perform in ways that speak to Asian Americans and non-Asian Americans alike. Ju Yon Kim submits that YouTube vlogs afford Asian Americans a space to perform a mundane, down-to-earth ordinariness—what she calls “chumminess”—that “deflate[s] perceptions of racial difference” and puts pressure on normative conceptions of the ordinary.³² By coming across as ordinary, Asian Americans downplay their otherness while conveying an authentic sense of relatability. So, when Christine Gambito reads a heartfelt note from her mother or when Kevin Wu talks about the difficulties of attracting a romantic partner, they both articulate experiences that are relatable to nearly anyone. Yet, the need to relate to broad audiences puts the Asian American content creator in a difficult position: either she acts in a manner that acknowledges audience expectations of Asian Americans (and possibly perpetuates essentialized stereotypes) or she acts in a manner that risks insisting on postracial color blindness. Either way, the minority content creator experiences added pressure to manage her self-representation. The “chumminess” that Kim articulates always participates in a just-like-me economy that requires minority content creators to downplay their professionalism in favor of amateurism, which further disassociates them from more traditional forms of industry professionalism. Viewers identify with content creators who appear ordinary. By compelling content creators to temper their professionalism in exchange for their ordinariness, the protocols governing the Partner Program trickle down to impact minority content creators’ performances, demonstrating how professional amateurism describes both an occupational relationship and an aesthetic relationship to YouTube.

The chumminess that other Asian American content creators communicate on YouTube has afforded them opportunities to access established mainstream markets, but often YouTube content creation remains a primary source of income. It is worth enumerating some of these successes to get a sense of their accomplishments: in 2010, Michelle Phan became Lancôme’s first Vietnamese American spokesperson and official makeup artist, before later launching a cosmetics line with L’Oréal and starting her own cosmetics company, Ipsy, which Forbes projected in 2015 to be worth $500 million;³³ in 2013, Thai American content creator Tim Chantarangsu (Timothy DeLaGhetto) joined the cast of MTV’s improv comedy show Wild ’N Out, hosted by celebrity Nick Cannon; in 2015, Chinese American brothers [End Page 401] Andrew Fung and David Fung (Fung Bros.) signed a cable television contract with the A&E Network to host their own travel and food show, Broke Bites: What the Fung?!; Ryan Higa (NigaHiga) founded Higa TV Productions LCC and starred in various films; Wesley Chan, Ted Fu, and Philip Wang (Wong Fu Productions) started their own production company; Bryan Le (RiceGum) starred in a 2018 Super Bowl commercial alongside musician Iggy Azalea to promote electronics brand Monster Cable Products; and, since 2016, Liza Koshy has starred in Tyler Perry’s horror comedy movie Boo! A Madea Halloween and Hulu’s drama series Freakish, and co-hosted MTV’s Total Request Live and Nickelodeon’s Double Dare. These diverse success stories evidence Asian Americans’ abilities to connect to broad audience bases. However, many still depend on YouTube to earn a living. While it might be tempting to celebrate their accomplishments beyond YouTube, it is precisely this impulse to celebrate such feats that obscures the institutional mechanisms that make chumminess, relatability, and authenticity valuable commodities in the just-like-me economy. Their professional amateurism uncovers their interpellation into YouTube’s corporate processes.

Accessing mainstream markets can therefore be a limiting beacon for success that risks naturalizing a restricted definition of success for Asian Americans on YouTube while affirming the (false) borders that would appear to separate YouTube from established mainstream media spaces. Based on this definition of success, Asian American YouTubers would ironically be considered most successful when they are no longer considered YouTubers. That is, they would be considered a success once they become film, television, or business personalities. While Asian Americans might have been drawn to YouTube due to the industry gatekeeping that had prevented them from entering Hollywood and network television, the notion that YouTube is separate from mainstream culture is simply untrue. Mainstream American audiences have embraced on-demand subscription-based streaming content providers, like YouTube, Netflix, and Hulu. Global metrics firm Nielsen Holdings PLC recently found that cable television viewer ratings have decreased by 40 percent, while overall television viewing has dropped by 10 percent.³⁴ General audiences want online content. Evidence of this shift can be seen in the reception of Netflix’s Master of None and Orange Is the New Black, which both won Emmys. Additionally, during MTV’s Teen Choice Awards in 2015, YouTube content creators received nominations in thirty-five award categories. Ryan Higa and Michelle Phan were among the nominees. According to a 2014 survey commissioned by Variety magazine, American teenagers see YouTube personalities as being more influential than Hollywood celebrities.³⁵ Corporations [End Page 402] external to YouTube recognize this and invest in online media to capitalize on market shares and adapt to evolving audience consumption patterns: “The ability to stake a claim in the expanding industry pie,” the Nielsen report concludes, “is central to companies’ growth.”³⁶ Rather than diminishing, the power of mainstream media corporations becomes ever more embedded in newer media platforms. Observing this cultural shift toward new media motivates new meanings of success for Asian Americans on YouTube.

YouTube’s location at the crossroad of media technologies is what makes determining Asian American success in new media such a tricky endeavor. Lori Kido Lopez interprets YouTube to be a space that “foster[s] participation and helps shape our understanding of the term ‘Asian America,’” but her claims assume that YouTube functions as a venue that “lack[s] of monetary reward” and allows “participants to discuss and develop their identities away from the public eye” of the mainstream media industries that monopolize narratives about Asian Americanness.³⁷ These assumptions, however, preserve the (mis)perception that YouTube operates as a free space for self-representation in line with the company’s “Broadcast Yourself” slogan. Taking “Broadcast Yourself” at face value does little to question the structures on which such broadcasting rests. YouTube portrays itself as a unique digital space that facilitates self-making and community because those kinds of engagement lend to higher profit yields. The very concept of self-making relies on neoliberal corporate logics that tether representation to YouTube’s free-market partnership models. Though Asian Americans appear to have claimed agency to “voice their opinions, organize themselves and their allies, initiate conversations, create their own media, and increase the impact of their messages,”³⁸ as Lopez asserts, Asian Americans do not escape the corporatized professionalism that undergirds YouTube. Actually, they perpetuate it just like everyone else on the site.

By interpreting YouTube as a digital workspace composed of professional amateurs, we can see how YouTube’s institutional structures regulate content creators’ access to mainstream opportunities. Lopez designates YouTube “a counterpublic that makes no effort to appeal to a mainstream audience” because she finds that YouTube both has “low barriers to participation” that do not require “expensive film equipment, editing software, and training” and remains in “absence of any sort of media industry infrastructure that might distance the creators from their fans (such as handlers, agents, PR professionals, or even technical assistants and crew).”³⁹ But digital media infrastructures do exist, and they even provide content creators with expensive resources to produce engaging [End Page 403] content. MCNs, for example, have existed in the YouTube community for many years.⁴⁰ MCNs are management firms that work with content creators to provide them with production support, talent development training, and networking opportunities in return for a percentage of the creators’ profit shares from their monetized video content. In fact, management firm Digital Content Partners contracted deals to represent both Kevin Wu and Christine Gambito back in 2008.⁴¹ MCNs are so pervasive that media scholars like David Craig and Stuart Cunningham have characterized them as central players in YouTube’s broader “proto-industry” to emphasize how back-end entertainment industries get built around new media platforms.⁴² Digital metrics site Social Blade curates a running list of the top 250 MCNs to aid content creators looking to find out which networks are most lucrative to join. If minority content creators feel comfortable on YouTube where they can “do race,” then it is important to notice that institutional developments in and around YouTube influence where content creators go to produce certain forms of cultural production. Taking into account the professional dimensions that undergird amateur content creation, professional amateurism allows us to revise critical treatments of Asian American cultural production on and off YouTube.

From Chumminess to Entertainment: The 2012 Partner Program Era

In April 2012, the Partner Program entered a second phase that differed significantly from the previous version by changing the protocols for partnership. YouTube no longer selected user-partners. Instead, any content creator could become a partner and monetize their videos as long as the content adhered to the new terms of service. This policy shift allowed You-Tube to seem less professional because it appeared to do away with the mechanisms that made content creators feel like they were being overseen by a centralized regulatory body. In other words, the 2012 Partner Program doubled down on the notion that YouTube is a site for amateur content creators. The new policy guidelines were published on April 12, 2012, on YouTube’s Creator Blog, an archive for platform-related news and updates geared toward content creators.⁴³ With YouTube decentralized, corporate advertisers gained more power over partnership. According to the 2012 Partner Program’s policies, videos must not promote “harmful or dangerous activities,” not have “excessive profanity or graphic violence,” and not present “strongly sexually suggestive material.”⁴⁴ Partners can monetize only content that is safe for all audiences because advertisers want to capitalize on content creators’ videos without jeopardizing their public images by having their advertisements run alongside content perceived to [End Page 404] be inappropriate. Content creators must also join their YouTube accounts to Google AdSense—an advertisement-based revenue sharing system through Google—to turn on the monetization functionality. Now each video must garner high viewer rates to be profitable. High-quality video production therefore is key. Most partners earn between $0.30 to $2.50 CPM (cost per one thousand views) on a video. However, high-profile YouTube personalities, such as Felix Kjellberg (PewDiePie), Jake Paul, and Logan Paul (Logan Paul Vlogs) make upwards of $10 CPM or more, allowing them to net millions of dollars in annual earnings—much more than the earnings that content creators accrued during the 2007 partnership era.⁴⁵ Moreover, while the 2007 Partner Program focused on the United States and Canada, the 2012 Partner Program expanded to twenty countries.⁴⁶ The only Asian county represented in this new grouping was Japan. It would not be until later that YouTube would extend the program to 102 countries. This slow and staggered expansion suggests that different forms of cultural production and influencer cultures on YouTube might have grown at different rates and at different times across the globe.

Since the 2012 Partner Program let every video be monetized, the notion of being a YouTube “partner” changed. Moving away from the 2007 Partner Program, which placed an emphasis on a content creator’s channel, the 2012 Partner Program focused on individual videos. Under the 2012 Partner Program, partnership merely denotes that a content creator’s individual video has gained enough views to be profitable for advertising. As controversial YouTuber Felix Kjellberg—currently the most subscribed individual content creator in the world—succinctly put it, “You’re rewarded for constantly uploading on YouTube as often and frequently as possible.”⁴⁷ By June 2013, the top thousand YouTube channels were netting around $23,000 per month on average in advertising revenue purely from their video content.⁴⁸ According to Social Blade estimates, Asian American content creator Bryan Le (RiceGum) earned around $3 million in 2018 from his videos.

But this shift to valuing individual video content did not result in a return to the one-hit wonder viral video era of Web 2.0; rather, the 2012 Partner Program introduced a new YouTube culture where content creators, knowing that they could acquire an income only by producing high-quality content in each video, put their efforts into generating high-volume content that appeals for its entertainment value. The type of relatable vlogging popularized by the likes of LonelyGirl15 in 2006 and 2007, in which a content creator sits alone in her room talking to a stationary camera, no longer lends to growing profit margins. While relatability might establish an initial viewership, audiences want to be entertained. [End Page 405] The 2012 Partner Program inaugurated an online culture revolving around entertainment. Content creators would go on extravagant vacations across the world, party at expensive clubs, and hang out with celebrities in order to wow viewers, a far cry from the culture of chumminess produced by the 2007 Partner Program.

Unsurprisingly, the 2012 Partner Program coincided with a new wave of Asian American cultural production, and new perceptions of Asian Americanness. With anyone able to become a partner, content creators have to stand out. For Asian Americans, this means producing video content that is dedicated not just to relating to viewers. Rather than making people feel just-like-me, Asian American content creators began to entertain. Thai American content creator Tim Chantarangsu (Timothy DeLaGhetto) possesses a vast archive of video content that exemplifies this cultural shift toward entertainment.

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Figure 2.

Chantarangsu, Tim. “I’m On TV, B*TCH! (Vlog #349).” YouTube.com. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzxxFYn95Uw&t= (access October 8, 2019).

[End Page 406]

Chantarangsu joined YouTube in 2006, but, unlike Gambito and Wu, who have both been less active on YouTube since their heydays in mid- to late 2000s, Chantarangsu keeps up with his vlog channel. His channel offers an institutional memory that gives insight into the evolution of Asian American content creation and reveals a clear progression. For example, “Dear DeLaGhetto #26 (Part 2)-Tall Sex and Racism” typifies his content from 2008 when he was attempting to establish his audience by connecting with viewers on a personal level. Sitting alone at his desk answering real questions about sex and racism from his fans, Chantarangsu displays a Wu-esque willingness to be sympathetic, carefree, and funny. His openness revises the stereotype that Asian American men are stoic ineffectual robots who hide their feelings. The title of the video indicates that he was making an effort to start a series that would showcase his personality to his viewers. By 2013, there is a marked change in direction with his content. In “I’m On TV, B*ITCH! (Vlog #349),” Chantarangsu gives his viewers exclusive behind-the-scenes access to the set of MTV’s Wild ’N Out with his co-stars, including actor and comedian Kevin Hart. This video title reflects his brash emphasis on the entertaining quality of his content, which is in contrast to the sense of relatability that gets conveyed in the previous video title. He also documents his extravagant travels and showcases glamorous settings. In his 2016 video “The Highest Pool In The World!!!! - Vlog #609,” he situates the viewer in an infinity pool at the Marina Bay Sands in Singapore that overlooks the downtown skyline. His latest videos are a series of spectacles, with him frequently touring places like London, Melbourne, Las Vegas, and Hawai’i. For many of his 3.6 million subscribers (including myself), Chantarangsu’s exploits are not at all relatable. The videos are entertaining, though. From these videos, Asian Americanness gets associated with a jet-set cosmopolitan lifestyle where wealth, travel, worldliness, and celebrity all take center stage.

While the 2012 Partner Program influenced the kind of content that Chantarangsu uploaded to his vlog channel, Chinese American content creators Andrew Fung and David Fung (Fung Bros.) illustrate how the 2012 Partner Program compelled creators to overhaul their entire channels to produce videos in different genres. Before the Fung brothers were known simply as the Fung Bros., as their channel reads now, their previous channel name was Fung Bros Comedy. They moved away from the sketch comedy genre to capitalize on a broader range of audience interests. By adopting a new channel name that was no longer singularly focused on a specific generic category, the Fung brothers gave themselves latitude to expand the types of content that they wanted to perform while also branding themselves as a duo invested in the freedom of self-representation. [End Page 407]

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Figure 3.

Fung, Andrew and David Fung. “TAIWANESE NIGHT MARKET CRAWL IN TAIPEI! - Shilin - Fung Bros Food.” Youtube.com. https://youtu.be/lJzikt4oqxo (accessed October 8, 2019).

Like Chantarangsu, the Fung brothers journey around the world to entertain viewers. Their video series “Fung Bros Food,” a series that led to their television series Broke Bites on the A&E Network, documents their trips to dining spots in San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, New York City, Los Angeles, Singapore, and Taipei, among other locations. It is not unique for the Fung brothers to have a travel series because there were series like this one during the earlier generation of YouTube partnership. But whereas content creators from the 2007 Partner Program showcased one series, the Fung brothers host many different series on their channel, including “Fung Bros Tech,” “Fung Bros Basketball,” “Fung Bros Travel,” and “Fung Bros Vlogs.” The point of providing such a wide range of recurring content is to provide a constant and diverse stream of entertainment for viewers. Again, while the 2007 Partner Program encouraged generic and performative consistency that allowed content creators to connect with viewers, the 2012 Partner Program compels content creators to diversify the cultural production that they upload to YouTube for the sake of entertainment. [End Page 408]

While the decentralization of YouTube as the purveyor of partnership in the 2012 Partner Program might make YouTube appear to be more democratic and open than the 2007 Partnership Program, systemic institutional inequality still permeates the video sharing platform. Partners from the 2007 Partner Program have the greatest capacity to adapt to YouTube’s changing structures because they have the cultural and financial capital to do so. Both Chantarangsu and the Fung brothers stay with their friends from YouTube while traveling, affording unique opportunities to collaborate with other prominent personalities to expand their viewership. In other words, they take advantage of their networks to further provide entertaining content for viewers. The Fung brothers hang out with Taiwanese American NBA basketball star Jeremy Lin, whose presence in their videos leads to spikes in views and subscribers. Among the videos on their “Fung Bros Food” series, the video featuring Lin dining with them at a restaurant in Charlotte, North Carolina, is one of the most popular videos in the series with around 1.7 million views. Benefits earned from the earlier iteration of the Partner Program result in long-term benefits that carry over into the next iteration. In fact, this benefit was institutionalized through the Partner Promotion system that was launched alongside the 2012 Partner Program. According to the April 12, 2012, post on YouTube’s official Creator Blog, YouTube installed the Partner Promotion system to give content creators who had been awarded partnership prior to April 2012 (i.e., the launch of the 2012 Partner Program) a special opportunity to attract more viewers than its newer partners: “Certain creators who were partners prior to April 10th may be eligible to receive free advertising on the Google Display Network—websites that cover more than 92 percent of the Internet.”⁴⁹ In short, YouTube explicitly privileged its older user-partners. Although these benefits are not unique to Asian American content creators, my point is to highlight how the partnership model from an earlier phase of the Partner Program creates an ever widening gap between the haves and the have-nots. The program hails content creators into a system that perpetuates inequalities within the YouTube community by pitting established content creators against new content creators. As a result, some content creators are perceived as being more amateur than others. Asian American content creators, then, are unavoidably in competition with each another as much as they are purportedly—as some critics might insist—in solidarity because the Asian American content creators who joined YouTube after April 2012 experience a tremendous uphill battle to partnership. YouTube is less an egalitarian media space that provides people a level playing field for participation and instead a highly stratified media sphere built on systemic inequality under the guise of democratic possibility and inclusivity. [End Page 409]

Nevertheless, YouTube’s culture of professional amateurism affords content creators opportunities to navigate the marketplace on their own terms, which can be successes in their own right. Since YouTube and mainstream markets are not separate, we should not value YouTube for creating a unique counterpublic for minorities apart from the mainstream; rather, we must find new and different ways to value minority content creators as influencers within YouTube’s digital economy. Such a reframing allows for more nuanced critical readings of YouTube by taking into account the shifting dynamics of power under which content creators perform during each iteration of the platform’s partnership structures. My approach emphasizes the ability of Asian American content creators to reshape market expectations of Asian Americanness. Asian American success on YouTube is found not in the turn away from the mainstream but instead in the turn toward the mainstream to revise it in the name of Asian America.

Kevin Wu’s appearance on The Amazing Race can therefore be reinterpreted with a critical eye toward the possibilities implicit in his interpellation into the 2007 Partner Program. On the show’s webpage, each contestant had a short biographical profile so audiences could get to know the contestants. The profile consists of short answers to innocuous questions. In response to a question about what personal achievement he most values, Wu answers, “I just recently hit one million subscribers on YouTube.”⁵⁰ Since CBS is a corporate partner with YouTube, CBS wants audiences to view Wu’s YouTube commentaries about the show and then return to the national broadcast to bolster the network’s viewership metrics. However, whereas critics have suggested that Wu’s success lies in his ability to appear on CBS, I contend that his true success lies in his ability to control mainstream audience consumption patterns by facilitating viewership across media platforms to his channel. Certainly, Wu’s videos are interpellated in CBS’s multimedia network because CBS accrues revenue when viewers watch The Amazing Race both on national television and on YouTube. But the fact that Wu impacts the flow and circulation of viewer consumption habits when he calls attention to his own YouTube channel is a feat on its own, considering that Asian Americans have been historically disempowered in mainstream entertainment markets. His professional amateurism reveals new modes of influence over the marketplace from within it.

Many Asian American content creators do not experience levels of popularity that let them access network television, but during the 2012 Partner Program lesser known Asian Americans on YouTube found opportunities to assert power over the marketplace through sponsored content deals. On YouTube, sponsored content defines video content that is paid for by an advertiser with the intentions of promoting a specific good or company. Sponsored video content typically comes from outside sources [End Page 410] independent of YouTube, meaning that the revenue from sponsored content supplements the revenue from the Partner Program. Sponsored content often emulates the quality and form of a content creator’s regular video content, allowing sponsored content to blend in seamlessly with a content creator’s normal cultural production. Sponsored content is an efficient marketing strategy for advertisers because it is a cheap alternative to expensive national media campaigns, and the content circulates quickly online. At first, sponsored content appears to exemplify corporate control over content creators. But, by dictating the terms on which they agree to produce sponsored content, individual content creators can exert some influence over the market. Asian American content creators may choose to capitalize on sponsored content opportunities that they find representative of both their personal interests and the interests of their online community. In this way, even though Asian Americans participate in YouTube’s economy of professional amateurs, they can take advantage of their subject position to claim rights over their own self-making. Through sponsored content deals, Asian Americans have the capability to challenge and revise the marketplace’s codified conceptions of Asian Americanness.

Vietnamese American YouTube personality Richie Le (Richie Le), whose videos cover streetwear fashion trends, addresses the power that sponsored content affords Asian American content creators in a Q&A video from 2017. In the video, Le responds to real comments from his viewers. One user criticizes Le for doing a house hunting video that appeared like “cringey adulting bullshit.”⁵¹

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Figure 4a.

Le, Richie. “WHOA! NEW HYPETALK MERCH?!” Youtube. com. https://youtu.be/bXIqIbxR7qI (accessed October 8, 2019).

[End Page 411]

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Figure 4b.

Le, Richie. “HOUSE HUNTING! DID I REALLY BUY A HOUSE?!” Youtube. com. https://youtu.be/2fgmMbKeETc (accessed October 8, 2019).

Le shows a clip of the video in question and admits that it was part of a sponsored content deal that he had brokered with the real estate company Century 21 to supplement his YouTube income. He explains that he appeared unnatural and awkward in that video because “a team of, like, 12 people behind the camera” were constantly monitoring his speech and dialogue, telling him things such as, “Hey, don’t say it like this; [instead,] say it like this.”⁵² Clearly, this sponsored content deal informs how Le’s audience receives him. Normally confident, gregarious, and suave, Le conveys an overly formal disposition that appears “cringey.” This sponsored content risks reinforcing the stereotype that Asian Americans are socially awkward and uncool—a devastating irony for a channel dedicated to showcasing Asian American fashion sensibilities. At first, this type of content portrays Le’s subjection to the marketplace: Le needed the money, and Century 21 used him to promote its brand. But sponsored content deals also provide Le with new audiences and the financial resources to improve his clothing review videos and shopping vlogs—the two primary types of content on his channel. As his content reaches a wider viewership and accrues higher viewing rates, Le can be more selective with his sponsored content deals. After working with Century 21, Le contracted fashion reviews with mnml, a luxury streetwear clothing brand headquartered in Los Angeles, and [End Page 412] with Vincero Collective, a high-end watch brand. Besides supplementing his income, these fashion-based sponsored content deals contribute to the kinds of cultural production that inform public perceptions of Asian Americanness at the same time that they legitimate his cultural influence in the fashion scene. They also gave him the capital to start his own fashion line, the Richie Le Collection. So, although he does not necessarily access mainstream media venues, Le asserts a sense of control over the marketplace’s orientation toward Asian Americans.

By reframing the successes of Asian American YouTube personalities during different iterations of the Partner Program through the evolving corporate logics made visible by professional amateurism, we can reinterpret the conditions that shape Asian Americans’ engagement with their audiences. My investigation into the dimensions of professional amateurism that motivate minority participation on YouTube unveils the institutional structures that make participation an avenue for profit. In doing so, I situate new terms for analyzing Asian Americans’ involvement on YouTube by being attentive to their influence over marketplace trends, which is made possible by understanding YouTube as both a social platform and an advertising platform.

Conclusion: The 2017 and 2018 Partner Program Eras for Asian America and Beyond

The Partner Program changed the entire landscape of cultural production on YouTube when it turned everyday amateur content creators into a professional amateur labor force beholden to mainstream industry codes of professionalism. Although it brokered minority content creators’ abilities to access professional mainstream industry markets, the Partner Program set the conditions for minority content creators to experience YouTube differently by coding them as professional amateurs invested in certain kind of cultural production. Professional amateurism elucidates the broader institutional matrices that undergird content creation and consumption on YouTube as the platform interpellates users into its evolving corporate advertising partnerships. Neither static nor monolithic, YouTube must always be approached contextually with attention to its institutional developments.

Today, the Partner Program is in the early phases of another series of dramatic changes. First, in April 2017, YouTube announced that the 2012 Partner Program would be overhauled. No longer can any content creator become a partner. Content creators had to apply to a YouTube review committee to gain partnership after accruing at least ten thousand views [End Page 413] on their YouTube channels. Content creators would not be able to turn on the monetization functionality until their channels were approved for partnership. Then, in January 2018, YouTube faced public scrutiny after Logan Paul, a high-profile content creator, uploaded content that showed him filming and mocking a Japanese suicide victim hanged in Japan’s Aokigahara Forest. This kind of content illustrates the ugly extremes to which content creators go for the sake of entertainment, leading many major advertisers to boycott YouTube. To assuage the concerns of these advertisers, YouTube implemented new eligibility requirements for user partnerships. Now, content creators must acquire at least a thousand channel subscriptions and four thousand hours of watch time on their video content before applying for partnership. Moreover, YouTube’s Partner Program grew to include 102 countries, many of which are in Asia. While these recent iterations of partnership are still in their infancy, we can already see how they might condition the rise of new online cultures on YouTube. For instance, the popularity of “roasting” culture, where content creators ridicule other content creators in their videos for entertainment, and “flexing” culture, where content creators flash their wealth in videos to attract viewers, both flourished during these 2017 and 2018 partnership changes as smaller creators looked to profit off of the platform. This was grossly epitomized by ten-year-old Asian Canadian content creator Claire Eileen Qi Hope (Lil Tay), the self-proclaimed “Youngest Flexer of the Century,” who embodied offensive stereotypes of black hip-hop culture in videos roasting Bryan Le (RiceGum) in an attempt to grow her channel. The Partner Program inspires new forms of cultural production as content creators strive to reach the eligibility requirements as quickly as possible so that they can monetize their content.

While my essay focuses on Asian American content creators, professional amateurism remains a critical concept for scholars across disciplines since many marginalized communities have been affected by YouTube’s policies. The Partner Program has played a decisive role in legislating black, Latinx, Muslim American, and LGBTQ+ experiences, among others, on the platform. Additionally, the Partner Program is not the only user-based program on the site. Since 2012, the Trusted Flagger and Restricted Mode programs have in their own ways played a role in censuring Muslim American and LGBTQ+ content creators by demonetizing any video content that involves sensitive discussions on race, religion, gender, and sexuality. While these two institutional formations possess their own complicated and fraught histories on the platform that deserve attention in future studies, they further indicate how YouTube’s institutional structures delimit the kinds of cultural production that appear online and impact cultural perceptions [End Page 414] of marginalized peoples. We must therefore contextualize online content creation by paying closer attention to its evolving relationship to shifting institutional developments and corporate logics. In doing so, we will be better poised to envision new discursive possibilities for thinking critically about the influence and cultural production of marginalized communities in the digital economy.