Selling Out Doesn’t Make Sense on YouTube

Everyone knows a band that deviated from it’s roots to finally work their way to the top of the pops. Essentially, they wanted to reach a larger audience and make more money, much like companies are now trying to do with vloggers. A recent vlog (video blog) post from Alex Day informed the viewer of how Sanyo wanted him to put a 15 second commercial in the middle of a video in exchange for a $1700 camera. He declined. It wasn’t as if he was against using his vlog for profit. The method bothered him. Sanyo was trying to impose the industry standard for television onto YouTube. This spurred a vlog conversation around the subject. In the end, the general opinion was that vloggers can take money for ads, but it has to be an organic production that uses the personality that built the following instead of an ad that the company wants to show the followers.

The full story at Convergence Culture Consortium:
http://www.convergenceculture.org/weblog/2009/07/selling_out_on_youtube_vlogger.php