This is one of the most pervasive paradoxes surrounding online video. When it comes to numbers – be they subscribers or views – they somehow mean everything and nothing, simultaneously. We don’t ‘care’ about them, we aren’t motivated by them, though, oddly enough, we are happy when they go up.
Reubnick is a familiar voice in the Will Video For Food backrow. It is easy to feel discouraged when you feel like you’re producing great stuff online and the response is less than ethusiastic. (Though we might be reminded of Nalts’ comments about the the curse of subscriber self-worth. It’s a bottomless pit, folks!) Clearly disappointed in the views he was receiving for his most recent video, I thought I would try to put it into some perspective. I noted that his video got more views over night than mine had over several days (and I had more subscribers than him).
“Wait a minute!” he objects. “I thought you were a partner and all that! How is that all you got?”
To say Leslie Hall is larger-than-life would be a polite exercise in understatement. Sporting gold spandex suits, staring down the barrel of video cameras saying hilarious things in a profoundly dead pan manner that makes her even funnier, hers is a life that has been dedicated to the celebration and preservation of Gem Sweaters. The website she set up to model these Gem Sweaters became so popular that the bandwidth charges started to become obscenely expensive. A lesser soul might’ve taken the site down, but not Leslie. She decided to record and sell an album – in Garage Band, of all things – and the rest, as they say, is history.
“Hi, I’m Leslie Hall,” she explains in an appearance for Amoeba’s What’s In My Bag segment, “you might know me from Internet videos that get over 200 views.” The joke may be lost on those not yet indocrinated into the realms of the Gem Sweater. When the video for her song This Is How We Go Out (filmed in her hometown of Ames, Iowa) received a global feature on YouTube, that video alone earned more than a one million views.
So what should Internet video creators take from Leslie’s experience? Well as she explains in the Threadbanger video (embedded above):
Definitely my message is simple: you should be yourself. Because peasant people, streetwalkers can become Internet celebrities if you remain true to yourself, put it on YouTube, keep it clean… there’s plenty star power even if you are freakishly ghoulish and unlovable.
