“About to reach 1,000 subs,” ObviouslyBenHughes writes on Twitter. “It’s a number, but I’m so happy!”

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?”

There’s a lot of rhetoric and mystery around YouTube partners. Snarkdetriomphe once described the situation as the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots.’ Though I really think the distinction is much more illusory than most people are prepared to accept. Google might have a commercial interest in presenting a video that has an ad beside it. It’s true that such videos will often show up in ‘related video’ lists and keyword searches. But ultimately the viewer is still king; they still choose what they want to watch and who they subscribe to.

Infact some people refuse to watch or subscribe to YouTube partners on purely ‘moral’ grounds. While the estimates vary on precisely how much, there is consensus on the fact that YouTube is losing a lot of money. I guess people who adopt this stance are looking for a ‘good time’ on YouTube, though perhaps not a long time.

But what interests me the most are the attitudes and beliefs people have about YouTube partnership, especially to the extent that I’ve been on either side of that imagined fence. When I spoke to Karpadiem on the JOJCAST he confessed, “It became very much a status symbol at the time. You know to have autoplay meant you had arrived, as annoying as it was for so many at the time.”

You’ll even see non-partners express an interest in becoming part of the program but they’ll often couch that desire with conditions like “I’m only doing it for the banners” and “but of course I won’t put ads on any of my videos.”

Perhaps even more telling is when ObviouslyBenHughes (again on Twitter) wrote, “You’ll always be JayOhJay the non-partner to me!”

I think Ben is awesome and I wish him every success in the world. But I have to ask the question… Is being a partner such an offensive thing that it is better to pretend your friends aren’t one? I guess for a lot of people the answer is a resounding ‘yes.’

Look, I like to think I’m resourceful enough to take advantage of all the opportunities afforded to me, and that my videos live or die on their own merits. (I’m sure mostly they die – but even this doesn’t phase as much as it did when I first started.) Either they’re for you or they’re not. The idea that the video I made as a non-partner is a completely different animal to the one I make as a partner confuses me. The inference (from some corners) that I went from being a happy-go-lucky community minded YouTuber one day to a money-grubbing sell out the next is equally perplexing. But perhaps you know something about me that I do not…

Now go watch the videos of ObviouslyBenHughes, Reubnick and Karpadiem on YouTube. They all have very different styles, but they all work hard to produce good things online and I truly believe they are worth your time.

Online video has many advantages over television. You can watch what you want, when you want, and, well, you’re never subjected to what appears below…

Hat tip: Fridley

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.