Meet the YouTubers Trying to Make Sense of YouTube

Internet culture scholarship sprouts out the unlikeliest of places.

Sarah Z, Kat Blaque and Tiffany Ferguson pictures all courtesy of their Twitter accounts.

There’s been a recent explosion in empirical and cultural analysis done with the purpose of better understanding YouTube, but by virtue of it originating mostly from non-YouTubers — those being academics and journalists — it tends to gloss over their lived realities, painting them as sole arbiters of what gets put out instead of cogs in a cultural machine which thrives on the same social disparities we see in our day-to-day. Audiences, yearning for that key insight, have turned to a newly-emergent form of internet culture analysis on the platform, one which promotes audience awareness above any consideration for appeasing the ever-so-fickle YouTube algorithm.

Of those most notable, Tiffany Ferguson happens to be one of the most pertinent. What distinguishes her work from the litany of existing “YouTube analysis” on the platform is that she doesn’t seem to mind as much about cold-hard data to make deductions about a certain phenomena at play. For her latest addition to the fan-favorite “Internet Analysis” series, Ferguson described an all-too-common occurrence of YouTubers going out of favor with their audience due to a perceptible change in economic status-the theory goes, that as better upward social mobility is…