Are YouTube creators entertainers? Are they artists? Celebrities? Five years ago, the answer would’ve been that they were mildly "Internet famous"—that weird kind of fame where a person is known to their Twitter followers and channel subscribers but no one else. Today? YouTube stars are celebs. They make millions of dollars, have agents, and get movie deals.
"We can walk down the street of Toronto now and people are like, 'Oh, you’re the AsapScience guys!' and want to take a picture. We’re not at Beyoncé’s level, we can still walk down the street comfortably. But I do know a lot of YouTubers for whom there’s a much bigger perception that people know who they are and that they're a personality on the Internet," says Mitchell Moffit, the co-creator of the YouTube channel AsapScience. "That’s the threshold we’ve crossed over."
So now that YouTube stars are, indeed, Big Deals, the Internet naturally has questions about them. So we decided to ask. During last weekend’s VidCon convention, we pulled together folks from a wide variety of YouTube channels—AsapScience, Rooster Teeth, the Slow Mo Guys, etc.—and had them do Google Autocomplete interviews to answer the web’s most pressing inquiries. Want to know if YouTubers think they’re revolutionizing entertainment? Watch the video above to find out.
