The top 10 most influential people on YouTube in 2012
It’s been said before but it’s never been more true: YouTube is indeed the new TV.
Just as cable dramas like Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and Boardwalk Empire have pushed the boundaries of primetime television, so too has YouTube experienced a major shift in the past year—spotlighting bold new programs, championing new personalities, and changing the very nature of storytelling.
Want comedy? YouTube’s got it. Dramas? Done. What about a show that stars Eliza Dushku and runs episodes lasting sometimes 15 minutes or more? YouTube has that too—tune into “The Leap Year”—and it’s actually pretty good.
The Google-owned company actually put in serious work this year to hone in on a newfound commitment to high-quality original programming, investing more than $100 million on 60 new channels, with subject matters ranging from geekdom culture on Chris Hardwick’s Nerdist channel to the hilarious shenanigans on Rob Barnett’s My Damn Channel.
The investment irked longtime partners, many of whom believed the company was turning a cold shoulder on the homegrown stars, but the company remained committed: In November, it announced another $60 million investment in original content.
Another sign of site’s shifting template was the rise of independent women, mastering a domain whose top 100 channels have long been dominated by men.
The course of YouTube’s calendar year, in fact, owes an unwavering debt to the Reply Girls, that springtime assembly of breasty bloggers who manipulated the site’s algorithms for pageviews and big money. The loosely affiliated group was so influential that Google actually changed the way in which YouTube’s view counts and suggested videos work. But Alejandrá Gaitan and company weren’t the only ladies to leave their mark on the massive video sharing site.
As our list of 2012’s most influential YouTubers helps illustrate, it was a banner year for women on the site. From Jenna Marbles and Amy Poehler to Felicia Day and Ashley Clements, women changed the conversation and helped push YouTube further into the mainstream eye than ever before.
1) Reply Girls
In February, a rogue assembly of buxom video bloggers took to YouTube with a series of reply videos that would change the way the video-sharing site calculates and provides data forever. Known known as The Reply Girls, the group—which was unofficially fronted by Argentinian blogger Alejandrá Gaitan, who held the handle of The ReplyGirl—would manipulate site tags and post videos in which they talked somewhat aimlessly at their cameras while wearing revealing clothing. They became public enemy No. 1 among the YouTube brass, leading to a change in algorithms that determined view counts and widespread attempts to shut down the movement in general. The site’s done massive work to label Reply Girls as spam and effectively end their short reign atop the site, but YouTube moderators must always be on the lookout. As many have predicted, the Reply Girls are really here to stay.
2) Psy
Unknown in America as recently as July 14, K-pop rapper Psy is now quite literally the creator of the most watched YouTube video of all time. With “Gangnam Style,” the South Korean sensation became a household name throughout the world, generating more than 800 million views in half a year and bringing K-pop into the common American music conversation. Pretty soon, “Gangnam Style” should be the first video to ever top 1 billion views.
3) The Vlogbrothers
Though brothers Hank and John Green didn’t do much to push their popular Vlogbrothers channel anywhere that it hadn’t already been before, the longstanding and much beloved YouTubers were instrumental in helping bring YouTube further into the mainstream. That’s something the two handled through VidCon, YouTube’s unofficial but ever-growing annual conference in Los Angeles, which got so grandiose this summer that it had to move to the Anaheim Convention Center.
