Some Notes about Women on YouTube

fishingboatproceeds:

1. There are many, many wonderful women on YouTube who have broad and growing audiences. Here is a long but still incomplete list. (I’d add Grace Helbig, Hannah Hart, Natalie Tran, and Mamrie Hart, but there are lots.)

2. When women start to build an audience on YouTube, they are far, far more likely than men to be subjected to threats, harassment  intimidation, and abuse. This has driven many women content creators whose work I love—especially LGBT women and/or women of color—away from YouTube. As a successful female YouTube partner said to me today, “Every time someone tweets a video of mine, I’m simultaneously grateful and really anxious, because I’m afraid of threats.” That’s a barrier to growing your audience, and it’s one created entirely by patriarchy.

3. Claims that the Top 500 Most Viewed YouTubers are >90% male simply because guys work harder at YouTube or make better videos are just blatantly ridiculous. Like, that’s just not a well reasoned conclusion.

After watching the newest Becoming Youtube episode about female youtubers are the imbalance in the gender of popular vloggers, I decided to go through the accounts I am subscribed to. These were my results:

Individual Channels:

Male: 58
Female: 120
Other/Unknown*: 7

Collabs:

Entirely Male: 9
Entirely Female: 14
Mixed: 30

I am obviously subscribed to way more females than males despite the box that I feel like Becoming Youtube continually wants to shove me into; since I’m a female, teen nerdfighter, I must be a fangirl who subscribes to boys I think are cute, right?

*This category other/unknown is for vloggers who are bigender/agender/genderfluid. Vloggers who are transsexual were placed in the gender they identify as. It also included channels who only post fanvids so I don’t know their gender/their gender is irrelevant.

Is that Charlie McDonnell dressed as an elf being carried by Michael Aranda dressed as Santa?

Yes. Yes it is.

This is available as part of a calender: MEN OF YOUTUBE which is available as a project for awesome perk which you can get here: http://www.indiegogo.com/p4a2012

Youtube nerds are awesome. I should know, I’m a youtube nerd.