Entrepreneurial Participatory Cultures: A Case Study of BookTube’s Promotional Practices

Entrepreneurial Participatory Cultures

A Case Study of BookTube’s Promotional Practices

Abstract:

How does the creation of revenue and promotional practices within BookTube affect the socioeconomic relations of BookTubers? BookTube is a community of video bloggers (vloggers) on YouTube, who have devoted their channels to reviewing books. While it is often argued that fan practices are outside the realm of revenue of due to copyright infringement, this thesis tries to investigate what happens when user generated content is commercialised by its own creators within the community. Using a combination of digital methods and case study research this thesis tries to approach YouTube not only as a platform and a social network, but also as an audio-visual medium. Thus quantitative and qualitative methods from both digital media and film-and television studies are combined to investigate not only how BookTube is

successfully commercialising itself, but also how it has remained a participatory fan community during this process.

Key words: participatory culture, YouTube, entrepreneurial vlogging, promotional practices, platform studies, film- and television studies.

Table of contents: Introduction

1. Participatory Cultures, Self-Branding, and the Beginning of YouTube 1.1 Participatory Cultures: A Definition

1.2 YouTube’s Digital Architecture and Advertising System 1.3 The Start of The Entrepreneurial Vlogger

2. An Introduction of BookTube, and the Methodology 2.1 BookTube: An Introduction

2.2 Digital Methods and Case Study Research

3. Social Formations on the Web and the Features Channels Tab 3.1 Metaphors For the Social Web: Community and Network 3.2 The Social Formation of BookTube

3.3 Turning Up in Each Other’s Video: An Analysis of Shared Vlogging 4. How Vloggers Relate to Their Audiences Through the Comment Section and Live Vlogging

4.1 Degrees of Participation

4.2 Interaction Through Comments and Replies 4.3 An Analysis of Q&As and Live Shows

5. Promotional Vlogging and the Publishing Industry: A Case Study in Authenticity 5.1 Promotional Practices of BookTube

5.2 Authenticity, Credibility, and Promotional Practices 6. Rewriting Entrepreneurial Participatory Cultures

6.1 Reworking the Theories on Participatory Cultures Conclusion

Introduction

What is the relationship between user generated content and promotional activities within participatory cultures on YouTube? User generated content is, as the name implies, content that is generated by users of a digital platform instead of the creators of that platform or large corporations (Gillespie 352). YouTube, as a platform, holds within it many tensions between commercialisation and ideological ideas of grassroots user generated content (Gillespie 352). The term platform in itself has a computational, architectural, figurative, and political connotation (Gillespie 349, 350). The computational meaning of platform refers to its function as a digital

infrastructure that supports the use and design of applications (Gillespie 349). As an architecture a platform is an open, flat, and raised surface that is usually intended for a particular activity or operation (Gillespie 349). In the figurative sense platforms are used in the context of opportunity: a starting point from which further growth can be achieved (Gillespie 350). All previously described uses of the word platform indicate a kind of neutral openness, but in politics platform is used to describe the core

political issues of a candidate, as well as their stand on those issues (Gillespie 350). A platform can thus be seen as a space for hands-on creation, an open neutral surface from which activities can take place, a space for opportunity, and a space where political values are made known and positions must be taken (Gillespie 350). As a platform YouTube thus facilitates the growth of grassroots user generated content and gives large media companies an opportunity to commercialise this space (Gillespie 353). When asked to take down particularly hateful or sexual videos YouTube can argue for freedom of expression on the internet as a platform (Gillespie 356, 357). However, in the face of copyright infringement YouTube can use the word platform to describe itself as a mere facilitator, claiming that the user should be the one to be held liable (Gillespie 356, 357). Gillespie does not go further into detail on what the dynamic of YouTube’s platform might mean for individual users or groups.

In her video Youtube Culture = Booktube Culture: Goodbye For Now? the video blogger (vlogger) amandapearl2books explains why she is leaving the

BookTube community: “I’ve been making videos on YouTube since 2008 [...]. I’ve noticed such a shift in this entire website. [YouTube] has gone from an equal group […] to a few up here and everyone else down here and I’m seeing the same thing

happen in BookTube.” BookTube is an online community of vloggers on YouTube who have devoted their channels to reviewing books. The BookTubers are joined by other active users in their discussions surrounding books. Video topics range from book reviews to book hauls and speculations on plot or character development. BookTube has a highly engaged community which is akin to a participatory culture. A participatory culture can be defined as a culture that has relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, a strong support system for sharing creations where experienced participants pass along their knowledge to newer participants, and informal membership (Jenkins Confronting the Challenges of

Participatory Culture 11). Participatory cultures were often theorised as being outside

of the realm of revenue due to copyright infringement. Yet revenue is made within BookTube, and many BookTubers are known to market themselves. Studying

BookTube could thus give insights in the particular ways the dynamics of YouTube’s platform trickle down into individual relations between users and groups. It might be particularly interesting to study the ties between YouTube’s platform, participatory cultures, and free labour. Free labour is the moment when the consumption of culture translates into the excess of productive activities (Terranova 78). Free labour is both pleasurable and exploited (Terranova 78). With the rise of entrepreneurship amongst social media platforms, such as YouTube, it has become easier to earn money within participatory cultures itself. Earning revenue within a participatory culture has been virtually unprecedented up until now. The main question I would thus like to answer in this thesis is: how does the creation of revenue and promotional practices within BookTube affect the socioeconomic relations of BookTubers?

While the platform does manage social and economic relations between users, it does not do so in a deterministic way. The social and cultural connotations of YouTube videos are often ignored by platform studies in their analysis of YouTube, even though these videos make up a crucial part of the platform’s content. However, studies on YouTube from the perspective of film- or television studies often ignore YouTube’s platform. These disciplines can no longer ignore each other’s theories or methodology if they want to get at the core of the ever increasing audio-visual cultures on the internet. An interdisciplinary approach is needed to study the

socioeconomic and technological relations between promotional material, labour, and participatory cultures on YouTube. This thesis tries to develop such an approach

through the use of both digital methods and case study research. Digital methods study the way in which digital objects, such as tags, likes, or tweets, are handled by their platforms (Rogers 1, 8, 10). What is of particular interest to this thesis is how digital object indicate promotional or social ties between vloggers (Rogers 1). However, in order to check what type of relationships these objects represent case studies are done through a qualitative analysis of the videos posted by BookTubers (Yin 13). A case study studies a contemporary phenomenon in its real-life context, when the boundaries between the phenomenon and the context are not clear initially (Yin 13).

The first chapter of this thesis will give an overview of the existing theories on participatory cultures and free labour. An overview of the computational,

entrepreneurial, and economic specificities of YouTube’s platform will also be given. The second chapter deals with the question: can BookTube be classified as a

participatory culture? Furthermore, the methodology of this thesis will be explained in further detail. The third chapter will deal with the promotional and social formations of BookTube, particularly through a network analysis of the featured channels tab. Chapter three deals with the following sub question in particular: what is the social formation of BookTube? In the fourth chapter the following question is answered: how does an increase in revenue for and promotional practices by the vlogger impact the ways vloggers interact with their audiences? The YouTube comment section will be the focus of this chapter, as well as the ways in which vloggers connect with their audience. In chapter five the promotional relationships between vloggers and the publishing industry will be looked at in relation to BookTube. Here the following twofold question will be answered: what are the promotional ties between the publishing industry and entrepreneurial vloggers, and how do these promotional ties affect the vlogger’s authenticity within the participatory culture of BookTube? In chapter six some of the theories on participatory cultures and free labour will be rewritten with the new insights gained from the studies done in this thesis.

Chapter 01:

Participatory Cultures, Self-Branding, and the Beginning of YouTube

The question I would like to answer in this thesis is thus: how does the creation of revenue and promotional practices within BookTube affect the socioeconomic relations of BookTubers? In order to answer this question an understanding of the already existing theories on different kinds of participatory cultures and participatory practices is needed. Furthermore, it is beneficial to show what has already been written on the topic of revenue, labour, and participatory practices. The first part of this chapter will give an outline of the relevant definitions and theories that already exist on these topics. The second part of this chapter will try to outline how YouTube has structured its informational architecture to create revenue and what the options are for vloggers to earn money from uploading videos. The last part of this chapter will deal with the ways in which vloggers can become

entrepreneurs by making use of YouTube’s partnership program, and how this has brought practices of self-branding into the community.

1.1 Participatory Cultures: A Definition

A participatory culture can be defined as a culture that has relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, a strong support system for sharing creations through which experienced participants pass along their knowledge to newer participants, and informal membership (Jenkins Confronting the Challenges

of Participatory Culture 11). Participating in these cultures takes place in four forms:

affiliations, expressions, collaborative problem solving, and circulations. However, not all of these forms have to be present in a participatory culture at the same time, or to the same extent. The key part of affiliations within a participatory culture is that the membership is informal (Jenkins Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture 11, 12). There is no authority figure that determines whether or not someone is part of the community, neither are members required to pay a fee (Jenkins Confronting the

Challenges of Participatory Culture 11, 12). Membership is generally self-identified.

Informal membership is intrinsically tied to either artistic expressions or civic engagement (Jenkins Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture 11, 12).

Expressions deal with the production of new creative forms. It is not enough to create a channel on YouTube, a vlogger has to upload vlogs in order to become part of a participatory culture. Collaborative problem solving deals with working together in teams to develop new knowledge (Jenkins Confronting the Challenges of

Participatory Culture 11, 12). This can be considered a form of scaffolding, which is

a term teachers use to discuss a pedagogical process that works by encouraging children to try out new skills step-by-step on top of those they have already mastered (Jenkins Convergence Culture 178). Key of participatory cultures is that scaffolding is provided by more experienced participants in order for less experienced participants to gain the skills needed to become more sophisticated in the creation of their expressions (Jenkins Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture 11, 12;

Convergence Culture 178). Circulations deal with shaping the flow of a medium

(Jenkins Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture 11, 12). The question of how to circulate the participatory efforts of a group has come up in many fan cultures. While fan cultures are often vulnerable to prosecution for copyright infringement, there is also an anxiety amongst fans that their creative efforts will not be understood correctly outside of the interpretive context of their particular fandom (Jenkins What

Happened Before YouTube 117). The question of “to YouTube or not to YouTube”

was faced by many participatory communities (Jenkins What Happened Before

YouTube 119). Due to the limited amount of space in this thesis I will only deal with

participatory cultures that are primarily fan based, instead of based on activism. Participation online can be divided into explicit and implicit participation (Schäfer 78). Explicit participation is a “heterogeneous constellation of different participants” of whom the participatory activities are firmly intertwined (Schäfer 77). However, within online participatory culture there is a second form of participation which comes into play when users knowingly or unknowingly interact with platforms (Schäfer 78). The data that is mined by clicks in the graphical user interface is

formalised and made into software: “an ‘architecture of participation’” (Schäfer 78). Participants often negotiate complex situations surrounding meanings, values, and the experience of work and labour (Banks and Deuze 4200, 4201). Post-NSA scandal many users know that they are being monitored and data mined, yet they still enjoy their online activities (Andrejevic 83). If people willingly submit to data mining and forms of monitoring in order to have access to a web service, can this still be called

exploitative? (Andrejevic 83, 90). Indeed innate to the concept of exploitation is the concept of coercion (Andrejevic 90). The fact that somebody benefits from the participatory efforts of a group does not constitute exploitation in itself (Andrejevic 90). Many fans in participatory communities have argued that their creative efforts reflect the logic of a gift economy, where goods are circulated freely for the shared benefit of the community rather than sold for profit (Jenkins What Happened Before

YouTube 119). The ‘gift’ in gift economy is an expression of time and ideas, the

production of knowledge rooted in collaboration (Terranova 76, 78). The gift

economy and the money-commodity model are not always in conflict with each other (Terranova 77). In fact the gift economy is an important force that drives forward the production of labour in late capitalism (Terranova 77). Exploitation also cannot be defined “solely in terms of subjective sensibility”: exploitation can exist even if a sense of victimisation is absent in the individual being exploited (Andrejevic 91). The current capitalist market emphasises knowledge as its main source of added value (Terranova 77). Knowledge work is “that indefinable quality which is essential to the processes of stimulating innovation and achieving goals of

competitiveness” (Terranova 78). However, human intelligence cannot be managed in quite the same way as traditional types of labour, its production is rooted in

collaboration (Terranova 78). Collectivity is inherit to knowledge labour, capital’s problem is how to extract as much value out of this terrain (Terranova 88). The extraction of value from practices within a gift economy produces free labour (Terranova 78). Free labour is the moment during which the consumption of culture translates into an excess of productive activities, both pleasurable and exploited (Terranova 78). The role free labour plays in relation to the internet is highlighted by its connections with the social factory (Terranova 74). The social factory is a process whereby work shifts from the factory to society (Terranova 74). The cultural

industries extend their range of production beyond the established channels of their corporation by incorporating participatory user activities into their own commercial products (Schäfer 168). While participatory practices might stand in stark contrast to the established business models of the cultural industries, both participatory cultures and the cultural industries “simultaneously create the conditions for innovative business opportunities.” (Schäfer 169). Commodity is not so much disappearing as it is becoming ephemeral, it becomes a process rather than a finished product

(Terranova 90). Continuous creative labour is crucial to the digital economy and the production of monetary value comes from foregrounding the quality of this labour: “it is not enough to produce a good web site; you need to update it continuously to maintain interest in it and fight off obsolescence” (Terranova 90). The internet, as a medium, is thus sustained by a massive amount of labour, only some of which is hyper-compensated by the logic of venture capitalism (Terranova 91).

Andrejevic uses Holmstrom’s observations on Marx to explain that

exploitation is more than just capturing the surplus value produced in labour, it at the same time reproduces alienation of the worker from their product of labour (91). The storage of our digital media, such as videos; music; pictures and text, is often done on a commercially owned server (Andrejevic 92). The logic of this would be that of free exchange, where sites such as YouTube provide a service and they extract a form of payment, in this case data or videos (Andrejevic 92). However, some of these service sites have become so big that it gives the owners of them a disproportionate amount of power in setting the terms of access (Andrejevic 92). Still, capturing data does not entail capturing the control of the productive and creative capacity of the participant (Andrejevic 95). Even if coercion exists, estrangement does not (Andrejevic 95). One can test whether something is a form of exploitation when the fruits of an individual’s labour is returned to them as an alienating force (Andrejevic 95). The data that is mined by the website is often used in order to custom-tailor advertisement to the individual user, thus commercial websites such as Facebook and YouTube “enlist the participatory public in the process of marketing to itself” (Andrejevic 95). However, free labour is not the bad capitalists moving in on subcultures to incorporate the fruits of their labour (Terranova 79, 80). The cultural flows of participatory culture have originated from within a field that was always already capitalism (Terranova 80).

1.2 YouTube’s Digital Architecture and Advertising System

In the early days, the inventors of YouTube made the crucial decision not to include advertisement on their site (Wasko, Erickson 373). In these first few years YouTube was financed by Sequoia Capital, who also funded Apple, Google, and Atari (Wasko, Erickson 374). By the time Google bought the company YouTube had already established itself as a facilitator of participatory space for a variety of

communities (Wasko, Ericson 374, 373). Even without ways to gain advertising revenue YouTube still relied on the free labour of their users. The YouTube database is an infrastructure created through hybrid interaction (Kessler, Schäfer 278, 279). Hybrid interaction means that humans and machines create the database together; video retrieval and management depend fundamentally upon user-generated texts (Kessler, Schäfer 279). What is read are the titles, tags, hyperlinks, and user

comments to identify the semantic content of the file (Kessler, Schäfer 279). Search engine optimisation is thus crowdsourced by YouTube (Kessler, Schäfer 281). Search results often give a selection of videos that match the request in presumed order of relevance, but may not include the item one was looking for (Kessler, Schäfer 281). The inherent structure of YouTube is built on click throughs. The interface is built to allow us to keep going from clip to clip to view as many videos as possible (Lovink, 12). Users can renew the search, or click through the suggested clip in hope to find the video they have been looking for in the ‘related video’ section (Kessler, Schäfer 281, 282). Viewing the videos is a default aspect of navigation (Kessler, Schäfer 280). YouTube´s database thus functions as an infrastructure (Kessler, Schäfer 278). Furthermore, YouTube has introduced an option called ‘embedded links’ which allows users to embed videos directly in pages on other websites (Kessler, Schäfer 278). The YouTube database thus has grown exponentially beyond its original platform (Kessler, Schäfer 279). This act of viewing thus lets the viewer navigate from non-Google owned websites back to YouTube.

One of the fundamental problems that commercial media companies face today is how to translate cultural goods into revenue (Wasko, Ericson 377). In 2008 Google CEO Eric Schmidt admitted that he did not know exactly how to monetise YouTube. The company was exploring its options and they encouraged its advertisers to try different tactics (Wasko, Ericson 378). YouTube started showing image-overlay advertising in 2008 (Wasko, Ericson 380). The introduction of the skip button has allowed YouTube to show these advertisements before videos without losing a large amount of views. YouTube introduced the partnership program in early 2007 (Wasko, Ericson 380). Twenty to thirty particularly popular users were invited to split the advertising revenue of their videos fifty-fifty with YouTube (Wasko, Ericson 380). Taking part of this partnership program has now become common practice amongst entrepreneurial vloggers.

As has been said in the introduction the term platform has several meanings: a computational, architectural, figurative, and political one (Gillespie 349, 350). The computational meaning of platform as a digital infrastructure has been described in detail above (Gillespie 349). The architectural and figurative connotations of platforms as an open space for opportunity has often been used by YouTube as an ideological paradigm for the way they profess to be a space of equality for user generated content (Gillespie 349-356). Of course one can question whether or not YouTube actually upholds this ideal of equality in the face of copyright infringement. When we look at the requirements for YouTube partnership on the page “Working Together” we can see that actually all creators can become YouTube partners. This would indeed allow for YouTube’s many participatory cultures to retain their low barriers for participation. However, if we look more closely we see that there is a distinction between all creators, channels that have been verified by YouTube, and partners with more than 75.000 cumulative watch hours over the last ninety days (https://www.youtube.com/yt/creators/en-GB/creator-benefits.html). Channels that have been verified by YouTube get an extra of advanced product features: “custom thumbs, series playlists, Associated Websites & Merch Annotations, Live”

(https://www.youtube.com/yt/creators/en-GB/creator-benefits.html). Partners with more than 75.000 cumulative watch hours are also eligible to apply to advanced programs, and strategic and technical support

(https://www.youtube.com/yt/creators/en-GB/creator-benefits.html).

YouTube partnership can be requested by going to your YouTube settings and asking to monetise your channel. You will get a terms of agreement that is called “Enable Your Account for Monetisation.” YouTube will give you different options to monetise your videos: overlay in-video ads, and skippable video ads. Another option is shown in italics: the declaration that “videos contain a product placement.” If we look at the early history of YouTube’s advertising schemes we see that many commercial players skipped YouTube partnership and decided to approach the vloggers directly through product placement (Wasko, Ericson 380). This allowed advertisers to circumvent advertisement fees by going straight to the individual content creators (Wasko, Ericson 380). The use of product placement from other commercial players has now become coded into the platform of YouTube itself.

Types of advertisements available for YouTube monetisation

In fact one of the criteria for YouTube partnership is that “you upload original, quality content that is advertiser-friendly.” (https://support.google.com/youtube). A best practice is that vloggers should “not embed promotions for [their] own sponsors as this may create advertiser conflict.” (https://support.google.com/youtube). After you have agreed to be partnered with YouTube you can decide to monetise individual videos. Monetisation is done by going to the actions dropdown menu and clicking ‘monetise’ for individual videos.

Individual video monetisation

When we take an even closer look at the criteria for YouTube partnership we can establish that the idea that ‘all creators’ can become partners is a highly

theoretical one (https://support.google.com/youtube). In YouTube’s list of criteria for partnership the following point can be a problem for many participatory cultures: “your account is in good standing and hasn’t previously been disabled for

disabled for monetisation if the uploader does not own the “necessary commercial use rights” to all visual and audio material used to produce the video

(https://support.google.com/youtube). This means that all remix communities are per definition not eligible for YouTube partnership, because they often encounter

copyright infringement by remixing their favourite movies or television shows in a video. Thus what YouTube suggests is that only original content is quality content, because only original content can be used for advertising without lawsuits for copyright infringement. These YouTube policy guidelines imply that content is ‘original’ when the creator holds all necessary commercial use rights

(https://support.google.com/youtube). A video can thus be a remix of the Avengers movie trailer with video clips of Disney Princesses set to a song by Ariana Grande and YouTube will still consider this content to be ‘original’ as long as the video is posted by The Wald Disney Company. Within the space of participation on YouTube, BookTube thus makes an exception, because reviewing books is seen as the

intellectual property of the content creator. When Jenkins talks about participants in participatory cultures profesionalising he suggest that they do so by gaining access to the cultural industries (Jenkins What Happened Before YouTube 119). This

professionalisation was thus done by taking the skills fostered within the participatory culture and then stepping outside of this culture to a more professional media culture in which one could create revenue. The creation of revenue through the practices within a participatory culture has been unprecedented up until the last five years.

The fourth connotation of the term platform is a political one (Gillespie 350). While the other connotations indicate a kind of neutral openness, in politics platform is used to describe the core political issues of a candidate as well as their stand on those issues (Gillespie 350). In fact the ideological connotations of words do not emerge spontaneously or diffuse automatically, they need a vehicle for their transmission, perhaps an institution or a company (Galperin 161). As has been

previously mentioned in the introduction, YouTube can proliferate itself as a defender of freedom of expression on the internet when it suits the company’s economic purpose and can at the same time us the term platform to argue that it is a mere facilitator of user generated content in the face of copyright lawsuits (Gillespie 350). As we have seen in the first part of this section, YouTube indeed does make

marketable for advertisers. The figurative meaning of the word platform as a space for opportunity from the standpoint of YouTube and Google can thus best be seen as a space for economic opportunity, most importantly a space for advertising.

YouTube’s advertising scheme is based on the ad auctions system of Google AdWords (https://support.google.com/youtube). AdWords has two bidding systems for YouTube: a cost-per-view system that charges you only after the user has watched more than thirty seconds of your add, and a cost-per-click or cost-per-thousand impressions system which charges you after the ad has been clicked or when the ad has been watched a thousand times (https://support.google.com/youtube). YouTube has a multi-sided market of users, content-providers, and advertisers (Rieder, Sire 199, 200). The attention of the users and content providers makes it more attractive for advertisers to advertise on YouTube (Rieder, Sire 199, 200). The users query the system in search for results that are provided by content providers in the form of videos (Rieder, Sire 198). These websites or videos are then matched with ads (Rieder, Sire 198). YouTube as an facilitating platform can market the attention of users and content providers to advertisers for a profit (Rieder, Sire 199, 200). Advertisers can place bids on specific queries and terms (Rieder, Sire 201). Then Google’s algorithm assesses how well an ad fits with the content that is provided, in the case of YouTube this is the video (Rieder, Sire 201). This quality score goes into a feedback loop where calculations determine where the ad is placed and what the actual price is that the advertiser must pay (Rieder, Sire 201). Better fits of ads lead to more clicks, a niche market such as BookTube thus often places quite high in these ad auctions (Rieder, Sire 201).

1.3 The Start of The Entrepreneurial Vlogger

YouTube has created new models of media entrepreneurialism that are grounded in its user generated content (Burgess, Green 91). YouTube is often characterized as a challenger to the dominance of traditional broadcasting, because YouTube’s highly engaged participatory cultures have the potential to provide exposure through word-of-mouth that can cut through the clutter of advertising space (Burgess, Green 89). However, what are the entrepreneurial practices of these

branding. Personal branding is a programmatic approach to selling a person who is fashioned proactively in response to the desires of an emerging target audience or market (Lair, Sullivan, and Cheney 309). The personal branding movement promises to give individuals control over their economic destiny by shaping how they represent themselves to others (Lair, Sullivan, and Cheney 314). The rhetoric of the personal branding movement is tied to three themes: inevitability, the American mythos, and disidentifying with cynicism (Lair, Sullivan, and Cheney 321-323). The personal branding movement argues that economic turmoil is inevitable and that personal branding is the solution that your competitors will adopt, therefore you must brand yourself first to succeed (Lair, Sullivan, and Cheney 322). However, it can be said that even personal branding cannot provide security, for insecurity in the work environment is argued to be inevitable. Second is the American mythos, which is highly correlated to the high amounts of individualism in America’s neoliberal economic philosophy (Lair, Sullivan, and Cheney 322). Personal branding literature consistently points out that individuals are responsible for their own futures and often connects the ideal of self-reliance to the celebration of freedom (Lair, Sullivan, and Cheney 323). The ideal of self-reliance is particularly damaging to a participatory culture. Work in general does not exist in a closed off component from which we can emerge to announce to the world that we did it all on our own, you will always need other people to help and support you in your entrepreneurial endeavours. Finally the theme of disidentifying with cynicism tries to insulate the personal branding

movement from criticism: “to attack the idea [of personal branding] is to be cynical; and to be cynical is to throw your hands up and take what the economy gives you” (Lair, Sullivan, and Cheney 323). Just like the gift economy and the money-commodity model exist in symbioses, so do the seemingly opposing theories of participatory cultures and personal branding (Terranova 77).

Chapter 02:

An Introduction of BookTube, and the Methodology

In the last chapter I have discussed the different theories surrounding participatory cultures and labour. I have also given an overview of YouTube’s advertising system and how the partnership program works through video monetisation. Furthermore, I have introduced to concept of the entrepreneurial vlogger and the tension between self-branding practices and participatory cultures. In the first part of this chapter I will give a more general overview of what BookTube is and whether or not it actually qualifies as a participatory culture. In the second part I will explain my methodology and I will introduce a set sub questions for the

upcoming chapters.

2.1 BookTube: An Introduction

BookTube is an online community of vloggers on YouTube. If we type BookTube into the search bar of YouTube and filter on channels we get 4.270

individual channels that self-identify as being part of BookTube. The common interest of these vloggers is the reading and reviewing of books. Many channels on YouTube started out with the reviewing of books, mostly in the genre of young adult literature (YA literature). After a while people started to create different types of videos, such as Q&As and book hauls in which vloggers show their viewers which books they bought that month. Read-a-longs are a practice in which vloggers and their viewers read and discuss a book or a series of books in a set amount of time, mostly a month. Discussions surrounding plot or character development are common place during these times. The most popular vloggers do read-a-longs each month. During the month of October almost all vloggers on BookTube read a set amount of books as a challenge, this read-a-long is called booktober. Tags are also often done by vloggers in BookTube. A tag is a list of questions or an assignment for the vlogger. Tags are often done by a group of vloggers simultaneously. This is where the practice of two or more vloggers sharing one video comes from.

One of the most well known vloggers in the BookTube community is Christine Riccio or Polandbananas as she is known on YouTube. The tagline of her

official site www.christinericcio.com is: “Comedy. Books. Bananas!”

(www.christinericcio.com). The picture of her in the background is exemplary of the look she has created for herself. In her BookTube videos she always wears heavy set cat eye makeup with long lashes and a bright lip colour. The person that we see in her videos is cheerful and hyper, with a huge smile on her face.

Christine Riccio landing page

She has two channels: one for comedy and one for her BookTube activities. Her BookTube channel, which she started in 2011, has over two hundred thousand subscribers. She also has a shop where she sells merchandise for her channel, such as quotes of some of her videos printed on t-shirts. She is also very active on other social media networks: on her BookTube channel she has links to two Tumblr pages, two Instagram pages, a Facebook link, a link to her Twitter page, a link to her Goodreads page, and a link to Google Plus

(https://www.youtube.com/user/polandbananasBOOKS/about). In the about section of her channel she also gives an email address for business inquiries. Polandbananas thus really positions herself as a young entrepreneur.

Selling merchandise is an upcoming practice with quite some vloggers in the BookTube community who have more than 75.000 subscribers. Abookutopia for example has a standard set of links in the description of her video that link to her collection of t-shirts, tote bags, and framed art prints with texts such as “I’m a Bookoholic” and “Certified Fangirl”(http://society6.com/abookutopia). There are

often links to a site called Audible where you can get a free trial to listen to audio books, and to a site called Book Depository (audibletrial.com/abookutopia; http://www.bookdepository.com/?a_aid=abookutopia). Sometimes there are even addresses of PO Boxes where fans can send letters or goods.

More common is the practice of putting Tumblr, facebook, twitter and instagram links in the description of all videos; as well as an email address for business inquiries. When we go to Abookutopia’s website description we see that some BookTubers have started to self-identify as the promoters of authors: “I’m Sasha, a BookTuber over on my YouTube channel Abookutopia. I review books, promote authors and cover events.” (http://www.abookutopia.com/). Then again it can be said that many vloggers promote authors by reviewing and recommending these author’s books. Even though most videos on their channels deal with books and bookreviews, some vloggers with a high amount of followers also post videos on how they edit their instagram photos (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ESi4GuH5ug). YouTuber Morgan Yates explains that editing is a powerful way to show only those parts of yourself that you would like to market to the YouTube community: “People watch thinking like ‘oh this is what this person’s like’ when in reality, while it’s not a photoshopped picture in a magazine, it’s still an edited down, perfected video […] where you’re seeing a very filtered out part of this person.”

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hA8ob9ySlU). Self-promotion is not

uncommon in participatory cultures, but due monetisation vlogging communities on YouTube have started to adopted self-promotion as a core practice.

However, the question remains whether BookTube qualifies as a participatory culture or not? As we have seen in chapter one a participatory practice is defined by its low barriers to participation in the form of creative expressions, a self-identified membership and scaffolding in which older participants help newer participants gain skills. As we have seen above there are about 4.270 individual YouTube channels that self-identify as being part of BookTube. Creating a channel on YouTube is free from expenses. The only expenses that the vlogger has to pay in order to be able to join BookTube is for a camera that can shoot videos, but with the advance of mobile telephones this is not difficult to acquire. In order to participate in tags, book hauls, and the discussions surrounding books and book reviews one only has to upload videos surrounding these subjects and tag them. Thus the barriers to join BookTube

are quite low. However, it can be said that the participant needs to have a stable internet connection and the time to script, shoot, edit, and upload videos.

The BookTube Newbie tag is a good example of the request for scaffolding from less experienced participants. In this tag the uploader is asked a few questions that introduces them to the rest of the community. Using this tag is not mandatory to become part of BookTube, but it is a good way to introduce oneself to the rest of the community and to request help from more experienced participants. To the question of what she is most excited for by joining BookTube Lauren from Books and Daydreams explains that she is really excited to get used to talking on camera, and editing videos. She thought that everyone seemed incredibly friendly and that they replied to her questions and discussions a lot (https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=QhZqfvDw96s). BookTube thus indeed seem to contain the requirements of a participatory culture regarding scaffolding and participation. However, we can question whether the barrier for participation is really still low enough. It is indeed relatively easy to create a YouTube channel and upload vlogs, but with the increasing professionalisation of entrepreneurial vloggers it is becoming harder to get a large following and really create an impact in the discussion. Then again the amount of subscribers or views on videos might not be why a participant wants to be part of a participatory culture (Jenkins What Happened Before YouTube 119).

2.2 Digital Methods and Case Study Research

As has been said in the introduction and in chapter one the main question that I am trying to answer in this thesis is: how does the creation of revenue and

promotional practices within BookTube affect the socioeconomic relations of BookTubers? There are a couple of sub questions related to this overall question:

 What is the of social formation of BookTube?

 How does an increase in revenue for and promotional practices by the vlogger impact the ways vloggers interact with their audiences?  What are the promotional ties between the publishing industry and

entrepreneurial vloggers, and how do these promotional ties affect the vlogger’s authenticity within the participatory culture of BookTube?

To answer these questions I will be using both quantitative and qualitative methods. While the questions I have asked deal with large quantities of data that are better understood through the use of quantitative methods, there are many nuances within the social structures of online participatory cultures that are better suited for

qualitative methods. YouTube is not just a digital media platform, it also has a large amount of audio-visual media. If we only look at the platform and the way this structures or facilitates relationships through big data analysis or graphs, we miss a large part of what YouTube is actually about: videos. However, if we only analyse the videos on YouTube in order to find out how vloggers interact with each other, we might be able to pick out the nuances of a particular set of relationships, but we will not be able to cover nearly as much ground as through the use of data graphs. YouTube functions as an interface between the study of digital media and film- and television studies. Both studies have quantitative and qualitative methods that complement each other while studying the social-cultural and technological specificities of BookTube.

I will be using a combination of digital methods and case study research. Digital methods approaches the web as a data set and makes use of the methodology already found in the medium of the web (Rogers 1, 8). Digital methods looks at the object available, such as tags, hyperlinks, embedded videos or likes, and asks how these objects are handled by their platform (Rogers 1, 10). Digital methods then will repurpose the way these objects are handled by their platform for scientific research by building applications on top of the original platform that can query the platform in question (Rogers 1). In this way digital methods seeks to learn how objects move through their platform and what social structures arise from them (Rogers 1). For my thesis I am using a tool made by Bernhard Rieder called the YouTube Data Tools. These tools where made for the purpose of extracting data from the YouTube API v3 (https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/). An API is short for application

programming interface. Through this interface web developers can request data which can be used to build applications on top of popular commercial websites, such as YouTube (Rogers 1). The YouTube Data Tools can extract channel info, create channel networks, make a list of videos, create a video network, and give video information and comments (Rieder YouTube Data Tools). Digital methods function in a few steps: first we research what kind of digital objects are available. Then the

question is asked: how do the platforms handle these objects, and what are the online methods used to do so? The third step is to repurpose the online methods of this platform to study social-cultural phenomenon (Rogers 9). It is often argued that digital data is ephemeral and thus instable, if the platform changes its terms of service, or API the data might disappear and links might become broken (Rogers 9, 10). However, because this thesis concerns itself with online participatory cultures this ephemerally is already always present no matter what object one chooses to look at. It is possible to only look at the social relationships between vloggers by doing

interviews or questionnaires, but this extracts these social relationships from the digital environment which mediates their existence. It is thus beneficial to look at how YouTube’s platform mediates these social-cultural relations through its digital

objects.

The second method that I will be using is case study research. A case study is the study of a contemporary phenomenon in its real-life context, when the boundaries between the phenomenon and context are not clear initially (Yin 13). Yin defines the need for a case study when the researcher wants to answer a how or why question about a contemporary set of events in which the researcher has little to no control of the behavioural events (Yin 5, 9). Thus a case study is used when the researcher believes that the contextual conditions of a phenomenon are highly important in the study of this phenomenon (Yin 13). Yin argues that an experiment will deliberately separate a phenomenon form its contextual conditions in order to look at a few choice variables (Yin 13). A case study or a group of case studies needs four design tests: construct validity, internal validity, external validity and reliability (Yin 34). Construct validity means that the case study needs to have the correct operational measures in order to study its concepts correctly: there is a need for multiple sources of evidence and an established chain of events (Yin 34). Internal validity means that a causal relationship is established and that it is shown how this relationship leads to other conditions: pattern-matching, explanation-building, and making valid

connections with theories (Yin 34). External validity means that the study’s findings can be generalised to a larger population (Yin 34). Reliability means that the study is repeatable, because the researcher has shown how the data was collected and

As has been said in the introduction, the third chapter will deal with the promotional and social formations of BookTube. The featured channels tab is the object that will be studied by using digital methods. Through the use of the YouTube Data Tools and a visualisation program named Gephi a network analysis is done to determine how vloggers connect with each other by making use of native objects from YouTube’s platform (Rieder; http://gephi.github.io/). Furthermore, a case study is done by analysing the practice of two vloggers sharing one video to determine how strong the ties are between the vloggers that have been found in the featured channels network. In the fourth chapter the YouTube Data Tools are used to gather the

comments on the YouTube videos of a select group of vloggers (Rieder). This group has been determined by looking at the most featured vloggers from the featured channels tab. The comments are gathered by the tool and then the number of comments the vloggers left on their own videos are counted (Rieder YouTube Data Tools). This way we can see how many times vloggers mingled in the discussions that surround their videos. As a case study other forms in which vloggers communicate with their audience are analysed. Here the practice of live vlogging, in which vloggers can answer the questions of their audience live, is of particular interest. Chapter five is entirely made up of case studies to look at the promotional relationships between vloggers and the publishing industry. The entire oeuvre of the most featured and most subscribed vloggers from the featured channels network is analysed to determine how much interaction takes place between vloggers and the publishing industries. This chapter will also deal with the perceived authenticity of vloggers, which is one of their main selling points, and how this perception might be challenged by personal

branding. Chapter six will be a theoretical chapter in which some of the theories on participatory cultures and free labour will be rewritten with new insights gained from the studies done in the previous chapters.

Social Formations on the Web and the Features Channels Tab

In the previous chapter I explained what BookTube is and the methods I am going to be using to study it. In this chapter I will try to answer the following question: what is the of social formation of BookTube? In order to study the social formation of BookTube we must first learn about different types of social formations that take place on the social web.

3.1 Metaphors For the Social Web: Community and Network The structure of identity and relationships within the social web is

simultaneously characterised by connection and isolation (Rieder de la communauté à

l’écume 44). Social relations can take on many different forms, some of which are

more fleeting than others. Bernhard Rieder discusses various different metaphors that have been used to analyse social relationships on the web, two of which are important in relation to BookTube: community and network (de la communauté à l’écume 34). The concept of community is often associated with the work of Ferdinand Tönnies who makes a distinction between gemeinschaft or community and gesellschaft or society (Rieder de la communauté à l’écume 40). In a gemeinschaft the group is prioritised above individual needs, whereas in a gesellschaft the individual interest outweighs that of the group (Rieder de la communauté à l’écume 41). In a community the identities of the members are shaped by the ideas, values, and common signs that make up the group’s identity (Rieder de la communauté à l’écume 41). It was Howard Rheingold that adapted this concept to the term virtual community (Rieder de la

communauté à l’écume 41). A community has a few properties: first of all the central

notion of a community is that of membership and exclusion, some people are part of the community and others are not (Erickson 2). Furthermore, members of the

community form personal relationships with each other. Yet as Erickson states these communities are often too large to know everyone, thus it is more like an overlapping network of relationships (3). Members in a community usually have a strong

commitment to the community, for example one member may help another member because they are part of the same community even if they don’t know each other (Erickson 3). A community has a shared history, practices, and values (Erickson 3).

Communities have collective goods that they create, control, and distribute like a gift economy (Erickson 3). Duration is also important because “a community as a

collective is expected to have a long existence” (Erickson 3).

Rheingold names some advantages and disadvantages to communicating within a virtual community: in a virtual community we meet people by searching for a particular interest and then get acquainted with those people (Rheingold Virtual

communities 4). Furthermore, these virtual communities help with the information

overload on the internet by having a group of people filter and sift through the information space, keeping an eye out for interesting articles that fit one of the member’s interests (Rheingold Virtual communities 4). Rheingold argues that elegantly presented knowledge is a valuable currency: “Sometimes you give one person more information than you would give another person in response to the same query, simply because you recognize one of them to be more generous or funny or to-the-point or agreeable” (Rheingold The Virtual Community 53). Rheingold argues that this type or reciprocity is like a gift economy where knowledge is shared to build up relations between the participants instead of for monetary gain (Rheingold The

Virtual Community 53). BookTube thrives on these two advantages with a collective

of people banding together because of an interest in books and sifting through the information space while putting all useful or fun information into ten minute videos. Erickson argues that the concept of community does not always accurately fits the practice of online-discussions (2). Online discussions may still be useful even if the participants only engage with each other once and no further relationships are formed (Erickson 3).The definition of a virtual community is thus quite rigid and unable to deal with the fact that the majority of relationships on the internet are defined by ephemerality or weak ties (Rieder de la communauté à l’écume 41).

A network shows relationships in nodes and edges, where every node is a person and the edge is the relationship between two or more people (Rieder de la

communauté à l’écume 42). The metaphor of a network is usually used in regard to

graphs (Rieder de la communauté à l’écume 42). One can analyse these graphs for different densities, connections, and reciprocities (Rieder de la communauté à

l’écume 42). A network is both a metaphor for social formations and a method of

studying these social relationships. Moreno called this sociometry or network analysis, which is a technique of graphically representing the subjective feelings of

individuals to one another (Borgatti et. al. 892). In the 1940s and ‘50s the Group Network Laboratory at MIT began to study how fast different social networks could solve problems, out of which more centralised structures such as a star structure would perform better than decentralised structure such as the circle (Borgatti et. al. 892). They found that in human networks those at the periphery, meaning those with few connections, would pass along their knowledge to the most central node who would then make the decision on the correct answer (Borgatti et. al. 892). The network preformed faster if the distance between the nodes and the instigator was shorter (Borgatti et. al. 892). There are two main reasons that a network might not work as a metaphor for interaction on the social web: first of all the level of abstraction of the network brings up questions on the quality of the edges between notes; secondly, once again the network requires relationships to remain stable, unchanged, and above all traceable (Rieder de la communauté à l’écume 42).

3.2 The Social Formation of BookTube

To look at the social formation of BookTube one must consider the different ways the platform allows users to connect. In this chapter my focus will lie

specifically on the relationship between vloggers that self-identify as BookTubers. A lot of vloggers interact with other vloggers in a way that non-vlogging users also do: they watch other people’s videos, they comment on them or like them, and put these videos in their playlists. These interactions are difficult to map, not every user’s playlist is open to the public. One of the features of YouTube that is an interface between personal-branding and participatory communities is the featured channels tab. Users can actively choose who they want to promote on their channel by selecting other channels for the featured channel tab. This featured channels tab is based on the way YouTube’s platform creates navigation by means on click-throughs (Lovink, 12). At the same time it also creates a network between BookTubers based on promotion. As we have discussed in the first part of this chapter, networks are both used as a specific social formation and as a method to study social formations.

Social network analysis is an approach that can be used to study the patterns of relationships between actors and how available recourses are exchanged between these actors (Haythornthwaite 323). The patterns of the relationships between

different actors can show us the likelihood that individuals are exposed to certain information (Haythornthwaite 324). In order to get a featured channels network I used the YouTube Data Tool made by Bernhard Rieder (Rieder YouTube Data Tools). This tool gathered the first hundred results that come up when searching for channels with the keyword ‘booktube’ in their description (Rieder YouTube Data Tools). Then the tool gathered the featured channels seeds of the initial one hundred channels, the tool defines this as crawl depth zero. The featured channels seeds of the featured channels were gathered in crawl depth one (Rieder YouTube Data Tools). This information was then visualised in a social network visualisation tool named Gephi

(http://gephi.github.io/). You can also find this graph in the appendix.

Featured channels network

Within this particular graph the resource is getting featured in the featured channel tab. A node’s size depends on how many times this node is featured on the channels of other nodes. Those nodes that are featured the most thus grow to be the largest. This brings us to a twofold question: who are the biggest nodes in the featured

channels network, and how strong are the ties between them? The blue nodes are the initial one hundred channels that where gathered, the blue edges are the connections between these initial one hundred channels. The grey edges are the connections between the first one hundred channels and the channels they feature, as well as the featured relationships of the seeds. The nodes of the initial seeds are in red. The red edges show the connection of the featured channels to their seeds. If we observe the shape of the plot we can see that there are certain connected components that have formed in the middle that branch out into smaller components. Some components in this plot are completely cut off from the rest, we find them at the outer edges of the plot. There are about eleven different components. Surprisingly these components have come into being through a medium that is not specifically connected to the platform, a medium that can be said to be the biggest connector and isolator in our culture namely: language.

Featured channels network German component

Thus while the platform influences the way vloggers can connect by offering the option to self-select featured channels, it is in fact the practice of reading that makes the distinction in the promotional relations of BookTube. Looking back at chapter one we can see that affiliations and expressions are highly linked. In order to be part of BookTube, one has to do book reviews and connect with other people in the

community. The language that the vloggers use for their videos is most likely the language in which they read books. While some vloggers may choose to vlog in a language that is not their native tongue they have to take into account that their followers will only be able to read certain languages. For example French speaking people that want to read French books will most likely search for vlogs that are in French. Though there can be some overlap, most often an English book is discussed on a vlog that is in a different language, the reverse is quite rare. In total there are six languages present in the components: German, Spanish, English, French, Peruvian, and Dutch. It is highly likely that there are more languages present in the BookTube community that are not represented in this plot. The giant component in the middle is the English speaking component; this is connected to the Spanish, the German, and the Peruvian component. The nodes that connect these components are most likely to be bilingual vloggers or polyglots. There is a very small Dutch speaking component in the corner which is not connected, but seeing as the name Simone is present in two of the three channels that are linked I suspect that these channels are run by one person. The other component that is not linked is the French language component. The channels in this component are run by several different people. It could be that if the initial search was larger more connections could be found, but this would make the plot unreadable.

Featured channels network Dutch and French components

Then there are some nodes which are just not connected to anyone. Most likely these nodes did not use the option to feature other channels on their own channel. For the sake of scope I will concentrate on the English speaking sector of BookTube.

Featured channels network English component

As we can see there are a few big nodes in the middle of the English

component, each of which have more than 12 incoming links. Nodes get bigger the more incoming links they have. A node can have many outgoing links, such as Thoughts on Tomes in the right corner, but if there are no in links the node will stay the same size. All the blue nodes are from the initial top one hundred results while searching for ‘booktube,’ but the channel with the most in links

polandbananasBOOKS is not part of the top one hundred results on YouTube. Instead PeruseProject is the biggest channel from the original search. There are three other large nodes in red: jessethereader, Katytastic, and Little Book Owl. Thus it seems that promotion between channels does not automatically rank channels higher in the YouTube results pages. This might have to do with the fact that YouTube puts a lot of emphasises on views of individual videos as we have seen while discussing the partnership program in chapter one. The close proximity of these large nodes also indicates that they have each other in their featured channels tab. While the featured

channels tab gave us a good overview of the promotional relationships between BookTubers, it is not the only way vloggers interact with each other. It would thus also be beneficial to see what other forms of interaction there are in the videos that vloggers post.

3.3 Turning Up in Each Other’s Video: An Analysis of Shared Vlogging It is not uncommon for vloggers to turn up in each other’s videos. Shared vlogging is not done often, due to the fact that one or both vloggers need to physically travel in order to vlog, but the practice is common enough to do a qualitative analysis. In the last part of this chapter I want to focus on how weak ties of a YouTube network can become stronger when vloggers meet in person to do one or multiple sessions of shared vlogging. As has been discussed in chapter two and in the first part of this chapter while quantitative research like network analysis gives us a lot of information about the structure of the social relationships between a large group of people it does show us the quality of those relationships (Rieder de la communauté à l’écume 42). Therefore it is good to do a qualitative case study on the strength of the relationships between a select group of people within the featured channels network. By looking at the practice of two vloggers sharing a video we can distinguish that these vloggers have strong social ties since they have come to know each other outside of BookTube. I want to start by analysing the channels of the five largest nodes we have seen in the featured channels network: polandbananasBOOKS, PeruseProject, jessethereader, Katytastic, and Little Book Owl.

When looking at shared vlogging of polandbananasBOOKS it is noticeable that she has done many live shows. These live shows, like live shows on television, are recorded and broadcast simultaneously which makes it easier for vloggers to interact with their audience. Usually questions are gathered via twitter or the YouTube comment section and the vloggers try to immediately respond. These live shows usually last half an hour to an hour. By using live shows for her shared vlogging polandbananasBOOKS eliminates the effort some of her fellow vloggers would have to go through in order to share a vlog. That is why she can have a set cast of vloggers who call in via skype to discuss the book-of-the-month. During these live shows polandbananasBOOKS leads the discussion and is joined by: jessethereader,

Katytastic, Tashapolis, priceiswrong, TheBookTuber, three black mice, and vincentvanstop. Most these vloggers can also be found in the featured channels network used in the last section, except for three black mice. Two of these fellow vloggers: jessethereader and Katytastic are also part of the big five names in the English BookTube component. Through the comments I even found out that polandbananasBOOKS and Katytastic live together.

Christine and Katy living together

It thus seems that the promotional relationships of the featured channels do not only show ephemeral relations between vloggers characterised by weak ties, but can also be translated into stronger relations between BookTubers.

Jessethereader mostly does his shared vlogging through challenges. In these videos jessethereader is given a challenge which he must complete within a set amount of time, usually three minutes. In these challenges he invites other vloggers to participate and compete against each other. These challenges usually have to do with books, such as the find-the-words challenge in which the vloggers have to spell as many words as they can with their book titles, or the book-whisper challenge in which one vlogger reads a book and the other has to lip-read. Jessethereader also has a reoccurring cast of vloggers that appear in these challenge videos: Katytastic, maureenkeavy, vincentvanstop, Kouturebookloves, PeruseProject, ArielBissett, and Eliezziebooks. Other vloggers also appear in his challenges such as

polandbananasBOOKS, but these are less frequent. Both Katytastic and PeruseProject are part of the big five. Kouturebookloves cannot be found in the featured channels network. These challenges are usually reciprocated. PeruseProject has significantly less shared vlogs, though she has a lot of challenges. These challenges are usually done on her own or with friends that are not in the BookTube community.

WhittyNovels, Katytastic, maureenkeavy, and jessethereader are the BookTubers that show up in her videos the most. All of these vloggers can be found in the featured

channels network. Other than that the challenges work exactly the same as with jessethereader.

Katytastic also uploads live shows with polandbananasBOOKS and jessethereader to her channel. On her channel Katytastic is the one that leads the discussion surrounding these books. Many of the books Katytastic discusses

polandbananasBOOKS has also read and reviewed, and vise versa. Though they are both careful to not discuss the same books in their live shows. These live shows by Katytastic are less common than those by polandbananasBOOKS. Rather Katytastic has a larger variety of challenges, Q&A’s, and discussions. The discussions on Katytastic’s channel usually surround the plot of a book or an episode of a TV series that was based on a book. In these discussions the vloggers usually give their opinion about a new development surrounding a book and either give their approval or disapproval. In the Q&A videos the vloggers answer questions they have gathered from Twitter. Katytastic usually gives a shout out on Twitter to get questions in advance, she gathers them and then each vlogger answers the question separately. Her most common cast is: polandbananasBOOKS, jessethereader, and Tashapolis. All of which can be found in the featured channels network.

Little Book Owl is the only vlogger that barely shows up in the vlogs of the other big five vloggers discussed in this chapter. She does not do a lot of challenges and when she does they are usually with friends that are not on BookTube. This is because while the rest of the big five vloggers live in America, Little Book Owl lives in Australia. Little Book Owl does do a lot of live shows, but her cast of regulars is very different from the other big vloggers. Dylanbooks, TheEighthPotter,

padfootandprongs07, PeruseProject, and Samantha’s Books can be found in the featured channels network; Alice Reeds, Knight from the Lion, and mekkk cannot. One difference between Little Book Owl, polandbananasBOOKS, and Katytastic is that Little Book Owl makes separate videos to announce that she will have a live show discussing a certain book a few days before she does the actual show. This way she makes sure her viewers know the time and date of the live show. While

polandbananasBOOKS and Katytastic have a set date and time on which they do live shows, Little Book Owl’s schedule is more irregular.

Thus the relationships forged through shared vlogging can also be found in the featured channel network. It can be said that the ties between vloggers become stronger through shared vlogging, because it takes up time, effort, and the vloggers speak to each other regularly. We can even say that vloggers who share a video have moved beyond being mere acquaintances and into friendship. This part of BookTube is thus more akin to a community than a network. It can be argued that vloggers feature the channels of those they have good social relationships with. The featured channel tab thus shows us both weak and strong ties in the same graph. Promotion and interaction intermingle in the BookTube community.

Chapter 04:

How Vloggers Relate to Their Audiences Through the Comment Section and Live Vlogging

In the last chapter we looked at the social structure of promotion in BookTube and concluded that this part of BookTube functions like a community. In this chapter I want to answer the following question: how does an increase in revenue for and promotional practices by the vlogger impact the ways vloggers interact with their audiences?

4.1 Degrees of Participation

Participation has several degrees. With participation here I mean explicit participation which is a constellation of participants of whom participatory efforts are intertwined firmly (Schäfer 77). For explicit participatory practices Ioana Literat developed a pyramid of artistic participation (2976). Literat argues that artists and curators have often seen participation through an optimistic utopian lens and do not take into account the possibility of a hierarchy existing within participatory

expressions (2975). In reality there are degrees in participation with an art work and while BookTube is not necessarily considered a piece of art Literat’s distinctions between different degrees of participation are helpful to keep in mind when talking about commenters (2975).

Literat’s pyramid exists out of three forms of participation: receptive,

executory, and structural (2975). These three forms can be further divided in passive, tokenistic, engaged, creative, co-designed, and co-authored participation (Literat 2975). With receptive participation the audience receives a finished product. While Literat acknowledges that the spectator also actively decodes and interprets the product they are viewing, as a participant in the actual making of the artwork or expression itself the viewer is passive (2976). Executory participation is task-based participation in a predesigned project (Literat 2977). Within executory participation tokenistic projects involve micro level participation (Literat 2977). The participant is usually not aware of what other participants are doing, nor do they have any