Youtube is a platform made not just for funny cat videos, but also to express yourself, as well as your ideas. These people that make these videos for other people’s entertainment are called youtubers. Out of hundreds and thousands of youtubers, there could be some bad personalities, but also some good.

Youtube was founded on February 14, 2005, but has recently became more popular in the past 2 years. On Youtube, music videos from popular artists such as Ed Sheeran, Ariana Grande, and One Direction to everyday vloggers such as Marcus Butler and Alfie Deyes get thousands of views a day. Along with these views, these youtubers do rack in some money. Depending on what your “deal” is, you can make money on a certain amount of views, or work with ad companies. When working with a view counter, depending on how popular your video is, the amount of money you can receive every 1,000 views is ranged from $1 to $5 at maximum. When working with ad companies, depending on how many clicks an ad gets, or how long the ad is being played, you could receive a certain amount of money.

Sophomore Hailey Druek has been making videos since this past August. Her Youtube channel has been blowing up throughout the school and most people seem to love the weekly Thursday videos.  Druek simply stated the purpose for her videos was “To make people happy.” Along with the positive vibes coming from her videos and her viewers, there’s also some hate. “I don’t pay attention to the hate because there’s always going to be the people who feel the need to criticize you and you know what I think of them… irrelevant” Druek explained. Druek does not only make videos for others to watch, but she’s been watching Youtubers for a while. “My favorites are Tyler Oakley, Jenna Marbles, O2L, Kingsly, and SuperWoman” Druek listed. Her best advice for whomever wanted to start a Youtube channel is to “definitely never hold back because life is way too short. Youtube is a community and once you’re in there you feel like everyone relates to you, since you all have something in common.”

Ryan Abe is a Youtube star featured on the collaboration channel Settle Down Kids, mostly known as SDK every Friday. SDK has over 140,000 subscribers and 7 members. Abe also has his own personal channel called RyansAverageLife with over 390,000 subscribers. Abe has been doing Youtube for about two years now and is still loving every bit of it. “What brings me the most joy from being a Youtuber is being able to travel and meet people.” Abe also explained that “being able to upload what I want without anyone having to tell me no or “it isn’t funny” is all up to me and I love it.” Along the way, Abe has become best friends with the other people on SDK, such as Joey Gatto, Josh Sobo, Jonah Green, Adam and Nick Buongiovanni, and Joe Santagato. Abe is also part of the friend group called the Beast Coast, which consists of Youtubers around his age, that all live on the East coast. Abe had a different way of dealing with hate than Druek did. His first option is to “make a joke first, to steal the haters ammo.” Abe’s second option is to “kill them with kindness.”

As a teen, getting bored happens on the daily. When Ryan Abe was a teen, he started a Youtube channel out of “curiosity and boredom.” Abe explained how he was “really intrigued by the fact that people actually watched other people film themselves.” After years of posting these videos online for everyone in the world to see, Abe has created some memories on the way to success. “From friendships to relationships to crazy fun memories, it’s basically given me everything and I am so grateful for that.”

So many famous Youtubers are handed unimaginable opportunities such as traveling the world to collaborate with other Youtubers or get jobs in acting. Recently Josh Sobo, from SDK, traveled to Spain and took a cruise and shot a couple of scenes for an upcoming short film. Kian Lawley, from O2L, is currently shooting scenes for a movie also coming out soon. Many of these famous Youtubers also get to attend award shows and win awards. Some awards shows such as the Teen Choice Awards have now added a couple of new categories aimed towards Youtube and other social medias. John Green started an event called VidCon in 2009 where he invites all of these Youtubers to come out and host entertainment shows where the fans get to watch and see these youtubers perform their talents. It is like a giving back opportunity for the fans because the fans who attend get to meet the people they look up to and hangout with them.

Pepper, a Youtuber with over two million subscribers regularly posts prank videos ranging from “How to make out with strangers” to “A human delivery prank.” Although some of these videos have been deleted due to sexual harassment, these videos often target only woman. With recent allegations of Pepper’s latest videos, he has lost over 500,000 subscribers and all of his brand deals including SnapChat and VidCon. The reason for this decrease in liking is from the world renowned video “Fake bum pinch prank” where he went around asking women for directions, then taking his arm out of his sweater and grabbing these innocent women’s bottoms. In the video these women were very offended by what he did to them. Pepper argued against the case and explained that “I warned them before I did it and told them it was for a video.” When these women were asked, they had no idea he was going to do that. This video was deleted from Youtube after three days due to an army of people strongly against it. Most people attacking Pepper are known as feminists and are arguing the fact that these types of things happen to women more than men.

Later that week, he uploaded a second part to the first video, which was the opposite of the first. In this video he hired a woman go around and grab innocent men’s bottoms. This video got deleted as quickly as three hours later. A couple of days after that, he uploaded a third part of this “series.” In this video, Pepper explained how he planned on his recent videos getting a tremendous amount of hate and that it was a social experiment. He relentlessly kept naming off statistics showing how many women get sexually abused a year.

Pepper wasn’t the only man to do this to his viewers. British youtuber Jason Viohni was also reported due to sexual harassment. Most of these victims are posting their stories through social networking because most teenagers who are watching and idolize these people have better access to the information. Coming out with a police report is hard to do when the people they’re reporting have big names and a lot of supporters that will silently attack you.

There isn’t just bad people on Youtube though. Youtube also has a community full of great people that do great things for not only their viewers but also for certain projects or charities.

Tyler Oakley is a 25 year old American Youtuber. Oakley is an LGBT supporter and regularly does fundraisers for the Trevor Project. The Trevor Project is the leading national organization providing crisis intervention and suicide prevention services to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender teens.

Oakley has over 5,730,000 subscribers and 355 videos over the past seven years. He entertains his viewers with humorous weekly videos along with weekly Q&A’s or as he likes to call them “Q&Slays.” Oakley has won four awards within the past seven years including two Teen Choice Awards for Choice Web Star: Male and Choice Web Collaboration: The boyfriend tag with Troye Sivan. Oakley has also won two awards from the Streamy Awards for Entertainer of the year and Activist Icon of the year.

There are many other people out there, some on Youtube and some that aren’t, that are doing great things for the community. People like Tyler Oakley along with his other friends like Sawyer Hartman who makes short films. Try something new, upload videos to youtube. There’s a possibility to become famous and get handed amazing opportunities.