This thesis is about YouTube, focusing on the phenomenon on the platform called vlogging. The study aims to examine how the dedicated user explains his/hers feelings towards the people of which vlogging content they have been consuming for a long period of time. Is there perhaps a noticeable pattern regarding how and why they established this relationship in the first place, and how it has developed over time. What is it that makes this type of video consumption valuable to the consumer, and what is the driving force that makes them stay so committed. The aim and purpose of this study is to find out what kind of participatory culture that is involved around vlogging as a media production and how it is described with the dedicated users own words. Is the driving force behind the engagement being a part of a community on the platform, or is the relationship straight between the producer and the consumer. If so, how and what is it that makes this one-way-relationship between the viewer and the vlogger valuable. To gather information about the dedicated users view of their consumption, and to answer the questions above, I have carried out 10 qualitative interviews with respondents who have been watching vlogs for five years or more within the media of YouTube. Through data collection and previous research within the subject, this thesis is able to confirm five different themes. Through analysis these themes together map out a pattern that concludes different factors for participating.

Over the past decade, there has been a considerable rise in popularity of family vlog channels on YouTube. However, these videos have been receiving growing criticism for hosting the children as the main ‘stars’. With YouTube being the main source of income for some of these family units, concerns rise regarding the possibility of family vlogging accommodating a new type of child labour. For this reason, it is crucial to understand how the children’s rights might be threatened. At the same time, research within this field is still limited as family vlogging concerns a fairly recent phenomenon. Accordingly, the current thesis aims to fill these research gaps by contextualizing the practices of family vlogging through a rights-based approach. To do so, a case study was conducted on a YouTube account named ‘The Bucket List Family’. Using content analysis, 5 of their videos were analysed qualitatively and 100 of their video titles were analysed quantitatively. Findings confirm that the children played a central role in contributing to the popularity of the videos. Moreover, the children’s images were consistently and successfully used to further capitalize the family’s brand. Therefore, one can conclude that these children are being exposed to digital child labour, which can mean a possible breach of their rights. The considerable exposure of the children in the videos not only robs them from their privacy, but it also does so without their explicit consent, leaving them extremely vulnerable. As such, the conclusions of this thesis implicate that more research in this field is needed, so that future policymaking can be guided towards a better protection of the children. Additionally, by exposing the digital child labour practices behind family vlogging, this study hopes to bring more societal awareness to the topic.

This thesis examines the role of authenticity, its elements and manifestations in the process of developing a relationship between micro-celebrities and their fans. The issue is demonstrated by the example of YouTube, the most important video-sharing site. Part of the issue is whether the YouTube content creators and their subscribers develop parasocial relationships as defined by Horton and Wohl (1956), and authenticity as an element that sets the relationship between micro-celebrities and their fans apart from the relationship between traditional celebrities and their fans. The theoretical part of the thesis deals with concepts that are associated with development of the micro-celebrity phenomenon, discusses the concepts of micro-celebrity and authenticity themselves, and expounds the parasocial relationships theory. Analysis of the role of authenticity in the process of developing the relationship between micro-celebrities and their fans is based on qualitative research that draws from interviews with micro-celebrities and their fans and the analysis of videos and comments by which viewers respond to them.

In the past decades a lot of research has been dedicated to widening the understanding of different media audiences, as well as to determining the motivations behind both, creation of user-generated content (UGC) as well as audience behavior. This thesis seeks to broaden this knowledge by studying vloggers and their interaction with their audiences. Instead of asking the audience members: In what ways are the vloggers an influence on you, this thesis asks: “Can the audience be a source of inspiration and influence for vloggers? The thesis aims also at recognizing typicality’s in vloggers audio-visual content as well as strategical approaches for audience engagement. Approach in order to find answers to the set questions is critical yet humanistic. Empirical research is divided in two parts, of which the first is done by qualitative content analysis and the second part by semi-structured interviews. The aim of this multimethod approach is to get a broad yet deep view on this commercial, and contemporary storytelling form. Appadurai’s five scape- theory is used as the theoretical framework, and the research findings as well as conclusions are also viewed through other recent studies from media and communications field.

This study investigates two vocabulary exercises where the participant students receive an assigned set of words to put into sentences, one being a more traditional written exercise, the other being an exercise where students make a vlog using the assigned words. Two upper secondary school classes in Sweden participated in the experiment, including responding to a Likert attitude questionnaire. The hypothesis used in this paper is derived of Pegrum’s third category, of higher integration between school and everyday life, and that this would lead to better results for the students who completed the vlogging exercise. The two participating classes were each divided into two group halves, and each group half received one written exercise and one vlogging exercise – consequently each class half acted as a control group for the other half. The responses gathered were divided into three categories, ‘Correct’, ‘Undetermined’, and ‘Failed’. The results disprove that the vlogging exercise offers a significant improvement over the traditional written exercise, and thusly confirms the No Significant Difference phenomenon.

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