Business & Technology

YouTube Beauty Gurus: a new business

Nov 3st 2014, 16.45 By Diane.M

Picture: Zoe Sugg aka Zoella, famous YouTuber

From the edge of her bed, surrounded by fairy lights, this young beauty addict tests lip-glosses, foundations, skincare creams, nail polishes, and little by little, and she will make you a friend, she might become a millionaire in the process, as well. In 2013, a million YouTube users earned money from their videos.

The broadcast channel:

Did you know that one of the most popular topics on YouTube is beauty?

The video-sharing website points out what attracted attention of a large number of people: Music, Gaming, Entertainment and Vloggs are the most popular topics on YouTube. Over the last few years, the consumption of online videos has been skyrocketing.

There is a billion users’ visits on YouTube each month and over 6 billion hours of video are watched monthly on YouTube for 100 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute.

Concerning the beauty industry, the biggest audiences on YouTube are teenage girls, and they are creating and consuming content themselves. They crave instantaneous visual content so much that they keep on refreshing their favorite YouTuber’s page to catch the new released video. YouTube has 14.9 billion beauty-related video views.

What is a beauty guru?

They can be your best friend and your favorite celebrity at the same time - there are admired and accessible. People watch their videos to know what products they buy, what stores they shop at and what beauty techniques they use.

They have done the hard work for you and have carefully picked through and chosen the best make-up to show you.

They post on a schedule, provide seductive content, reply to comments, and build content consulting the viewers’ requests since fans can interact with the beauty guru and with other fans in the comments.

As viewers are committed in this community, it makes it difficult for subscribers not to purchase anything from their favorite beauty guru. The perception of building a relationship makes it all so engaging and addicting.

For the young people involved it is about far more than just make-up. Through daily vloggs, namely online diary journals, they provide an insight into their everyday life discussing their boyfriends, pets, outfit of the day and hairstyle. From “Healthy reviews” presenting recipes of vegan salads to their workout routines, they produce and edit their videos filming with professional camcorders, adding a nice background music and sweet voice-over instructions.

A leading-edge industry in the digital video marketplace:

Those face-to-face interactions bring much more impact and connections than usual advertising.

Brands would die for the same attention in their marketing efforts - those home-grown beauty experts have overrun fashion magazines and bricks-and-mortar stores. For example, Zoella currently has 6.5 million subscribers, whereas Chanel has 310 639 subscribers.

Beauty gurus are changing the face of the make-up industry. YouTube is not the only platform they are present on. You can follow them on Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter and all the conceivable other social media. They are used to organizing and running meet-ups in cooperation with brands.

Rumor has is that when Zoella recommends or mentions a Lush face mask, there is a 40% click-through rate to the Lush website. Moreover, some of the products presented in the videos are free goodies sent by a company for review.

While the beauty gurus are enough of a cultural phenomenon to be invited regularly on TV shows, they also have their controversies. YouTubers have to deal with an incredible amount of negative comments. Unfortunately, negative comments tend to be particularly bad toward women in the technology field. People behind their screen are trying to find the flaws.

Typing “Morning Routine” in the search bar of YouTube brings up over 1,920,000 results. Doing the same for “Smokey eye tutorial” gives you over 678,000 results. Those women now face harsh competition. Nevertheless, a small proportion of those gurus will make successful careers from it, bringing out their own beauty ranges.

“And now it’s time to wrap it up, if you enjoyed it please give it thumbs up”.