Reaction Videos, Researcher Positionality, and Falling Back in Love with Vlogging

Introduction Reaction videos are a popular genre of vlog in which a creator watches a cultural product, in many cases a music video, and shares their impression and opinion in real time. Reaction videos are popular amongst the international fandom of the Eurovision Song Contest, and every spring during the national selection season for Eurovision, YouTube is inundated with videos from around the world reacting to Eurovision hopefuls. In recent years, reaction videos to songs competing in Finland’s national selection Uuden Musiikin Kilpailu (UMK, translation: New Music Competition) have achieved phenomenal popularity, garnering thousands of views for even the smallest of channels. This popularity has not only drawn attention to the contest within Finland and abroad but also facilitated the cross-cultural formation of an online fandom surrounding the contest that has had real-life impact on the reaction video creators (reactors). My own journey as a UMK reactor began as a mere hobby but over time resulted in me moving from the United States to Finland to pursue doctoral research on the topic. This article examines the complexities of positionality as an academic and fan to answer the question: How does my prior practice as a reactor impact on my research, and how does my research impact on my own experience as a reactor? To do so, I will describe the confluences and conflicts that arose between my identities as academic and fan during the research process. Background and Methodology This research is grounded in prior work on Convergence Culture Theory (Galuszka; Jenkins) to understand the relationship between media consumption and production within a participatory culture shaped by new media, specifically through the lens of foreign made reaction videos to Finnish music on YouTube. Scholars of reaction videos have explored cross-cultural remediation (Goddard; Swan), creator labour (McDaniel), and the performance of authenticity (Cox), and my research builds on these ideas from the point of view of a reactor who is also a researcher, in other words, an academic-fan or “aca-fan”. Navigating my positionality as an aca-fan while researching a fan culture in which I was an active participant was aided by the work of Hills, Jenkins, and Christofari and Guitton. Christofari and Guitton argue that in aca-fan research “what theoretical and conceptual considerations often leave out are the practical modalities of the aca-fan's work” (714). To address this gap, I demonstrate how my practice as a vlogger and creator of new media adds to the discussion on what can happen when science and fandom intersect. Eurovision has been researched extensively, with analysis ranging from its social (Carbone et al.; Quigg et al.) to its political (Baker; Jay; Öberg; Vuletic) significance. Despite some explorations of Eurovision fandom (Halliwell; Highfield et al.; Kyriakidou et al.) there has been little focus on new media produced by Eurovision fans. Eurovision researchers Chris Hay and Jessica Carniel approached their study of the international song contest as aca-fans and stated that they “learnt through the course of our research that our own fandom barely scratched the surface of what was possible” regarding fan practices and experiences (306). As a Eurovision reactor and aca-fan, I take their research one step further to show what is possible when a researcher is deeply embedded and creatively active within the fandom. Additionally, national selections that feed into Eurovision, such as UMK, have received little attention from scholars and are ripe for research. The Eurovision fandom is large and diverse; in the 2025 contest, 37 countries participated, and each country has its own unique fandom. By analyzing national selections as a sub-fandom of the greater Eurovision fandom, we can not only see how these fandoms manifest on the national level, but also open up the possibility for comparative study of the national fandoms. Reactors are particularly useful in this context as they foster the fan community through their vlogging activity and lead the conversation on national selections with the fans inside and outside of the participating country. To better understand the output of new media by the fandom, my research utilises established methodologies for online ethnographic research (Boelstorff et al.; Hine; Pink et al.) and leverages my own experience as a reactor within the Eurovision and UMK fandoms through autoethnography (Chang; Kennedy; Pignetti). Ümit Kennedy’s autoethnographic research on vlogging effectively demonstrates how the transition from researcher to vlogger impacted on her, and in contrast I will show how the transition from vlogger to researcher impacted on me and my work. As stated by Kennedy, “autoethnography is not the whole picture, but it provides an insight into the complexities behind the scenes that often go unseen” (576). During the 2025 UMK season, I followed the contest in online spaces and attended in-person events while taking extensive field notes throughout the experience. My study involved the creation of 16 UMK themed vlogs on YouTube, watching all UMK reaction videos that were posted within 24 hours of initial song release (over 70 videos in total), semi-structured interviews with two popular UMK reactors, attendance at the UMK artist reveal, participation in a press trip with international media and Eurovision reactors, and attendance at UMK with media accreditation, which granted me access to rehearsals and artist press conferences. My UMK vlogs – including reaction videos to all seven songs competing in UMK – featured a research disclosure, my personal ranking, and results prediction. My other UMK-related vlogs included an artist interview, press conference and event coverage, and a contest experience vlog with my reflections on in-person attendance of the contest. When creating my reactions, I followed a set of guidelines to maintain consistency in the content and the resulting data: all reactions were filmed immediately upon song release; all videos begin with a disclosure that they are created for research purposes; the videos include my genuine first impression and opinion of the songs; the video thumbnails are a screenshot from the actual video; videos are titled consistently (“UMK25 reaction: song title by artist name”). In total, from the UMK artist reveal on 8 January 2025 until 15 February 2025, one week following the conclusion of the contest, my research videos accumulated 96,484 views and 1,093,800 impressions on the platform. Throughout the process, I recorded in my field notes details about my activities and the effect they had on me. This article utilises those reflections as my primary data. Positionality as an Aca-Fan My role as a reactor precedes my position as a researcher, and in fact my experience as a reactor was the catalyst for pursuing this line of scientific inquiry. I began creating my own reaction videos in 2023 as a hobby in my personal time while settling into life in a new city at the start of my professional career. I did not have any expectation or desire to become an Internet celebrity; I just wanted to do something creative and make new friends who shared my interest in Eurovision. Much to my surprise, the fifth reaction video I ever posted (Cha Cha Cha by Käärijä, the winner of UMK in 2023) went viral and was viewed over 31,000 times in its first week online (The E Spot, Cha Cha Cha). Not only did the views result in many new subscribers, but the Finnish tabloid Seura even ran an article about me (Ollikainen). I thought this was a fluke, so I did not anticipate that I would have another reaction to a UMK song go viral in 2024. My reaction to Paskana (translation: I’m a F***ing Wreck) by Sara Siipola, which is currently the most viewed reaction to the song, almost never got posted (The E Spot, Paskana). It was the first time in any of my reactions that I had been overcome by emotion, and I cried throughout the video. My tears were authentic, and the vulnerability of showing emotion on camera was an uncomfortable feeling. The positive response to the reaction was equally overwhelming, and even Sara Siipola herself shared a video on TikTok reacting to my reaction (Siipola). I was left wondering: why would my reaction video to a Finnish song, on a channel based in the United States with less than a thousand subscribers, be watched by tens of thousands of people, including the artist, and result in such a unique co-creation of content? At that time, I realised there is something special about reaction videos, particularly in the context of UMK. Indeed, other scholars had already observed the cross-cultural impact of reaction videos, such as Michael Goddard who examined the phenomenon along racial lines by looking at reactions made by non-white creators to white-coded music genres, and Anna Lee Swan who analysed the transnationalism of North Americans reacting to K-Pop songs. In comparison to these studies, UMK reactors come from a variety of races and nationalities, and whereas K-Pop is a massive global industry, UMK songs represent a niche segment of the domestic Finnish pop music market. When I made my first reaction videos in 2023, I lacked any technical knowledge of making videos for YouTube and had no understanding of how to form a following on the platform. Though engagement was low on my first few videos and remained low even after the viral success of my Cha Cha Cha reaction, every interaction was exciting, which encouraged me to continue making videos. In the summer of 2023, I created a variety of vlogs for my channel, including many about my forays into Finnish language and culture as I prepared for a vacation to Finland to attend UMK. Since I would attend UMK in person, I made sure to react to every song competing in the 2024 contest. In addition to the success of my Paskana reaction, all my UMK reactions that year received thousands, and even tens of thousands, of views. This was a huge success for my small channel of only 1,500 subscribers, and those days were full of adrenaline and excitement. Though I did not know it at the time, my experience as a reactor would change drastically in 2025 when I moved to Finland and began my research with a new identity as an aca-fan. Approaching this research as an established member of the UMK fandom had advantages and disadvantages. It is not uncommon for aca-fans to begin as fans and later transition into academic research (Christofari and Guitton 719), and the embodied knowledge gained through my prior experience as a reactor provided me with a strong understanding of the community I study and was beneficial in developing my research plan, building trust with informants, and facilitating views on my research videos. On the other hand, I was confronted with challenges that impacted on the research process and my personal well-being, which ultimately changed my relationship to reacting and my identity as a vlogger. Kennedy’s experience with vlogging as a researcher showed that “anxieties take a toll when the product being offered is the self. Especially when the narrative is being produced in real time” (573). This has been true for me, as the research process has been more than just scientific inquiry; it has also been a crash course in maintaining authenticity while performing academic and emotional labour. In Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame Online, Abidin discusses online emotional labour with regard to camgirls and states that “microcelebrities have their popularity premised on feelings of connection and interactive responsiveness with their audiences” (11). Based on my own experience as a microcelebrity and vlogger of UMK reaction videos, I believe that this inherent emotional labour is amplified by my shared fandom with my audience and my position as a researcher. My vlogs and reactions are a manifestation of my inner life as a fan of UMK and allow the audience to observe the process of my research in an open and highly vulnerable manner. Confluence and Conflict I expected that incorporating my hobby of creating reaction videos in my research design would make the project enjoyable. I was mistaken. In previous years, I was excitedly making my reactions with minimal pressure, but pressures felt as a researcher led me down the road to burnout. Through interviews with vloggers, Patricia Lange found that burnout is a common experience among creators who rely on the financial returns of monetised videos (249). In contrast, my videos are not monetised, but my role as a researcher had a professionalised aspect which impacted on me in a similar way. The most acutely felt pressures were time and copyright compliance. When I was living in the United States, UMK songs were released at 17:00 in my time zone, and I was afforded the entire evening to record, edit, and upload my videos. Now, as a resident of Finland, songs were released at midnight, and I felt great urgency to upload my reactions immediately to maximise their reach. This urgency turned into dread when coupled with editing the videos to comply with copyright restrictions. All videos uploaded to YouTube undergo an automated copyright check which can result in full authorisation, revenue-sharing with the copyright holder, geographic restrictions, or even total blocks on visibility. Though I had encountered copyright restrictions with previous reactions, the importance of these videos for my research made the checks much more stressful. As recorded in my field notes: “whenever the videos go through the copyright check, I can feel myself tense up because if it is clear (or only geographically restricted, as is usually the case with Russia and Belarus) then it means I can start to get myself ready to sleep. If it gets flagged, then it could mean hours of editing and reuploading to get the video online”. Long nights spent reacting and editing had a devastating impact on my sleep schedule, which in turn made me feel the mental and emotional pressures more acutely. Lack of sleep is certainly not an unusual experience in the academic context, but it is an unhealthy one. In the day following the first song release, I noted that I was already having trouble keeping up with comments, and following subsequent song releases, I noted discomfort when faced with negative comments from viewers. The most upsetting were comments that doubted the value of my research. Before I became an aca-fan, most negative comments I received were based on a difference of opinion about the song I reacted to, which is a normal aspect of being a reactor; however, negative comments about my research felt more personal in nature, and at times even xenophobic, with some commenters remarking that my work was a waste of taxpayer money and that I should go back to my home country. An expected part of academic life is defending the validity of your work, but because my research is publicly visible and interactive, pre-publication criticism is not confined to the academy. As I recorded in my field notes, “if anything will prepare me for my eventual dissertation defense, it will be the opponents who appear within my comments”. Throughout the reaction process, what was once a low-stakes activity transformed into a distressing one. Other words that appear in my field notes to describe the experience included: disappointing, frustrating, unhappy, and furious. At the end of the reaction process, I summed up my experience with “I find very little about this fun”. During the research process, my positionalities as an aca-fan came into conflict as I endeavoured to maintain my authenticity while reacting. Through my prior reactions, I had already achieved the perception of authenticity through the three modes described by Cameron Cox: involuntary physical responses of shock during Cha Cha Cha and crying during Paskana; authenticity claimed through fandom after two years of reacting and travelling to attend UMK; and reactor as a celebrity as one of the most viewed UMK reactors. Despite this, my new status as a researcher had the risk of damaging viewers’ perceived sense of my authenticity and motivations for reacting. As Lange states, “tension emerges when people use YouTube to support their livelihood and engage in temporal padding in ways that viewers may feel threaten the quality of individual videos” (248). A pitfall for aca-fan Daisy Pignetti was inadequate transparency and accessibility with the fan community she studied, so I took much consideration regarding how to inform my audience of the nature of the work I was doing. Before the UMK videos were released, I posted a short video disclosing to viewers that I would be doing research on the UMK season, that my reactions were part of the research, and gave information regarding data collection and privacy protection. Furthermore, every reaction video I made included a disclaimer at the beginning stating that the videos were for research purposes and a link to the disclosure video. It was so strange for me to read a script during the disclosure statement, as my prior reactions were fully ad-libbed, and I worried that viewers may doubt the authenticity of my reactions since they served a research purpose. To counteract that possibility, I deliberately avoided the use of clickbait titles or dramatised thumbnail images which could misrepresent the content of my reactions. I happily received no comments from viewers doubting my authenticity, but the dread I felt before reacting had me questioning my own authenticity as the reactions began to feel more like a performance of emotional labour. Arguably, all reaction videos do involve emotional labour (Goddard; McDaniel); however, when I was reacting as a fan this aspect was only felt subconsciously. Reacting as a researcher, with the added pressures and theoretical awareness that position entailed, put the ratio of enjoyment to effort entirely out of balance. By the time the third of seven UMK songs was released, I found myself pacing around my apartment, desperately trying to pump myself up and find the enthusiasm to film a reaction, whereas in previous years it was the highlight of my day. I noted at the time, “you wouldn’t know when watching my reaction that only one hour before I was dreading the fact that I had to make a video”. The conflict felt between my identities as an academic and a fan while making reaction videos had a lasting impact on me, and it has been an ongoing struggle to regain my sense of authenticity as a creator and rediscover the joy in creating. Conclusion One month after release of the songs, the UMK final occurred in Tampere, Finland. A highlight of the experience was interaction with other members of fan media from around Europe, many of whom I had only ever spoken with in online spaces, and meeting contest attendees who had watched my videos. Though my experience reacting to the UMK songs was somewhat joyless, the real-life encounters around the contest were highly fulfilling. When the participant observation phase of my research concluded, I reflected on the experience in my field notes, “I can feel my relationship to the contest changing, which is exciting but also quite scary, because I don’t know what that means for me on a personal/professional level going forward”. Christofari and Guitton describe the aca-fan as “a node between academic and fan communities” (713) which primarily transmits information from fans to academics, but I hope that through my status within the fan community I can also transmit what I learned through this process back to the fans and increase their understanding of what reactors go through when they aren't recording. My prior practice as a reactor certainly aided me in the process of my research in a practical sense, but the impact the research process had on my experience as a vlogger changed the trajectory of my YouTube channel. In the months following UMK, I made only a few videos as I reevaluated my goals for content creation, an outcome which bears much similarity to the burnt-out vloggers interviewed by Lange. 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