The Value of Vlogs

In the 20 years since its launch in 2005, millions of people around the world have gathered on YouTube, and later other platforms, to share and consume human experience through video. Vlogging has become a global phenomenon where ordinary individuals share their everyday lives online and, in doing so, build connection and community with others. Sharing life through video has resulted in a collective database of knowledge, memory, culture, movements, landscapes, and life. Vlogging, as we have come to know it, began in the early 2000s, enabled by the lightweight, portable, and increasingly affordable mobile phone featuring an inbuilt camera. Extending the practice of blogging – a personal, intimate, diary-like log of individual human experience on the public Internet, mainly in text form – vlogging offered the additional intimacy and authenticity of the audio-visual moving image. The vlog (video-blog) became a widely accessible, and wildly popular, medium for presenting the self, sharing life, and forming connection with others online. Though vlogs come in many formats and have evolved into various genres on multiple platforms, early vlogs on YouTube often featured ordinary people sitting in their homes, talking self-consciously to the camera. These vlogs were poor quality, unrehearsed, badly lit, and unedited. They were amateur and unremarkable, but they were personal and authentic. As Michael Strangelove observed in his early ethnography of YouTube, “the appeal is that it’s authentic and about people. There’s nothing more interesting to real people (not Hollywood producers) than authentic stories told about other real people” (Watching 65). In his article in this issue, “YouTube and Radical Change”, Strangelove once again reminds us of the extraordinary potential of ordinary individuals to create cultural objects, such as vlogs, that inspire hope and radical change. Addressing the increasing despair that many feel in this moment in history, Strangelove reminds us that “there is a new, or perhaps renewed, sense that when it comes to making history, YouTube videos made by ordinary people matter”. The practice of vlogging has evolved over time. As vlogs have become increasingly popular, the potential of vlogs to reach millions of viewers has resulted in the professionalisation and commercialisation of the practice. Vlogging is now a lucrative industry driven by the ability to influence mass audiences and their consumer behaviour. As Patricia G. Lange found in her anthropology of YouTube, initially, vlogging offered an exciting new way to participate in a democratised space, express oneself, and interact and connect with others (Thanks). Over time, however, the increasing popularity and commercialisation of the site introduced complexities which radically changed the experience and process of being a vlogger (Lange, Thanks). In her article in this issue, “Disenchantment and Re-Enchantment of YouTube Vlogging: A Posthuman Historical Perspective”, Lange uses a posthuman framework to remind us that YouTube has undergone many mutations, and there are, therefore, many YOUTUBEs and many VLOGs. Lange warns that as researchers of vlogs, we should be careful not to conflate sites for, and genres of, vlogging, and instead take care to describe the details of each version and its circumstances. Indeed, the strength of this issue is in each author’s emphasis on the contextual circumstances of the platforms and vlogs they explore. It is in these contextual details that we see vlogging’s historical significance, and continued relevance in facing the challenges of our present and future. As a form of participatory media within the democratised online space, vlogs have been celebrated by many as a space to express diverse thoughts, ideas, values, and experiences in public. Video sharing platforms, like all social media, have become a collective space for the expression and negotiation of cultural values. In his article “From Love Meetings (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1964) to Vlogs: Identity, Community, and Publics in the Age of Networked Intimacies”, Stefano Odorico reminds us that video has long been used for this purpose in his discussion of the genealogy of vlogs. Comparing two examples set 50 years apart, Odorico demonstrates the evolution of the use of video to capture ordinary people’s voices. He discusses the changing influences over representation and visibility over time, from the authority of the filmmaker to the veiled direction of the algorithm. Odorico highlights “how the making of publics through film/video has long involved negotiations between expressive agency and structural constraints”. What changes over time and throughout history “are the infrastructures, distribution logics, and economies that shape who can speak, who can be heard, and how publics are formed”. Recognising the influence of platforms on the practice of vlogging, Jia Guo and Crystal Abidin explore how six popular Chinese user-generated video platforms have shaped vlogging in China. In their article “Platform-Driven Vlogging: How Vlogs Were Mainstreamed in the Chinese Creator Market”, Guo and Abidin discuss the active role of Chinese platforms in turning the “vlog” – or shipin boke (视频博客) – “into a contextually legitimised and commercially viable mode of content creation in the Chinese market”. Guo and Abidin demonstrate how the six platforms govern and shape vlogging as both a cultural and commercial practice. They analyse the role these platforms play as intermediaries between vloggers, brands, and audiences, their use of incentives and campaigns to produce and monetise video content, and their ongoing engineering of visibility through “feature diversification, algorithmic governance, and monetisation schemes”. Both Odorico and Guo and Abidin emphasise how vlogs – and the resulting identities, communities, movements, and markets – are collectively shaped by all the participants within networks, including audience/viewers, vloggers/creators, platforms, technologies, brands, and products. Though much of the recent focus on vlogging has explored its increasing professionalisation and commercialisation, there are many millions of people who vlog without aspirations to become influencers. In their article “The Ethics of Accidental Vlogs”, Ryan McGrady and Harshita Snehi explore the widespread use of YouTube as an infrastructure for audio-visual communication with close friends and family. They draw on an enormous random sample of videos, which reveal that only 4% of videos on YouTube have over 10,000 views (McGrady et al.), while the median video on YouTube has up to 41 views (Zheng et al.). McGrady and Snehi use the case study of Hindi YouTube to demonstrate a more accurate picture of how vlogging fits into normal people’s lives, outside the Western imperative to “broadcast yourself” and create popular content. They demonstrate that among Hindi-speaking users, common video uploads are more accurately understood as “accidental vlogs – public videos likely meant for a small or private audience which reveal aspects of a subject’s life”. They argue that accidental vlogs require renewed ethical consideration of user privacy by governments, platforms, and researchers, to account for the cultural specificity and variability of how vlogging is used by different groups in different contexts. There is the random sharing of private life (resulting in accidental vlogs) for the purpose of connection, and then there is the deliberate sharing of personal – and very sensitive – experience for the sake of public testimony and witness. Each type of sharing through vlogs demands careful ethical consideration by researchers. In her article “Methods and Ethics for Research about Women’s Vlogs That Disclose Experiences of Sexual Violence”, Carol Harrington explores whether we, as researchers, should approach vlogs as human subjects or authored works. She builds on her previous work (Harrington “Making”) to explore the ethics of consent, privacy, authorship, and ownership when researching vlogs. Harrington argues that “researchers have an ethical responsibility to cite vlogs as creative productions whose authors should be acknowledged”. But she agrees that there are exceptions, and that therefore every research project involving vlogs requires careful consideration of each vlog’s context, subject, and purpose. As we now know, there can be a considerable cost to the individual when they share their life online, and as researchers we must be careful to avoid causing further harm or distress. As individuals, vloggers must balance the desire to share and create with the toll of being public and vulnerable. In her article “Reaction Videos, Researcher Positionality, and Falling Back in Love with Vlogging”, Renata Lisowski details her experience as a “reactor” (creator of reaction videos) and “aca-fan” (academic fan). She explores her experience of making reaction videos to the musical acts performed for Uuden Musiikin Kilpailu (UMK) – the Finnish competition preceding Eurovision. Lisowski uses autoethnography to analyse her experience as a fan, a viral cross-cultural creator, and a researcher. As others have found, she details how excitement and adrenaline quickly turned to burnout, caused by mounting pressures, looming dread, lack of sleep, negative comments, and the challenge of remaining transparent as an aca-fan and authentic as a creator of reaction videos. Lisowski writes that her experience was “a crash course in maintaining authenticity while performing academic and emotional labour”. Her work highlights the critical role that authenticity plays in vlogs. Though the practice and platforms have changed over the years, vlogging has always relied on a premise and value of authenticity. When the authenticity of a vlog is in question, it can harm the vlogger and their network. The proliferation of vlogging as an occupation has amplified complexities surrounding the authenticity of the lives shared in vlogs, which presents problems for individuals and audiences. The question of authenticity is further complicated by the rapid increase in “fake” content. In her article “Reflections on a Novel Method for Exploring Audience Reception of Fictional ‵Vlogs‘”, Caitlin Adams offers a new method for discovering how audiences determine authenticity in vlogs. Adams states that “authenticity is subjective, contextually dependent, and open to audience interpretation”. Her timely findings suggest that audiences are typically able to assess the authenticity of vlogs when viewing content within the bounds of what they would usually/routinely consume. Adams refers to this as “fluency”. This finding reminds us again of the importance of context when researching vlogs. If vlogs are shaped within intimate networks – of vloggers, viewers, platform, technology, brands, and so on – it is within these social networks that authenticity is judged, managed, and addressed. Though vlogging has been around for more than 20 years, it is still a rich site for discovery, especially as a space for cultural negotiation. In her article “Cultural Adaptation on YouTube: Migrant Vlogs in Taiwan as Digital Storytelling”, Sevda Kaya Kitınur explores migrant vlogs as a narrative process of storytelling about cultural transition, adaptation, and transformation. Kaya Kitınur explores vlogging as a digital and relational activity “through which migrants construct continuity between past and present while negotiating their sense of place in new surroundings”. She examines how migrants use vlogging to negotiate belonging, invite and engage with audiences, “and transform individual adaptation into forms of social and cultural capital”. Recognising the important role that vlogging plays in making culture visible, Kaya Kitınur also analyses how racial hierarchies influence the visibility and success of particular migrant vlogs in Taiwan. There were many more submissions to this issue exploring vlogs as a “third space” for cultural hybridity and negotiation, and I would like to acknowledge Hadjer Ben Salem, Florence Bacabac, and Charitha Dissanayake for their developing research with this focus. The affordances of vlogging for the expression, exploration, and negotiation of culture warrant their own issue. This issue demonstrates the enormous value of vlogs. As those who come before me have argued, vlogs should be viewed not as texts but as a process (Strangelove, Watching; Lange, Thanks): a process of living, doing, “being and becoming” (Kennedy), and also of responding to, shaping, and remaking our individual and collective experience. Vlogs offer us a rich database of our lived experience, our evolutions and transformations. They also offer us an opportunity to shape and understand the future. Vlogs are a window to the past and a window to the future. Through vlogging we can explore where we have come from and where we are going. Through vlogging we can investigate, respond to, and address the most pressing issues facing our society. I would like to extend my sincere thanks to all the authors and peer reviewers who contributed to this issue, and to all the scholars who shaped, and continue to shape, our thinking and research on vlogs. References Adams, Caitlin Anne. “Reflections on a Novel Method for Exploring Audience Reception of Fictional ‵Vlogs‘.” M/C Journal 28.4 (2025). . Guo, Jia, and Crystal Abidin. “Platform-Driven Vlogging: How Vlogs Were Mainstreamed in the Chinese Creator Market.” M/C Journal 28.4 (2025). . Harrington, Carol. “Making Ethical Judgement Calls about Qualitative Social Media Research on Sensitive Issues.” International Journal of Social Research Methodology 28.4 (2024): 397–409. . Harrington, Carol. “Methods and Ethics for Research about Women’s Vlogs That Disclose Experiences of Sexual Violence.” M/C Journal 28.4 (2025). . Kennedy, Ümit. “Arriving on YouTube: Vlogs, Automedia and Autoethnography.” Life Writing 18.4 (2021): 563-578. . Kaya Kitınur, Sevda. “Cultural Adaptation on YouTube: Migrant Vlogs in Taiwan as Digital Storytelling.” M/C Journal 28.4 (2025). . Lange, Patricia G. “Disenchantment and Re-Enchantment of YouTube Vlogging: A Posthuman Historical Perspective.” M/C Journal 28.4 (2025). . Lange, Patricia G. Thanks for Watching: An Anthropology Study of Video Sharing on YouTube. U of Colorado Press, 2019. Lisowski, Renata. “Reaction Videos, Researcher Positionality, and Falling Back in Love with Vlogging.” M/C Journal 28.4 (2025).. McGrady, Ryan, et al. “Dialing for Videos: A Random Sample of YouTube.” Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media 3 (2023): 1-85. . McGrady, Ryan, and Harshita Snehi. “The Ethics of Accidental Vlogs.” M/C Journal 28.4 (2025). . Odorico, Stefano. “From Love Meetings (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1964) to Vlogs: Identity, Community, and Publics in the Age of Networked Intimacies.” M/C Journal 28.4 (2025). . Strangelove, Michael. Watching YouTube: Extraordinary Videos by Ordinary People. U of Toronto Press, 2010. Strangelove, Michael. “YouTube and Radical Change.” M/C Journal 28.4 (2025). . Zheng, Kevin, et al. TubeStats, 17 June 2024. .