A REAL SUCCESS

RESARCH PROPOSAL

Research Proposal

For my community I am choosing the makeup YouTube and Instagram community. I chose this community because I am an avid makeup lover and used YouTube to teach me everything I know about beauty. I started watching YouTube videos to learn how to do my makeup when I was sixteen years old and had vicious acne. This was also the same year I decided to take better care of my natural hair, and turned to YouTube to learn about how to take care of it, and hear other video blogger’s natural hair stories. Youtubers with beauty based channels, also known as beauty gurus, in the past couldn’t make money off creating public videos on YouTube. Once the discovery of google ads became prevalent and viewers increased, things started to change. Brand marketers recognized the influence beauty gurus had on their audience and started offering free merchandise and paying the YouTubers with sponsorships and product collaborations. The top beauty gurus soon became millionaires, and big names in the industry. Brands started taking the top influencers on all expense paid vacations, where they shower the gurus in free product and other expensive monogramed goodies, that the youtubers are quick to show off on social media. With that, and the fact that YouTubers also spend their days living lavishly in their new luxury houses and cars, while doing virtually nothing can make this job extremely appealing.  So, it is understandable YouTube beauty industry would become extremely overpopulated. Everyone wants to make a channel and become rich from doing what they love. My research question is can people with brand new channels become successful on YouTube when this industry is already over populated, and what steps can be taken to expand new beauty channel viewers. I think this question is important because a lot of people put college off, and try to pursue a career on YouTube, but is it worth it? The people who are successful have had their channel for years, and beat the rush.  I want to explore my research with real life stories from people’s experiences. What’s missing from my research at this point is my interview.