Wednesday, January 27, 2021

PAPER 2B ONLINE MEDIA : Introduction to Zoella

Zoella is a fashion and beauty vlogger with 11.6 million subscribers on YouTube, Zoella's videos are about fashion, beauty and her life. Zoella has an estimated wealth of £4.7million, earning £600,000 a year from her two lifestyle channels. Their research predicts she can also earn upwards of £12,000 per sponsored Instagram post, also £250,000 per video for a video partnership. Companies want to place their products in her videos for new customers. Zoella and the youtuber she is collaborating gain views from each others channels. 

On the website, the first thing you see is her most recent post, her content is focused on 20-30 because of the certain articles that aren't suitable for younger ages anymore. Her target audience used to be pre-teen and early teenaged girls, the evidence is in her older youtube videos, the reason the target audience has changed is because Zoella knows that her fans have grown up and she wasn't very popular now so she raised the target audience to get her old audience. The audiences are encouraged to participate in her brand through comments, subscriptions and followers. 

Zoella offers a sense of entertainment and escapism to consumers who also feel a sense of personal identity. Also on her website is a preview of her instagram which shows both the brand @Zoella and her personal @ZoeSugg, the difference between the two is very big as the personal one shows more realistic normal posts of her life whereas the brand one is focused on her products and for her target audience. The representations feel less constructed and therefore more real. She makes a real effort to keep her vlogs as authentic and ‘real’ as they can be, showing all of her life rather than just the positive aspects. With it being a self-representation there is obviously a sense of biasness as she is unlikely to present herself in a negative light. However she is representing herself as the way she would like to be portrayed.

Her website is now controlled by Team Zoella, an instagram post shows her with her team, with young white women with expensive laptops, all healthy and happy. That matches the rest of her posts as she tries to be positive and healthy all the time and influences followers to be as well. Even though she doesn't like to show off how much money she has, you can often see how much she has like her house, or expensive items in her videos or posts. Her channel is mostly white people, the only time there is someone who isn't white is on her website or instagram to show off clothing or another type of product. The Bell Hooks theory focuses mostly on feminism but also factors in that race and class determine the extent to which an individuals are exploited, discriminated against or oppressed, meaning if Zoella represented herself differently and with different people, fans and followers probably won't like it as most of them are white and may discriminate her or the other person. 

On Instagram and Twitter, they both just repost the same articles that are on her website so more people can see them. However, her personal account shows off her life, they all have a warm theme to them to show that Zoe is a welcoming kind person, she doesn't sexualise herself at all and keeps it very positive. Her posts are usually about herself but some show who she is partnering up with, her most recent partnership was with MINI, and the rest of her posts is related with events going on.


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