Vlogging Predictions for 2017

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Vlogging is the best medium to connect with your audience and keep them constantly engaged. That’s a now well-established fact coming into 2017. It has become incredibly popular in recent years and millions of people are watching tens of thousands of vlogs every single day.

In the last decade blogging completely changed the way people consume content on the internet and now vlogging is in the process of once more changing the world of online content consumption.

People have been vlogging in one way or another for almost a decade, but in the last few years it's gained a serious amount of traction. Prior to this surge in “professional vlogging”, the actual process of creating a vlog was not that easy: Cameras were bulky and expensive and editing software was complicated and time-intensive.

However as technology has developed dramatically in recent years, it’s now incredibly easy and even fun to create vlogs. Popular vlogging cameras are now very inexpensive and editing software is easy to use. As a result, more and more people have started vlogging. Although vlogging has been steadily gathering interest over the years -- 2016 truly was the year that made vlogging super popular all over the globe.

These days the viewership of vlogs is increasingly massively along with audience loyalty to specific vloggers -- as highlighted with many vloggers gaining bigger and bigger numbers of “subscribers” at a faster rate than ever before. One of the most significant reasons why 2016 was the best year so far for vlogger popularity was Casey Neistat. You can also call it, “The Year of Casey Neistat”. He started vlogging daily in March 2015 and quickly became arguably the most fast-growing vlogger in the globe. In the six months that followed, he vlogged daily about his life, New York, his business, his family, etc. One of his videos titled “$21,000 first class airplane seat” went viral and has now received over 30 million views. The guy really exploded on the ‘vlog’ scene, and in doing so brought the format of vlogging into the public eye in a way it had never been prior.

In the August of 2015 Casey surpassed 1 million subscribers. This number increased to 4 million by August 2016. Unfortunately, he stopped vlogging to focus on creating short films, which he shows to his now 6 million(and growing) subscriber base. By gaining so much popularity all over the world he has popularized vlogging and inspired hundreds of people to start vlogging themselves.

One of the things we predict for vlogging in 2017 is that more and more brands are going to leverage vloggers to increase their reach. From a company’s perspective, vloggers can be the best brand ambassadors as they have the most loyal and engaging audience.

There are vloggers in most of the major industries like gaming, beauty, cooking, hiking, travelling, technology, finance, etc. And they have a community of millions and millions of people who regularly watch their vlogs. From a brand’s perspective, advertising their products via these vloggers can really increase their reach and be cost effective at the same time. As these vloggers are not going to charge near as much as A/B/C-list celebrities.

Although vloggers with over a million followers may charge brands a fairly high price for sponsored vlogs or product mentions -- brands can (and are starting more and more to) partner with vloggers who have anywhere between 20,000 and 500,000 followers. As these vloggers are in the growing stage of their channel they might not be that expensive. But the persuasion power of the vloggers is pretty much the same, whether they have 500,000 subscribers or 5 million subscribers. The only difference is that the vlogger with more subscribers will reach more people but this doesn’t mean that the vlogger with less audience won’t be helpful.

We are also seeing new companies of this ‘online’ generation sending their products to vloggers completely free of charge for reviewing. Popular vloggers may be getting huge amounts of products every week, so if you are a new product company -- you can start by sending your products to less popular vloggers and gain traction from them initially, before eventually (hopefully) having the big global “powerhouse” vloggers mentioning your product on their vlog in one way or another.

If you are tech enthusiast you must have heard the name “dbrand”. This company sells cover gear for mobile phones. They have leveraged vloggers more than any other player in their industry. They are constantly collaborating with the best vloggers in the tech community like MKBHD, Unbox Therapy, etc. These vloggers have millions and millions of engaged followers and by collaborating with them this company is increasing their reach rapidly.

Once such example of just how “big” we’re talking when talking about big brands getting involved with the world of vlogging is how LG recently launched an advertisement for their new 5k Display for Mac, and this time it’s not featuring a sports star or a movie celebrity. Instead they brought in the top four vloggers of the tech community – MKBHD, Ur Average Consumer, Austin Evans and TLD Today. This is a very smart and bold move by such a huge global corporation like LG.

Such examples like this completely validate the concept of using vloggers in your ads instead of film stars. Film stars are not experts in the industry, though they are good at acting. But when we are in the market for purchasing a product we want a true and honest review about the product. And if we hear it from the vloggers who are experts in their respective industry and we already know them, the persuasion will increase tremendously.

Conclusion

Vlogging is a growing platform and the rate at which it’s growing is going up and up. In the future, it is going to be a more “accepted” media consuming format in a professional sense. More and more companies will start to include vloggers in their marketing strategies. And we will definitely see a surge of companies leveraging vloggers to increase their brand reach in 2017.