High Impact Practices Student Showcase Fall 2024
How YouTuber's Brands Change as Their Rhetorical Choices Change Over Time
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Files
Download Script.docx (20 KB)
Course Code
ENC
Course Number
1102
Faculty/Instructor
Pamela Baker
Faculty/Instructor Email
Pamela.Baker@ucf.edu
Abstract, Summary, or Creative Statement
Rhetoric explains much of human interaction and meaning making, which builds an identity--credibility, trustworthiness, character, or authority. YouTubers use this when publishing content, as it can enhance their monetary streams such as branding or endorsements. This has been explained through the existing conversations in the community, however all of the scholars fail to address the issue throughout time. Through this study, it was found that there is indeed trends among increasing rhetoric (video quality) and the frequency of branding/endorsements. There had also been connections with the content maturity. It was concluded that what was research was interconnected with one another, as videos with high quality focused more on their brands whilst those that had low quality aimed for endorsements. Seeing as this is the same for maturity, with very mature content being low quality and vice versa; YouTubers that focus on their brand shift their target demographic to younger audiences while YouTubers that focus on endorsements appeal to wide demographics over time.
Additional Resources
SCRIPT/AUDIO TRANSCRIPT
Slide 1
Hi everyone, my name is Hector Mejia, and I will be arguing how YouTuber’s brands change as their rhetorical choices change over time.
Slide 2
YouTube was made nearly a year before I was born, so it was no shock to see me on the site whenever I got the chance to use my mom’s phone. Being a kid, I would watch people play games like Minecraft or Roblox, purely for entertainment value. However, over time, that has changed. Now, I can’t go a few videos without YouTubers blasting me in the face with promotions of different products. It was a bizarre phenomenon because most of the people I watched—who never did this—had begun doing so, with a multitude of others following suit. People I viewed as trustworthy had shifted their character, but why?
Slide 3
In short, it’s due to rhetoric. Rhetoric is a set of principles that explains much of human interaction and meaning making. Those sets of principles build identity: credibility, trustworthiness, etc. Downs sites identity revolving around ethos, or ethics. It deals with the authority of one’s character, which builds trust, as described by ES. Rhetoric is used to persuade, as it manipulates how we perceive and analyze things.
Slide 4
So, what does this have to do with YouTube? Believe it or not, YouTuber’s use this approach to build their identity, as they are consistently making rhetorical appeals. Downs explains two out of the three main appeals, pathos (emotion) and logos (logic); which were influential to ES’ methodology, where they investigated how Instagram users used these appeals.
Slide 5
Trust results in a malformed “relationship” between the YouTubers and their audiences. To start, influencers create “global villages” online—where digital communication takes prevalence—and relationships grow despite not being in person, leading to audiences mimicking what they see online (ES). This is explained as a “parasocial relationship”, a one-sided emotional and long-term bond between an individual and their audience (Yuan et al.). Scholars have suggested that this relationship exemplifies trust. In congruence, others classify it as a “expert-novice” relationship since the influencer could be perceived as an authority (Kier-Byfield et al.).
Slide 6
The creation of the audience creates a brand/platform. Persuasion is then used by YouTubers as they can use that parasocial relationship to their advantage.
Slide 7
That leads into my research question.
Although established studies have stated identity to be the driving factor in decision making for individuals who watch influencers, they often neglect directly connecting to rhetoric as a whole or how it is changed over time; as it alters an influencer’s identity and brand along the way. It is important to recognize that YouTubers often persuade using rhetoric, which could affect their unaware audiences. This relationship is constantly changing too, adding to the never-ending pile that is this issue. Although having their faults, Yuan et al. does exemplify this issue by stating it mishaps user’s purchase intent on a large scale.
So, with this gap in knowledge, how do youtuber’s brands change as their rhetorical choices change over time?
Understanding the issue at hand, I knew I had to stand against the uncounted aspects of the problem and address them head on. In this study, I constructed my methods around these unaddressed factors on the YouTube space, as I was most familiar with the platform. My experiment proved that there in fact is a connection between the frequency of branding and the overall demeanor of content quality, and I will be presenting these findings in a qualitative and quantitative format; stressing the importance of each aspect of what I investigated.
Slide 8
Multimodal analysis to analyze each rhetorical feature on a given YouTube video, leading to genre analysis to locate those features across a multitude of different YouTubers. Confidentiality and anonymity were crucial, so procedures were set in place to protect those unaware they were participating. Thumbnails, titling, descriptions, editing, maturity, endorsements, and branding were investigated across three different time periods.
Slide 9
With the data collected, I will now cover the results and point out the trends that occur. Starting with the content quality, I classified each YouTube feature with the following: high-end, medium-end, and low-end; which is basically high quality, medium quality, and low quality. YouTubers start off with mostly medium-end quality, with a lean towards low-end content. This was expected, as this is where most were just getting exposed to the platform. That quickly changed when they gained more popularity overtime, with the low-end quality being little to none. Medium-end content is now taking the majority, with high-end content just kicking off. Finally, as of most YouTuber’s recent videos, high-end content overtakes medium-end content. Low-end content is still scarce, however. Obviously, with it being easy to see, the trend here indicates that over time YouTubers advance their quality.
Slide 10
I then analyzed the next group based on frequency, with those being: endorsements and branding. Endorsements are deals made with other businesses, while branding is one’s very own business. Starting us off in their early videos, there is absolutely no endorsements happening on a wide scale. Branding, however, is nearly split 50-50. Moving on, we see a sudden surge of frequency of endorsements, with the split being nearly 33-33-33, whilst most videos contained some sort of branding. Finally, we actually see a reduction in overall frequency between the two, with them either having high frequency or a normal amount of frequence, excluding those that don’t contain any. The trend here is trickier to indicate, as within the first period there was an insurgence of both endorsements and branding, with a slight decrease in the second time period.
Slide 11
Finally, we have both titling and maturity. Titling would be classified from incoherent titles (those that don’t follow a pattern between a certain individuals content), articulated ones (those that do follow a pattern) and finally capitalized titles (those that are eye-catching). Maturity deals with the target demographic. The change in titles are scarce, so I am deciding to exclude those results from the overall discussion. As for maturity, the trends there indicate that over time YouTubers will shift their content from very mature-to-mature into content that is mature-to-family friendly.
Slide 12
Based on those patterns, I followed them up with the following claims. As YouTubers become more confident in their performance online, they begin to advance their video quality and take on partnership deals. The relationship performed here has to do with the YouTuber’s content quality, as businesses would not be able to sell their products if the people they made deals with were not selling their ideas. Since rhetoric has slowly been integrating into YouTuber’s content throughout their careers (55% low-end quality in early stages to at most a 20% low-end as of recent videos), it also has a direct correlation to the frequency of endorsements. This is backed by Qureshi et al. and Yuan et al., who argued the relationship formed between the audience and an influencer controls a user’s purchase intent. Both imply that this relationship had been built upon trust, which is built with rhetorical persuasion; done with thumbnails, titles, descriptions, and/or editing (Qureshi et al.; Yuan et al.).
Over time, patterns indicate that YouTuber’s will often drop either endorsements or their own businesses depending on the quality of their videos. We know that they prefer one over the other because the neutrality of both was at an all-time high of 75-30% in the middle of their careers, which dropped directly after in the next period to 30-25%. Seeing as there was a shift, and not much increase, it was found that creators who had better quality for their videos prioritized their own businesses, and those who had lesser quality went on to take up partnership deals with other businesses. In addition to this, maturity also had a direct influence on the decision as those who gradually shifted to a mature to family friendly audience often increased their quality, with it being vice versa on the opposite side of the spectrum. This preference over one or the other could be explained by Qureshi et al.’s findings, where long-term engagement with one product will influence purchase intent: crucial for branding. As for endorsements, this could be explained by Yuan et al.’s idea of trust influencing decision-making as endorsements typically shift product categories from video to video. This explains why the high maturity content focuses on partnerships, as there is a general audience, whereas family friendly videos constrict themselves into a narrower one.
With that previous point being stated, it is believed that a YouTuber’s own business or brand is catered to their audience, often being young. We can see this quite simply looking at the specific data for each individual YouTuber, where they shift to mature to family friendly content when focusing on selling their own products and ideas. This is exemplified when this is the opposite case for those simply selling other products for other businesses, as they tend to have a mature to very mature demographic. Rhetoric deals with an audience, which is why the sense of identity shapes how one acts to reach that audience (Downs). Seeing that a younger demographic is more impressionable, it is no wonder that a creator will shift their content to reflect that audience (ES; Qureshi et al.; Yuan et al.). ES states in their discussion how Instagram mommy-bloggers included certain beliefs (Christianity, patriotism, parenting, etc.) to influence their audience. Since they focus on their branding, the frequency they promote their products will be exponential; with long-term engagement the targeted audience will have their purchase intentions affected (Qureshi et al.). Correspondent to Qureshi et al.’s findings, Yuan et al. states that trust will also have an effect on purchase intent, which is seen in vulnerable populations such as the younger generations.
Slide 13
With the discussion of the most meaningful results out of the way, it is time to conclude. Implicating this into the real world, We need to be cognitive of our own decisions and become aware of rhetoric as it changes over the course of a certain time period. This extends far beyond just YouTube. The reason I saw this as a large problem on YouTube is because rhetoric is so easily able to persuade there, and I had fallen victim to it. But that’s just me, there are countless others on all different audiences who experience the same.
My findings do have limitations, however. Although I am satisfied by the implications it has, I fear that there could have been more to extract upon if I expanded the scope of my research. These limitations in my research, funny enough, have to deal with what I researched: time. I was only able to collect 20 samples, which if expanded could have resulted in more patterns. It could have also strengthened or weakened my argument, and I can’t deny that. However, I hope this could be fixed with future directions.
I feel like qualitative research may get into the nitty gritty of how a specific YouTuber may operate, and quantitative may find new trends or build upon existing ones. In addition to this, I feel like this is not limited to YouTube itself as other platforms are drastically different and also require their own spotlight. Even I am left with additional questions as a result of my project, that being with the similarities among trends and what the explanations of those could be. What I have found here is not perfected until it is continually built upon; as I hope what was found here can be of grave importance to future scholars in the community, such as the scholars I had drawn upon.
Slide 14 credits
With that being said, I thank you for your time, listening to my arguments made. I hope it has educated you or even inspires you to carry my torch. Thank you.
Keywords
Social Media; YouTube; Rhetoric; Brands
Recommended Citation
Mejia, Hector J., "How YouTuber's Brands Change as Their Rhetorical Choices Change Over Time" (2024). High Impact Practices Student Showcase Fall 2024. 46.
https://stars.library.ucf.edu/hip-2024fall/46