
YouTube has always been a place for niche audiences. Unlike television and other traditional platforms, YouTube caters to more than just the white-bread “majority,” which ‘Tuber Superwoman (real name: Lilly Singh) exemplifies and explains in Rhett & Link’s latest “Ear Biscuits.”
Part of the appeal of YouTube is that no matter how specific your interests are, you will find something that caters to you. While TV generally skews broadly, on YouTube, there’s something for everyone.
The democratic nature of the world’s biggest video platform benefits content creators, too. For instance, Singh, who first got noticed by “her own” demographic (fellow “brown people”), before discovering other audiences who, as luck would have it, could also relate to her.
Singh started creating content on YouTube because she’s always wanted to be an entertainer. Her original stuff was geared toward fellow brown people because “it was what [she] knew.” In the interview, she notes being lucky in the early days because her videos “really hit a niche market,” which helped her grow an audience. As far as she was concerned, there were plenty of “those girls” posting videos on YouTube, but not really any of “those brown girls.”
That said, even with this base audience who clamors for new content from her every week, Singh has wanted to expand and create content that’s not tied to one specific group
Lucky for her, YouTube has already made this possible.
One of Singh’s most popular “video series” is her “Indian parent” videos, in which she plays versions of her parents, playing up typical Indian-parent stereotypes that her audience would be able to relate to.
Soon after she started making these videos, Singh would get comments from people who claimed their white/black/Asian/etc. parents acted the same way. It made her realize she could achieve her goal creating for the masses. “One of the many lessons YouTube has taught me is that everyone is different and everyone is the same,” she says. Now Singh can boast 4.5 million views for videos like “How Girls Get Ready” (note that the title is not “How Indian Girls Get Ready”).
For more details on Singh’s life and career on YouTube, listen to her interview on “Ear Biscuits with Rhett & Link.”