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This article was published 01/09/2016 (3610 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For several generations, screen entertainment had two kinds of stars — movie stars, whose larger-than-life efforts on the silver screen produced larger-than-believable paycheques and notoriety, and TV stars, who became rich and famous (and, in showbiz terms, respected) on a decidedly smaller scale.

Sometimes, a star would ascend from one level to the next, burning brighter in the pop-culture consciousness. Occasionally, a major star would transition from big screen down to small, either to dabble temporarily in a well-scripted TV project or, perhaps, more permanently after fading box-office appeal made movie work harder to find.

In recent years, the increase in high-quality television writing has made movement between the two different levels of stardom much more common.

But for those decades, in the pre-digital world, those were the only levels of stardom to which screen actors could aspire. These days, there’s a very viable third option: online stardom.

Thanks to the rise of YouTube as a venue in which content creators can find audiences that number in the millions, a new kind of star has entered the entertainment universe. And make no mistake — online stardom is a very real stardom, one that can make those who achieve it very wealthy and can also lead to careers in the more mainstream and traditional screen realms.

One recent estimate suggests more than 100 hours of new content are uploaded to YouTube every single minute, and that YouTube experiences more than four billion video views each day. These days, the California-based video-sharing site has more viewers in the 18-to-34 demographic than any single cable-TV network.

If you’re over 40, you’ve probably never heard of PewDiePie or Daily Grace or Lilly Singh or Flula Borg. It’s almost certain that your teenage kids have; each of these YouTube stars has viewership that numbers in the millions, and paycheques that also feature six or more zeroes.

On a local level, one of the biggest YouTube sensations is MissFenderr, the screen name for Steinbach-born video creator Alayna Fender. Her frank and funny perspectives on life and love have attracted more than 150,000 subscribers to her YouTube channel; earlier this year, MuchMusic took note of Fender’s online popularity and offered her a job as a content creator for its digital-studios arm.

“I’m so excited about it,” says Fender, 24, who currently resides in Winnipeg, but recently travelled to Toronto to be part of the coverage team for the annual MuchMusic Video Awards. “They’ve been amazingly supportive; they’re working really hard at building up a roster of great Canadian content creators.”

Fender’s relationship with YouTube started a nearly decade ago, when she was a confused teenager in a conservative town, looking for answers to adolescent questions. Once she started to find a few online, she decided to begin posting videos of her own.

“YouTube is one huge community made up of a bunch of smaller communities; the reason people are drawn to YouTube, and the reason I was drawn to it, is that you can find people you can relate to, in a way that maybe you can’t with your real-life friends,” she explains. “For me, being from Steinbach — a small, conservative, religious town — I was in Grade 11, struggling with anxiety issues and struggling with my sexuality, and when I found YouTube, I found people who were talking about the same kinds of things that I was going through.

“When you find these communities that you can relate to (on YouTube), it’s like finding safety. It’s finding acceptance in people who understand you in a way your family and friends don’t… I had been making videos since I was in elementary school — my dad had an old video camera, and I discovered Windows Movie Maker and started making videos for school projects all through junior high and high school — so when I found YouTube, it clicked for me almost instantly that this was something I wanted to do… In terms of deciding to upload videos to YouTube, it was really just that I loved these people that I was watching, and I wanted to be one of them.”

And so, in 2011, MissFenderr was born, mostly concerned with comedy bits and goofing-around videos for her first few years on YouTube, before deciding a couple of years ago to delve into more serious subjects, but still with a light-hearted approach.

Last August, in a “draw my life” video (wfp.to/fenderr), Fender “came out” as bisexual; the YouTube video has been viewed nearly 100,000 times. She has used her regularly posted videos (she now has two YouTube channels, MissFenderr and MissAlayna) to discuss her struggles with anxiety, her relationship with her boyfriend, other LGBTTQ* issues, hair colour, fashion and, almost always, her love of cats.

“I think (the more personal postings) came from a sense of comfort in myself and my own identity that I had never experienced before,” she says.

“It wasn’t so much a moment of, ‘Aha! I need to share these things’; it was coming to a point of comfort and acceptance in myself and then recognizing how much other people’s stories had helped me and that maybe my stories could comfort someone else in the same situation.

“When I posted my first video about mental health, the response was overwhelming — I heard from all these people saying that they didn’t feel alone anymore, or that they never realized that other people have panic attacks, too. So after I posted that first video and got that reaction, I just wanted to continue to help.”

Of course, being a small-town girl posting videos about potentially touchy big-city issues carries a certain amount of risk. Fender says she worried at first that her family might not embrace the MissFenderr experience, but her parents’ response has been nothing but supportive.

“I don’t think they quite understand why I do it until I do it, and then they see the comments section and they understand why I share what I share,” she says. “Before I posted my coming-out video, I talked to my mom and told her I was worried that there might be some fallout (in Steinbach). She told me not to worry about it, and that it didn’t matter to them if other people chose to judge or disapprove. That was a powerful message. And the first time I went back home after I posted it, my parents had a bunch of friends over, and they basically just told me they appreciated my honesty and a lot of them hugged me.

“Again, it was support that I hadn’t expected — it turns out my family’s wonderful and their friends are wonderful, too.”

Fender says her trip to Toronto in June for the MMVAs was a surreal experience, an unexpected brush with fame that reinforced how much the Much connection has expanded MissFenderr’s reach.

“It was very, very strange,” she laughs. “I felt like I had to continually remind people that I’m not important, because everyone treated me like I was very important. It was crazy.”

Medium-scale Canadian fame hasn’t gone to her head, but Fender says she hopes her “dream job” with Much will allow her to keep making videos for as long as the public’s interest in her content endures.

“In terms of how long I can, I think that depends on the type of content you’re making,” she says. “I need to grow with my audience, and hope they’ll still be interested in what I have to say. And who knows — even if people stop watching, maybe I’ll still keep making videos; it just won’t be my job anymore.”

 

brad.oswald@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @BradOswald

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