[ 9. The lonelygirl15 Series | YouTube ]

[ The lonelygirl15 Series www.youtube.com/user/lonelygirl15 ]

Another internet phenomenon, lonelygirl15 (the preferred spelling is without any capital letters) is a relatively long-running and very popular Videoblog. The series began back in June 2006, where a 16 year old girl named Bree and her best friend, though not boyfriend Daniel under the anonym DanielBeast regularly posted Vblogs of their life onto YouTube.

[ In Detail ]
Bree first hooked viewers with humorous and engaging videos featuring popular YouTube directors and videos. Under the suspicious alias lonelygirl15, she achieved massive success on YouTube, with 91321 subscribers to her channel, who arduously followed her everyday life through the eyes of a webcam in her room. The widespread availability of good quality digital cameras and webcams and good editing software would have made her series possible and the cheap cost of fast broadband made it possible to both upload and download her movies. Many fans commented on her videos, which she sometimes replied to in the next in her series of blogs, showing that her blogs were not prerecorded, but were genuinely filmed around that time. However, the videos seemed far too regular and well edited to be real, many critics proclaimed, although many many of her closest fans believed that she was indeed a real person. She had her own pet likes and dislikes, and the story became too dramatic to be realistic, and was eventually found out to be an actress named Jessica Rose, with the suspicions about her username being simply a lure to pique the internet community’s interests… even a fan website and a whole section on wikipedia were created for her.
Many fans and viewers made the connection between this and the viral marketing campaign [ viral marketing ] launched by the Blair Witch Project [ Blair Witch Project ] to advertise their movie, and thought it could be a taster for a new television series or an alternative reality game [ ARG ] or possible for some covert online surveillance.
Still as of yet, the monetary purpose of the series is not yet known, as no profit is made from the series, directed by Glenn Rubenstein.

Her series is groundbreaking. It is also a good example of how the internet combined with the huge reach of YouTube can be manipulated to gain massive media interest.