User:TrueCRaysball/sandbox/Notability of YouTubers

Hello, all. I have a bit of a concern, so please bear with me. To get directly to the point, I don't believe our notability guidelines are fair to YouTubers. Let me explain. YouTube has become one of the most popular sites on the internet. Many of their users make a career off of it. YouTubers like CaptainSparklez, TmarTn, Sky Does Minecraft, etc. These are all very popular YouTube personalities (YouTubers), but only one of the mentioned personalities has an article due to the current state of our guidelines. Currently guidelines call for significant third party media coverage to establish notability. And I think this works in most cases. However for YouTubers, regardless of following and how large the fan base is receive little to no coverage and current guidelines are not so fair.

Let's take the aforementioned Sky Does Minecraft (henceforth referred to as "SDM") as an example. SDM has over 10 million subscribers (over 3 million more than CaptainSparklez, who does have an article), over 500 million likes on Facebook (verified page, by the way), and over 720 thousand followers on Twitter. Even further, his latest video, which is just a simple vlog about his current trip to Hawaii, has over 320 thousand hits, nearly 29 thousand likes and has about 4,600 comments. To me, all these stats would say he's quite notable. And per WP:ENTERTAINER, criterion 2, he would usually get an article. But since he's a YouTuber and, again, since YouTubers don't usually get media coverage, he doesn't. And, of course, that rings true for SDM as seen here.

This is just one example, but there are dozens of others in the same boat. The point of all this is, I don't believe media coverage is a good barometric measure of a YouTuber's notability. Something needs to change to adapt Wikipedia to acknowledge the notability of these internet celebrities, who, despite their huge followings, don't get the media coverage to warrant an article under the current guidelines. What is the solution? I'm not sure at the moment. All I know is something needs to change because our current system, as stated, is not a fair judgement of notability for YouTubers. CRRays Head90 | ^#RaysUp 12:34, 24 August 2014 (UTC)