Molly Thompson - 43,800 YouTube subscribers and couting!
Tue 4th October 2016
We did a round-robin in the Just Beverley office recently to find out where we would go for information on just about anything. Needless-to- say, there was a marked difference in the answers depending on age!
The more mature members amongst us mentioned books, magazines, libraries, the internet. The younger ones said Google and YouTube. It was therefore a real treat for everyone in the office to meet Molly Thompson, who has a YouTube channel with more followers than you can imagine.
Her channel is called Beauty Spectrum, which is also accessible via her website. Some of her videos have had over 250,000 views!
Molly is just 16 years old! What inspired Molly to set up a YouTube channel? Molly told Just Beverley: “I’ve always been interested in photography and filming and especially filming things that it isn’t necessary to film! I was initially inspired by people like Zoella and Tanya Barr who do the same sort of thing as me. They cover beauty and fashion, showing girls how to use make-up, create a particular look, do their hair or wear clothes in original ways, and lots of my friends were watching them - so I started watching them too and that was how Beauty Spectrum came into existence.
“At first I started filming on my phone, but when I reached 6,000 subscribers (followers), I bought a DSLR camera and tripod. I also have a small camera. I film myself to create the content and then edit it on a Macbook and upload it to YouTube.”
Molly is in Year 12 at Beverley High School, studying media, photography, English Literature and History and would like to go into broadcast journalism as a career. She was brave enough to film herself live opening her GCSE results envelope, which she posted out as a vlog (video blog) on her website!
All students are short of money, so Beauty Spectrum does make Molly a little bit of cash. YouTube is financed by companies who choose to place advertisements before particular channels or clips. If an advert is shown before a Beauty Spectrum clip, Molly gets rewarded with a small share of the revenue.
Yorkshire Soap are big at blogging and they recruited Molly to vlog about the contents of a particular hamper which they provided. Bodyshop, Simple, Rimmel, Maybelline and Lush also sponsor creatives. As Molly names the make-up brands she is using whilst demonstrating make-up techniques, this encourages the manufacturers to sponsor her films and vlogs.
Molly encourages subscribers to her channel and website by giving products away; she recently went on holiday and bought candles and fragrances which she gave away - but everything was vlogged! Her main attraction is keeping things real.
She makes most of her films in her bedroom or walking around the locality, ensures her films and vlogs are relatable and is conscious that the majority of people following her have little cash. Which is why most of her followers are of a similar age and why she has a strategy for filming, depending on the time of year and what’s happening in school, media, music and fashion.
Molly is conscious that there is a massive gap in the access to YouTube across the generations, but there really should not be. Molly has inspired Just Beverley to set up a YouTube channel to align with our Facebook page and Twitter feed to engage even more people to the brand. Who knows, we might have as many followers as Beauty Spectrum in the not too distant future?
Watch this space - but in the meantime, if you haven’t done so already, have a look at Beauty Spectrum and see what you have been missing!
www.youtube.com/user/beautyspectrumblog
