The Right Opinion: How One Tea Channel Faked It All - Inventing Anna Oop | TRO

0:00:00 - Intro
0:06:44 - Anna Oop
0:12:44 - Oops
0:19:00 - Mask Off
0:25:53 - Anna, Uncovered
0:33:48 - The Company You Keep
0:41:55 - The Real Anna Oop
0:48:03 - Faking It
0:54:35 - Inventing Anna Oop
1:03:45 - Outro

Businesses on YouTube, whether we like it or not, they’re here to stay, and in many cases I try not to view their presence as a wholly negative feature..

It’s important to remember that one of our primary purposes as creators is to bring entertainment to those who use the platform, and if a channel can do that, whoever it’s run by, then we can broadly agree that it’s a net positive for audiences. Businesses will always occupy a realm of YouTube and I do believe there can be a peaceful coexistence. At the same time, there will always be tension, to be honest it’s understandable why more grassroots creators feel unnerved by their presence. Businesses have so much more power and resources at their fingertips to outflank independent YouTubers in many aspects of quality control, they can create high production pieces in a few days that would take an individual upwards of a month, bombing the algorithm with a myriad of content that often gives what many would perceive, an unfair advantage to them against the humble creator.

When market domination comes from a few large corporations, the outcome for the consumer is generally not particularly positive. It leads to less diversity in general, and more control of narratives by a select few people, and in an industry that is already prone enough to corruption, it’s anything but healthy. YouTube was built on the notion of allowing a person to broadcast themselves without the necessary investment of a larger business so they didn’t have to dance to anyone’s tunes, and many people would like to keep it that way. Fortunately, there will always be people who will occupy these spaces regardless of their market success, but at the same time, it’s still good to have individual figures in influential positions who can represent a human aspect to content creation, and although businesses have certainly made more inroads on the platform than they used to, there will always be that window of authenticity that seems to separate many of them from the personally driven passion projects.

The truth is one thing that is hard to fabricate is that individual enthusiasm one has for a subject they cover, and although not impossible, many larger businesses simply don’t see it as a required component for success, and as channels like Looper and the rest have shown, you really don’t need that much framework on personality to succeed. In fact, avoiding building any personal image ensures that they keep any components that may change disposable, and that ultimately, control of the content is still centralised on the people who run the channel, and not those they may outsource a variety of the work to. This formula generally means that there is a boundary between more personal content, and more detached corporate presentations. However, just because there’s a rule, doesn’t mean that there aren’t exceptions, particularly in the community that we’re focusing on today.

Commentary is a genre that large corporations tend to avoid infiltrating, particularly given the aforementioned paragraph. Having a personality is almost essential to the content you’re producing, even if you’re merely presenting information, viewers expect at least a little pzazz. Audience members want to build a relationship based on trust with the person they’re listening to. How can you do that when you don’t even know if there’s a real person behind the channel? However, this doesn’t mean that there aren’t some willing to take the risk, and one subgenre of commentary knows this all too well: that being the tea community.

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