There are over 800 million unique users visit YouTube every month and millions of subscribers happen everyday. As a result, some YouTube celebrities become so famous and are well known to the world. However, I began to have many questions in my mind. How did these people swiftly rise to fame? Why these people are willing to spend their whole time on creating videos? Can they really make a living from creating these videos?

Apparently, there is a standard rubric for the earning on Youtube: $3 for 1000 views; $33 for 10,000 views; $330 for 100,000 views; and $3300 for 1,000,000 views. Thus, the most popular celebrity, Shane Dawson, who had a view of 431,787,450 during 2010, can earn up to $315000 per year. This is an incredibly high amount!

Youtube is willing to pay these celebrities high payments because the more famous these celebrities are, the more subscribers there are to watch their videos, the more companies want to post their banner ads on these videos. The Youtube would then splits the revenue with all the Youtube celebrities as an action to encourage people creating more successful videos.

What is more, lots of these top grossing Youtube celebrities are still in their early twenties. Not only they can get paid for a large amount of money from the Youtube, but they can also earn even more though working with the sponsors and making promotional videos. Therefore, a great number of teenagers are inspired and motivated to create more popular videos.

Resources:

http://www.aussiepete.com/2010/08/you-tube-made-me-rich-top-10-richest.html

http://socialtimes.com/money-youtube-partners_b21335

https://www.youtube.com/yt/press/statistics.html

It is true that online communication facilitates how people get to know and link with more new friends. It becomes very convenient to establish relationship with a new client from the existing friends on social network like LinkedIn. Massive online network users also lead to a great number of online business opportunities. Lot of big brands such as Facebook and Tweeter are popular social medias. However, there are some unfavourable features that are hard to avoid. First of all, anonymity or fake identity give people freedom to say and share whatever they want, but at the same time, lots of people are taking the advantage of this feature and begin to bully others.

After reading “Brands must do more to recognize the pitfalls of anti-social media“, i was shocked after reading a news that a 16 years old girl committed suicide because she was bullied on a social network, Ask. fm. that people asked her to kill herself. Unfortunately, this is not the first time happening and there is an increasing number of bulling and trolling online that has resulted in lots of tragedies. These violence aroused people’s attention and make people begin to wonder how social network can protect all the online users. Some solutions that are implemented by Facebook include reporting the comment to the system and deleting other’s comment on people’s own wall.

In addition, i believe privacy protection is the most important problem in social media. I also heard that when you give social network permission to use your album or locate your position, it can access to all your future pictures, locations and information. There are many news reported that many criminals exploit this feature to commit a crime. In conclusion, all of these social network should beware of these drawbacks and try to protect their users.

Resources:

http://www.marketingmagazine.co.uk/news/1174917/Brands-recognise-pitfalls-anti-social-media/?DCMP=ILC-SEARCH

Apple’s products all give people a sense of being superior to other brands, such as LG, Acer and Amazon. These products are often described as being lighter, thinner, greater looking and contain more functions. People appreciate these qualities and they are willing to pay a much higher price to buy Apple’s product than other similar products with different brands. However, in such a competitive market of technology, how can Apple keep such a high selling price and still generate a much greater profit than other competitors?

According to the article of “How Apple Sets Its Price“, Apple uses four retail strategies: House advantage, carrot and stick and when good discounts go bad. First of all, Apple employs a strategy known as price maintenance in its house advantage. In other words, Apple takes an advantage by limiting the way other retailers could advertise their products due to its strong popularity. Apple tries to reduce the wholesale price to other retailer, and therefore, those retailers have little or no room at all to have a discount on the Apple products or earn a lot of revenue. Thus, Apple could firmly grasp all the customers to its own Apple stores since it is considered to be more trustworthy and there is almost no price difference in the other retailer stores. Secondly,carrot and stick is an interesting term to indicate that Apple is only willing to give a little bit more wholesale discounts if the retailers can advertise their products above the minimum advertised price (MAP). I believe this is very efficient because not only Apple can reduce competitions from low price offered by other retailers, but it can also prevent any retailer to establish a strong market position and can have advantage in negotiations in the future. Lastly, many retailers such as Rogers and Tellus offer cheap iPhone but with a long-term contract in order to compensate the high costs. However, a big discount is actually bad for Apple since the market for retailer is also very competitive. If one retailer store lower the price, other retailers would do the same thing to attract customers.

Overall, Apple’s retail strategies help it control the whole distribution channels, reduce its competitors, prevent the drop in price and maximize its profits. Customers are very satisfied with Apple’s selling price since its quality deserves this price and there is no variability in the price in different retail or its own stores.

Resources:

http://www.macworld.com/article/2024257/how-apple-sets-its-prices.html