Jenny Hoyos wants to be your internet best friend.
That might sound ambitious for someone with more than 12 million YouTube subscribers. But for Hoyos, the feeling of accessibility is a fundamental part of being a creator.
"I don't want to feel like someone that just shows [up] once a week or once a month," Hoyos told Mashable and other journalists during a roundtable at the Made On YouTube event in New York City on Wednesday. "I want them to see, 'Wow, Jenny's accessible 24/7. She is responding all the time. She is posting every day, several times.'"
Then she laughed. "Does she sleep? Maybe not. Not enough."
Maintaining that level of intimacy with millions of people is, unsurprisingly, a lot of work. At Hoyos' scale, it's also become a team effort. "I basically have someone to do everything," she said. "I don't think that there's a single task that I have to do [alone]."
Hoyos has people helping with community posts and a community manager who assists with engagement and moderating unwanted comments. She still has final say, she said, but much of the work surrounding her online presence can be delegated. There is one obvious exception.
"Other than being on camera, that is the only thing I cannot outsource," Hoyos said. "I try to maximize the amount of time that I can on camera, just so I can show up for my viewers as much as possible."
It's a revealing look at what community building looks like at the highest levels of the creator economy. The intimacy between creator and fan might feel casual — a reply to a comment here, a livestream shoutout there — but maintaining that relationship at scale requires an increasingly sophisticated operation behind it. And YouTube wants to give creators more of the tools to run that operation without leaving YouTube.
At Made On YouTube, the video-sharing platform announced a slate of new and upcoming features designed around creator communities, including members-only Communities and more ways for fans to interact directly on the platform. Users will be able to share videos directly with friends through YouTube, with group chats coming soon. At the same time, members-only Communities will give paying channel members their own spaces to interact. YouTube is also expanding the ways viewers can participate in comments, including reaction GIFs and the ability to leave voice-to-text comments from their TVs.
Livestreaming is getting more interactive, too. Live Showdowns will turn fan participation into a kind of game, with viewers contributing to an on-screen battle as they watch. YouTube is also working to make livestreams easier to discover, including surfacing them alongside videos, Shorts, posts, and podcasts in personalized feeds. Taken together, the updates give creators more ways to turn watching YouTube into something viewers do with them and with each other.
Hoyos said that although she never deliberately set out to foster relationships among her viewers, she's watched those relationships emerge in her Community posts.
"I post almost every day," she said. "People just respond to each other, communicate with each other, and get connected."
Because Hoyos shares details about her own life and interests, fans will respond with their own, she said. Other viewers see those exchanges and discover people who like the same things.
Barbara Macdonald, Google's product manager for Live, said she sees the same phenomenon play out in livestream chats, particularly among smaller communities.
"People know each other's birthdays. They know what everybody is interested in," Macdonald said of her own YouTube community. She also maintains a Discord, where some of those relationships continue outside YouTube.
But unsurprisingly, YouTube appears to be building features that could keep more of that activity on its platform. Hoyos certainly sees the appeal.
"As a creator, I want everything in one place," she said. Creators already have enough work without maintaining separate spaces for every facet of their fandom, she argued. A creator might have a YouTube channel for videos, a Discord for their community, and a Patreon for exclusive content. Each new platform doesn't just create more work for creators; it also asks fans to follow them elsewhere.
"It's a lot," Hoyos said. "It's not even just a lot for us as the creator, but also the audience, getting them to convert."
"You have all these CTAs to download all these apps," she added. "It's so much easier for everyone [to have everything in one place]."
The business of being accessible
Of course, bringing more of a creator's fandom to YouTube also creates more monetization opportunities.
YouTube has spent more than a decade building ways for fans to financially support creators, from channel memberships and Super Chats to newer products such as Hype with Jewels and the upcoming Live Showdowns.
But Hoyos said she is cautious about directly monetizing the relationship she has built with her audience. "I don't like to monetize directly through just the fans, just because I do feel bad," she said.
Hoyos offers channel memberships, but unlike some creators, she doesn't put significant amounts of exclusive content behind them. Instead, membership largely gives fans a better chance of being noticed during her livestreams. Their badges make their messages stand out in a fast-moving chat, and Hoyos said she's more likely to acknowledge them or respond to their comments.
She doesn't see that as shutting everyone else out. "I still give energy and attention to everyone," Hoyos said. "It's just the ones that are members, I immediately see it first."
That distinction gets at a complicated part of the modern creator-fan relationship: Fans are no longer only consuming content — they're being asked to participate in the economy surrounding it.
According to Macdonald, YouTube's research has found that viewers spend money on creators for several different reasons. Some simply want to support someone whose work they enjoy. Others want exclusive content. And some are paying for a moment of recognition.
"If they happen to be doing a livestream and you send a Super Chat, and then they say your name, they shout you out, they answer the question that you've asked in Super, you just — you feel it," Macdonald said.
The culture around that exchange has changed dramatically since YouTube first began developing fan-funding products around 2015, she said. At the time, Macdonald recalled creators being uncomfortable with the idea. "'I don't know how I feel about having my fans pay to hang out with me,'" she recalled creators telling her.
Eleven years later, Macdonald said creators are actively asking YouTube for those tools, and viewers are now accustomed to using them.
Hoyos has noticed the shift, too. "It's definitely become more part of the culture to support your favorite creators," she said.
You can't outsource showing up
YouTube can build more tools to help creators find viewers, talk to them, moderate them, and eventually monetize them. But Hoyos doesn't think the platform can do the most important part of community building for them.
For smaller creators struggling to find an audience, Hoyos argued that the problem isn't always discovery. Sometimes, they simply aren't making compelling enough live content.
"It's on the creator to actually have good content and not just go live and, like, 'Oh, I hope people show up,'" she said. Creators should promote their livestreams, have something resembling a show planned, and, crucially, actually talk to the people who arrive.
"If you're not interacting with people, why are they going to tell their friends [to watch you]?" Hoyos said. "Why are they even going to continue watching?"
It's perhaps the simplest explanation of Hoyos' "internet best friend" strategy. YouTube can make it easier for creators to gather their communities in one place. AI can help moderate their comments. Teams can schedule posts, manage communities, and handle the day-to-day logistics of running a creator business.
But someone still has to show up. For Hoyos, that's the part she isn't willing to outsource.
