FROM BUZZFEED CREATOR TO (IN)DEPENDENT YOUTUBER - MANAGING PRECARIOUS LABOUR THROUGH GOSSIP

Several known Buzzfeed Creators have left the company’s toxic cultureby beginning a career as YouTubers. They hoped that their Buzzfeed audience would migrate tosupport their company-independent channel. Often represented as a move towards independenceby creators, cultural production research (Nieborg & Poell, 2018; Burgess et al. 2020)has shown that creators are platform and audience dependent for viability. Therefore, we arequestioning whether being an (in)dependent YouTuber would be more precarious than being anemployed Buzzfeed creator. How does the migration from Buzzfeed to YouTube creator offerboth independence and a host of new contingencies? Situating a content and discourseanalysis of “Why I left Buzzfeed” YouTube videos and comments within academic and populardiscourse, we understand these videos as sources of ‘gossip’ (Bishop, 2018) defined as“loose, unmethodological talk that is generative” (2590). Gossip can be beneficial toex-Buzzfeed creators building on their Buzzfeed association to boost algorithmic visibility.Additionally, gossip is a valuable form of knowledge exchange for content creators to stayinformed on discourse, support one another, and communicate their perspective on formerBuzzfeed content. Gossip also allows us as researchers to break through the blackbox ofYouTube content creation to better comprehend precarity as multifaceted. We hypothesize thatcreators have to balance different aspects of precarity depending on Buzzfeed as employer orYouTube as distributor. The imaginary of independence is a false friend as both employed andself-employed creators are dependent on platform governance and their platform public(Mniestri & Gekker, 2020) for success.