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Exposing Convergence:

YouTube, Fan Labour, and Anxiety of Cultural Production in Lonelygirl15

(accepted to be published in Convergence. Please do not cite or quote without permission.)

Burcu S. Bakioğlu, Ph.D. Senior User Experience Researcher bbakiogl@gmail.com

Burcu S. Bakioğlu is an independent scholar and currently the Senior User Experience Researcher of software at the ADP Innovation Lab. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature at Indiana University, Bloomington (IN) in 2009 and completed her Postdoctoral research in New Media at Lawrence University. Her areas of interest include new media, participatory culture, virtual worlds, gaming, and the digital rights movement. She has published widely on griefing and governance in virtual worlds. Burcu is also a member of the Internet Rights and Principles Coalition (@netrights) at the UN-IGF.

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Exposing Convergence:

YouTube, Fan Labour, and Anxiety of Cultural Production in Lonelygirl15

--To my mom, Itɪr Yeğenağa, who is patient and ever-loving...

Abstract

As one of the first social media franchises, Lonelygirl15 (LG15) played a surprisingly important role in transforming YouTube into a legitimate storytelling platform and a site of cultural production worthy of commercial attention. While LG15 has been hailed as one of the first community-based storytelling initiatives that harnessed the power of participatory culture, the anxiety of creating an economically sustainable story led to the careful management of fan efforts and the strict definition of the boundaries of the LG15 canon. In this article I argue that LG15 demonstrates one of the most worrisome aspects of YouTube's monetization strategies, the commodification of labour in which advertisers and media companies exploit users for profit. This exploitation does not necessarily come in the form of loss of monetary value, but through the alienation of fans from their productive labour. As such, the production of LG15 presents a powerful critique of convergence culture. It demonstrates that the movement of fans to the centre of cultural production does not necessarily mean empowerment, but may also suggest exploitation.

Keywords

convergence, YouTube, Lonelygirl15, social media, franchise, Internet,

fan labour, storytelling, media industry

Although few people remember Lonelygirl15 (LG15) today, the video series that started

as the ranting of a sixteen-year old girl named Bree marks a turning point in the history

of YouTube. Its first video posted in June 2006 entitled “First Blog/Dorkiness Prevails”

lasted only a minute-and-a-half, but garnered much attention almost overnight. The

third video, "My Parents Suck," registered half a million hits within hours, a number

ABC.com considered to be “the size of a good cable audience" at the time (ABC

Nightline, 2006). LG15 videos became an Internet phenomenon within three months.

The show was initially hidden under the guise of a teenager’s vlog (video log/diary),

and the issue of whether or not the videos were "real" or the authentic account of a

teenager became the ultimate enigma that attracted a wide range of audiences to the

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show. By the time the videos were exposed as "fake," its creators (Miles Beckett, a

doctor, Mesh Flinders, a struggling film-maker, and Greg Goodfried, a practicing

attorney) had a sufficient following to expand it to other social media platforms,

including Revver, MySpace, various message boards, and chat channels. Jessica Lee

Rose, having found the casting call for Bree on Craigslist, won the Webby Film and

Video Awards for Best Actress in 2007. By that year, the original series of LG15 had

received over 50 million combined views (Bebo, 2007), a feat that captured the

attention of such big media outlets as The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, MTV,

Yahoo!, and Wired, all of which gave extensive coverage to the show (Davis, 2006;

MTV, 2006; Rushfield, 2006; McLean and Weir, 2006; Heffernan, 2006a, 2006b,

2006c; Heffernan and Zeller, 2006a, 2006b; Bebo, 2007). The first video, costing $130

to produce, merely the cost of a webcam, developed into one of the first social media

franchises that emerged on YouTube.

The economic success of LG15 could be considered a breakthrough for

YouTube as a platform, the fate of which has been marred with uncertainty about how

to build a revenue model around audiences. The show played a surprisingly important

role in transforming YouTube into a legitimate storytelling platform and a site of

cultural production worthy of commercial attention. It was also one of the first

crowdfunded (and crowdsourced) projects online that was to set precedents for the likes

of Veronica Mars and others who found their funding through Kickstarter, a global

crowdfunding platform. But as I demonstrate, LG15 also exposed the inherent tension

between YouTube's democratizing goals and its economic potential. In other words,

interrogating the moment of cultural production of LG15 is about tracing the rocky

development of YouTube as a platform. As Wired headlined a story on its cover page in

2006, YouTube grew up with LG15.

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The seemingly overnight popularity of LG15 was the direct result of the creative

team’s ability to effectively activate the participatory culture that has become the

defining characteristic of YouTube. The rhetoric of LG15’s creative team that promoted

“community-led collaborative storytelling” (MTV, 2006) and their subsequent adoption

of the convergence logic native to YouTube allowed them to harness the free labour of

participatory culture. However, as Tiziana Terranova argues, the term harnessing

implies the reinsertion of corporate power. It is yet another way in which new media

companies outsource creative labour. Terranova postulates that new media companies

‘manufacture consent’ by enabling participation while seeking to contain and control

the emerging power of these new knowledge cultures (qtd. in Jenkins and Deuze, 2008,

p. 6). The LG15 team’s success mostly relies on its ability to manage participation

around the show to build a commercially viable franchise.

The creative team marketed their project as an unprecedented initiative that is

just as commercially viable as the ones born in mainstream media. They achieved this in

two ways. First of all, the team greatly benefited from fan labour and word-of-mouth

viral marketing that resulted from these fan activities. Secondly, the team consciously

used to their advantage the myth of the do-it-yourself (DIY) celebrity inherent to

YouTube. As Burgess and Green (2009) have noted, YouTube’s ability to freely

distribute content to millions with little investment holds the promise to broadcast

oneself to fame and fortune. As a result, hundreds of fans, with the hopes of becoming

legitimate storytellers, created videos around the LG15 world. Most hoped that mere

mention of their work in the franchise proper would open doors for them. In the process,

the fans were willingly generating value for the franchise. The team, on the other hand,

heavily regulated the boundaries of the LG15 canon by actively marking fan fiction as

ancillary and used copyright claims as ways to carefully manage community initiatives.

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Keeping the fans at arm's length ran counter to their initial rhetoric of community-led

collaborative storytelling and subsequently estranged the very community that had

initially given them exposure.

Thus far, what has been written about LG15 both in the news media and

academically has focused on the initial stages of the franchise or exclusively taken the

point of view of the media industry. This literature portrays the show as a wondrous

success story that blindsided the mainstream media. While these accounts are accurate

on some level, care must be taken with such portrayals because they serve a particular

agenda that depicts convergence culture as cultivating a mutually beneficial relationship

between participatory culture and the media industries rather than exposing the tensions

between the two.

With the present article, on the other hand, I offer a different approach. By

tracing the franchise throughout its lifetime and from the fans' point of view, I argue

that LG15’s success is a case of real subsumption in which, according to Marx, the once

deemed marginal, such as people’s everyday lives and daily social doings, functions as

source of capitalist value. In the case of LG15, the creative team used fan labour as the

main pillar upon which to build a media company. The robust fan activity surrounding

LG15 is a clear indicator that fans have indeed moved to the centre of cultural

production as some convergence scholars such as Henry Jenkins postulate. But rather

than becoming a source of empowerment, this can be understood as a form of

exploitation. Undoubtedly, when broadly viewed almost any fan activity could be

considered as exploitation. But I argue that the case of LG15 is somewhat different. The

case of LG15 was not financial exploitation in the sense that the creators used the fans'

money to make their own show, a critique frequently levelled at the crowdfunding

platforms, such as Kickstarter (Chin, Jones, McNutt, Pebler, 2014). It is true that fans of

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LG15 donated their money in the early stages of the show just to keep the lights going,

but they knew that they were funding their own entertainment in return, and they had no

problem with that.

Rather, I argue that it is a form of exploitation because the creative team mislead

the fans into thinking that their participation would have a more meaningful impact on

the show proper. This intentional misleading was primarily to garner the attention of the

mainstream media and grow the show into a robust franchise. The team claimed to be

experimenting with a new type of storytelling, a community-based narrative that

embodied the general spirit of co-authorship. They sold their show to fans as an

unprecedented initiative that would blur the actor/producer and fan divide, a promise

that did not actualize for many fans and was frequently curtailed by the creative team's

eagerness to protect the artistic integrity of their show. Ultimately, the team's goal of

proving LG15 to be a financially viable initiative led them to confine fan engagement

within strictly defined parameters that ultimately undermined their initial rhetoric of

community-led storytelling. Regardless, the creators benefited from the media attention

that this discourse brought to the show.

In making this argument, I do not wish to frame fans as cultural dupes, or imply

that they were ignorant of what was going on. Those who were disillusioned quickly

abandoned the franchise. Others stuck around and directed their participation in more

meaningful ways. As discussed later, a few fans were able to create their own shows

that were tangentially related to LG15 but primarily mobilized the LG15 fandom.

Others, intrigued by the mysterious beginnings of the show, created Alternate Reality

Game (ARG)1 spinoffs to deliver a more engaging experience than the show ultimately

offered. I argue elsewhere that these fan-created games became tactics through which

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fans engaged in transgressive play and negotiated a more meaningful role within the

franchise (Bakioğlu, 2014).

A brief summary of the show is in order to contextualize the discussion to

follow. LG15 starts out as a vlog that voices the ranting of a frustrated sixteen-year-old

girl named Bree as she makes brief videos out of her bedroom about her life, her best

friend, Daniel, and her conflicts with her parents. Eventually, Bree's parents are

revealed to belong to a secretive religion, the fictional Hymn of One, which is later

revealed to be a front for a dangerous cult called the Order. The organization is after

girls with trait-positive blood type, the characteristics of which, although not explained

in the show, enable the performance of a mysterious ceremony to save their elders. The

fans suspect the ceremony to be a virgin sacrifice. Seemingly getting cues from the fans,

Daniel and Bree decide to run away to save Bree. The three seasons of LG15 -- the first

season in which Bree dies in the ceremony and the subsequent seasons entitled

Bloodlines and Revelations—all relate the stories of these trait-positive girls who are

perpetually on the run. The show also comprises various extensions, including

Resistance, and the fan created follow-up shows, LG15: The Last and LG15: The Show

Is Yours (TSIY). The story world is referred to as the Breeniverse after its first heroine

whose videos became wildly popular.

In this article I open with an overview of the economic and cultural conditions

that led the creators of LG15 to embrace the DIY (do-it-yourself) culture of YouTube

and appropriate the rhetoric of “community-based show” and “collaborative

storytelling” to build a social media franchise. The subsequent section considers fan

activities as a form of real subsumption within the context of labour theory. In the final

two sections I discuss the ways in which the LG15 team modelled fan behavior and

shaped taste cultures to assert control over its IP (intellectual property), while

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simultaneously harnessing free creative labour that would generate media attention

necessary to become a social media franchise.

Before I begin my analysis, I would like to say a few words about the history of

the LG15 site and the methodology I used during my research. The web portal for LG15

comprising both the official videos and fan videos went through three versions as the

team behind the project first became LG15 Studies and then EQAL. While the second

version included all of these, in addition to a separate site for LG15 Forums, the third

and final version omitted all fan videos and previous fan comments, including the LG15

Forums, leaving only the official videos and recent fan comments. By then, the interest

in the show had waned and the community had dwindled dramatically, so no

meaningful fan interaction took place in this final site. The site was taken down entirely

after the company was bought by Everyday Health in 2012. My research was conducted

during the second phase of the LG15 portal when most interaction took place. I went

through hundreds of official videos and thousands of comments to identify key fans and

community interactions. In addition to content analysis of various LG15 sites and

forums looking for key fan interactions, I conducted interviews through Skype, Gchat,

Internet Relay Chat, and in person with some of the fans and a few people who worked

for the creative team.

Truth, Lies, and Videos: Building a Social Media Franchise from a DIY

Initiative

Founded in 2005, YouTube was initially born as a community-driven video-

sharing site. To keep it that way, its founders made a deliberate decision not to include

advertising even as they were struggling to keep afloat (Cloud, 2006). The issue of

monetization of the site became front and centre with the Google acquisition in 2006

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and has been a concern for Google since (Wasko and Erickson, 2009, p. 373;

McDonald, 2009, p. 391; Andrejevic, 2009, p. 409). LG15, as an experimental

storytelling initiative that started in the early days of YouTube, inherited these concerns,

yet at the same time benefited from the potential for democratizing the dissemination of

user-generated content. The issue for the LG15 team, and many others considering

similar ventures, has been to come up with ways to cut through the noise of thousands

of videos uploaded daily and get noticed. To give an idea, the site housed around 100

million videos on a given day, with 65,000 new videos added every day when LG15

launched which was also the same year Google purchased YouTube (Google, 2006).

The LG15 team's understanding of the DIY culture inherent to YouTube allowed it to

develop the strategies necessary for building a legitimate franchise.

As a web-based grassroots project, the economic viability of LG15 was suspect

from the beginning. The production of the show was initially financed with savings,

credit cards, and some help from the parents of the creative team. Even so, as early as

the third video their followers surmised that this was a marketing scheme initiated by

big bad Hollywood for a movie in the vein of The Blair Witch Project. While this was

not exactly correct, the project was not devoid of economic undertones either. Greg

Goodfried, in an interview conducted by Catherine Morris (2009), admitted to having

plans for a movie: “Initially, we thought, what if we did this for a few months and then

had [Lonelygirl] disappear? We would then go off and create a feature film and

distribute it on iTunes” (p. 26). The creative team changed their movie idea once they

realized that there was a new, fast-growing market that no one had truly broken into yet.

But the team did not have a definite business plan in place.

Despite the challenges of an uncertain business model, launching their Web

series on YouTube was a strategic move by the LG15 team. The unprecedented success

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of LG15 came from the creators’ understanding of YouTube’s variegated culture based

on sharing mundane and amateur content. At the same time, the team’s identification

with its DIY culture provided YouTubers with the hope of being acknowledged as

credible content creators, which placed them on an even level with the community.

Perhaps to strengthen their identification with a culture native to the site and not appear

to have corporate ambitions, the LG15 team hid behind the aura of amateurism, neither

accepting nor denying the fictional status of their videos.

They correctly assumed that YouTube had the potential to generate a vibrant

audience around their videos. The creators made sure to link their videos to other

popular video productions to attract views, and shot their videos to pique the maximum

amount of curiosity, teasing viewers with a seemingly simple plotline laden with clues

that shrouded the videos with mystery promising something deeper underneath the

surface. In other words, the show appropriated a ludic narrative logic designed to

cultivate a puzzle-solving mentality in its audience right from the start (Bakioğlu,

2014). In so doing, they cultivated what Jason Mittell identifies as a form of storytelling

that "promotes a model of 'forensic fandom,' a mode of television engagement

encouraging research, collaboration, analysis, and interpretation" (Mittell, 2009a, 128-

130; Mittell, 2009b, n.d.). In Mittell's formulation, forensic fandom embraces a

detective mentality to seek out clues, patterns, information that lead to the formulation

of theories about the show and encourages a form of engagement that he refers to as

drillable media. It invites viewers to dig deeper, probing beneath the surface to

understand the complexity of a story (Mittell, n.d., "Forensic Fandom and the Drillable

Text"). At least in its initial stages, this strategy generated a considerable amount of

hype around the project. With the first video, fans began a witch-hunt style

investigation2 that translated into deeper audience engagement and increased the hype

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around the show even further (Bakioğlu, 2014).

Although the efforts of the LG15 creative team to prolong the mystery

surrounding their show lasted only a few months this was sufficient to generate

significant fan engagement. Once this engagement reached a critical mass, Grant

Steinfeld, a software engineer in San Francisco posing as a fan who used the nickname

Bukanator, helped the team build a site for the show where fans could interact and

communicate. The site forums quickly flooded with fans discussing every detail of each

video, initially debating the authenticity of the videos and later coming up with theories

of the story. When Steinfeld grew tired of running the site and dropped out of the

project, fans set up their own fan site devoted to LG15, which soon attracted more than

a thousand members (a number which later increased). After it was exposed as a show,

the LG15 team incorporated other video-sharing sites like Revver and social media

platforms such as MySpace and Facebook to build character profiles.

While the fictional status of Bree had long been suspected, the confirmed

fictional status of the videos elicited much outrage among some of its fans and almost

threatened to end the show. Some were ready to accept it for what it was, good

entertainment, but others felt cheated and betrayed because they took Bree’s plight for

real and offered heartfelt advice to someone they believed was a young girl in distress.

Comments accusing her of being fake lasted for months and some fans even posted their

own videos on YouTube expressing their anger and disappointment at being treated like

idiots. A quick glance at comments posted about the videos and in the forums over the

months reveals that there was a turnover in the audience after the fictional status of the

show was revealed.

Once exposed, the show’s creators clarified to The Associated Press that their

intention was not to trick the audience, but rather, to explore the narrative possibilities

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of Internet technologies as Orson Welles had done when he used the new technology of

radio to build an audience for his War of the Worlds. Ultimately, they explained, their

goal was to create a community-based storytelling that embodied the general spirit of

co-authorship. True to their promise, they developed a loose narrative structure that

enabled them to steer the story according to the feedback they received from the

audience. For example, the romantic tension between Bree and her friend Daniel was

developed only after fans sought this (MTV, 2006). When fans questioned certain

inconsistencies or inquired about the plot holes in the story --for example, who Daniel's

parents were or how Jonas, another character in the show, became so independently

wealthy -- the creators posted videos that addressed these concerns. As another

example, the decision to produce the season finale as a series of twelve videos posted by

the hour was a fan suggestion. The team also facilitated chat room gatherings with the

characters of the show, posted clues online for the fans to decode, and announced

contests to determine the outcome of the events. In addition to allowing the fans to

contribute to the story’s development, the creators initially wanted to integrate the

seemingly disparate, but narratively connected video series that emerged within the

Breeniverse.

From the outset, they decided that vlogging was the format that would sustain

this model. The skilful appropriation of the vlog and its confessional style also served as

a catalyst to build a community around the show. Simply stated, a vlog is a video diary

in which the user talks about her opinions and/or mundane things going on in her life.

Burgess and Green (2009) explain that its primary mode of engagement is the

facilitation of direct response to comments and videos that afford critique and debate (p.

54). Such interactions inevitably generate a community around the videos. The LG15

team's choice of this video genre not only demonstrated the potential of vlogging as a

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mode of storytelling, but also facilitated a form of decentralized storytelling. At the

same time, it was a good strategy to fuel user-generated content that affirmed the fans’

investment in the story world. Even after it was revealed that the show was merely

“fiction,” fans still wanted to be a part of it with the understanding that LG15 opened

the doors to a new form of storytelling. Those who stuck around responded to it almost

immediately. Within months, hundreds of fan fictions surfaced around the Breeniverse

some of which, unburdened by copyright and compensation concerns, achieved more

effective collaborative storytelling projects.

In order to generate revenue, the team started selling LG15 merchandise,

receiving fan donations, and posting their videos on Revver because the site placed

advertisements on videos and shared the revenue with the video owners. Once the show

received a steady viewership (1.5 million views per week, or 300,000 to 400,000 per

episode), the team received its first product placement from Hershey Icebreaker Sours.

The revenue of the deal was estimated to be $10,000 per show, per sponsor (EQAL,

2007). While financing the show was mostly a matter of trial-and-error during the first

season of the franchise, the increasing popularity of the videos allowed them to use

product placement in creative ways.

In June 2007, LG15 announced a promotional partnership with Neutrogena to

finance their second season. The third season, “Revelations,” was sponsored by News

Corp.’s 20th Century Fox who hired LG15 Studios to launch a viral marketing campaign

within the LG15 universe for Fox’s upcoming movie, Jumper, which was to be released

in February 2008 (EQAL, 2008). Two years after its launch, LG15 Studios became

EQAL (April 2008), with receipt of $5 million in venture capital to expand their

offerings (Hendricksonn, 2008). Around the same time, EQAL entered a partnership

with Bebo to finance and advertise their show as they expanded their franchise to

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England (Gower, 2007). The co-branded new spin-off, named KateModern, targeted a

slightly older audience and proved to be equally successful. The first season alone

received over 57 million views (Kiss, 2008). Bebo brought on Orange Mobile, P&G,

Disney Buena Vista International UK, and Microsoft to sponsor the series promising

deep brand integration (Gannes, 2007). Ultimately, KateModern was able to attract 60

different companies and brands that produced adequate revenue for the production,

although it is not clear how much Bebo's cut was. They also increased brand exposure

by selling KateModern merchandise. After KateModern came to an end and LG15 was

about to wrap up, EQAL licensed the franchise to Poland and produced N1ckola with

two other companies, Agora and A2 Multimedia. By 2013, on YouTube alone, the three

seasons of LG15 have had approximately 273,932,897 views, KateModern about

1,749,464 views, and the rest of the ancillary spinoffs close to one million views.

LG15 was one of the first instances in which YouTube proved itself as an

economically sustainable storytelling platform, and in so doing, took Hollywood off-

guard. Upon founding their entertainment company, Goodfried and Beckett confirmed

this by stating that “EQAL is [...] a nod to the power of Internet distribution in allowing

Hollywood outsiders to have an equal chance to compete with traditional media for

audiences” (Gannes, 2008). After LG15, the company struck a non-exclusive deal with

CBS to develop the online extension for their upcoming shows, Harper's Globe (Fine,

2009), Alicia Silverstone’s The Kind Life, and Anthony Zuilker’s Level 26.

Love's Labour Lost

What gave LG15 its irresistible charm wasn't the mystery around its authenticity

(for the enigma lasted only a few months) or that the fans helped the story evolve

(which turned out to be somewhat staged as the next section elaborates), but rather, that

it gave birth to innumerable spinoffs and fan creation. In other words, the success of the

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LG15 team in building a social media franchise was the direct result of the creative

team’s ability to effectively activate the participatory culture that emerged in the era of

media convergence. Henry Jenkins (2006) explains convergence as an era “where

grassroots and corporate media intersect, where the power of the media producer and

the power of the media consumer interact in unpredictable ways” (Jenkins, p. 2).

Convergence logic, then, is a cultural transformation where the boundaries between

producers and consumers are blurred to allow co-creation.

In this section I consider YouTube as a platform of real subsumption in which

the activities of participatory culture become a source of capital. To unleash the power

of this culture, the LG15 team developed a multi-pronged approach: it benefitted from

the affordances of the convergence logic that enabled every individual to become a

producer in their own right, in other words, it took advantage of the myth of DIY

celebrity to encourage massive fan participation. It also relied on the gift economy

inherent to social media to generate viral marketing for the show. To be sure, these

strategies proved to be immensely successful in rendering LG15 a commercially viable

initiative. Nevertheless, the increasingly accelerating conflict between the creators and

the fans throughout the lifetime of the franchise points toward the tensions that

undergird convergence logic.

For scholars working on digital labour, social media sites like YouTube present

environments in which a new form of labour can be cultivated. Because of their

potential for generating value, Italian autonomists have considered these environments

to be social factories (Ross, 2013, p. 25; Terranova, 2004, p. 33-34; Andrejevic, 2009,

p. 159). Developed by Mario Tronti, social factory designates a shift in the location of

production from the factory to society at large. It implies that the entire content of

people’s everyday lives and daily social doings have now become raw material for

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capital accumulation (Negri, 2005; Ross, 2013, p. 25). These are activities of real

subsumption which, according to Marx, is the process by which the once marginal

comes to function as source of capitalist value. Even though such activities are not

recognized as work, they produce cultural commodities that are equally valuable. It is

with this understanding that digital media scholars have used concepts like free labour,

immaterial labour, and playbour, a term coined from play and labour, to create new

models for how media interactivity has led to the extraction and exploitation of these

activities in these new platforms (Postigo, 2003; Terranova, 2004; Kücklich, 2005;

Andrejevic, 2009). What has transformed social media sites like YouTube, Facebook,

and Twitter into multi-million dollar companies is precisely this form of unrecognized

labour that is based on unwaged, voluntarily given work.

YouTube, as a starting platform housing user-generated content, provided the

perfect soil for a collaborative storytelling project like LG15. As a business, the site

actively solicits the participation of its users. Burgess and Green (2009) explain "For

YouTube, participatory culture is not a gimmick or a sideshow; it is absolutely core

business" (p. 6). Greg Goodfried, in an interview with MTV (2006) confirms this as a

strategy:

The fans’ ability to comment on all the videos and to interact in the forum, to interact with the characters, and also, just as importantly, to make their own videos and give their responses has the power to allow them to affect the story and to communicate with each other and with the characters about the story. And that is the driving force behind Lonelygirl15.

To spark this kind of participation, the creators of the LG15 organized regular contests

that encouraged fans to remix LG15 videos and posted the winners' videos on the LG15

official site. This, of course, would have been impossible without the technological

advancements that came about as a result of convergence. In the same interview with

MTV (2006) Miles Beckett explains that they "are taking advantage of the fact that

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people have webcams. They have their own digital cameras. Kids take media and they

make it their own…Our fans download the videos and remix them themselves. They

make responses. They create their own characters. They upload those videos." And it

worked. Using this strategy, the team was able to weather the blowback that ensued

after being exposed as fake.

The techniques used by the LG15 team were standard viral marketing

techniques, to be sure, but they were also able to transform these videos into spreadable

media by tapping into the participatory culture native to YouTube. When elaborating on

the difference between how viral media have traditionally been conceptualized and the

model of spreadable media, Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green (2013) observe

that the former assumes a passive audience who merely acts as an agent of distribution

(Jenkins et al., 2013, p. 20). By contrast spreadable media, in their formulation,

emphasize the role of networked communities that undergird viral marketing. Such

media embrace a hybrid model of circulation "where a mix of top-down and bottom-up

forces determine how material is shared across and among cultures in far more

participatory (and messier) ways" (Jenkins et al., 2013, p. 1). In this latter model,

consumers are no longer the distributers of pre-constructed messages, but rather, are

actively shaping the media flows by reframing, remixing, and sharing media content.

This form of advertisement facilitates a deeper engagement, but it also gets complicated

as audiences share content sometimes with the permission of the rights holders, at other

times in unauthorized ways and in unapproved forms. Ultimately, this mode of

engagement became the reason why some fans stuck with LG15 long after the mystery

was gone.

Unsurprisingly, the economic exchanges that undergird distribution models that

mix top-down and bottom-up forces in intricate ways are just as complex. Paul Booth

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coins the term Digi-Gratis to describe the type of digital economy that spreadable media

generates (2010, p. 24). For Booth, the concept comprises the hybrid economic

arrangements in which networked communities engage (2010, p. 24). Both market-

economy and gift economy co-exist in these arrangements in symbiosis, not in conflict

(Barbrook, 2005; Terranova, 2004, p.77; Booth, 2010, p.24). As a form of free

advertisement, this economic model serves the interests of the media companies; its

driving engine is the gift economy that relies on audiences to exchange links and videos

and remix content freely without pay. Jenkins, Ford, and Green explain that "it is

precisely the hybrid nature of these exchanges, the fluidity with which digital content

moves among different kinds of transactions, sometimes functioning as a gift and

sometimes as an advertisement for commercial gain or social advancement that makes it

so hard to determine the value, worth, and meaning of such materials” (2013, p. 91).

With its collaborative storytelling rhetoric, then, the LG15 team tapped into the gift

economy that YouTube has fostered, and in so doing, mobilized an effective form of

DIY marketing for their franchise.

In addition to facilitating the viral distribution of the videos, the logic of Digi-

Gratis led to the production of a swath of fan content around the Breeniverse. This was

mostly from the DIY culture of YouTube that infused its users with the hope of being

acknowledged as credible content creators. To be sure, this desire was not specific to

LG15, but rather, has been the driving impetus behind the content generated on

YouTube in general. According to Burgess and Green, YouTube's promise to broadcast

oneself to fame and fortune depending on the number of views one's videos receive

fosters a myth of DIY celebrity among the YouTube community (Burgess and Green,

2009, p. 22). As a platform through which one can reach millions with little investment,

YouTube technically allows the ordinary citizen to gain access to the modes of

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representation of the mass media, thereby bridging the gap between the ordinary citizen

and the celebrity. Burgess and Green explain that “the promise that talented but

undiscovered YouTubers can make the leap from their ‘ordinary worlds’ to the bona

fide ‘media world’ is firmly embedded in YouTube itself, evident in a number of

YouTube’s talent discovery competitions and initiatives” (Burgess and Green, 2009, p.

23). The creative team benefited from and actively encouraged their fans’ desires to

become legitimate storytellers on their own rights.

The unexpected success of LG15 is the result of the team's ability to manipulate

the myth of the DIY celebrity to maximum advantage. Embracing the amateur

aesthetics developed by the YouTube community, the team presented itself on a level

playing field with its audience. At first blush, this was not completely inaccurate. At the

very least, the creative team did not have the necessary amount of capital (either

financial or social) or the resources to shoot a film, let alone to launch a media

company. Their project was a shot in the dark.

Underneath the cloak of this perfect rags-to-riches story, however, there was a

resourceful team heading the project. Although they started out with limited funding

and had a very small group of people working on it, having a film-maker and an

attorney in the team, a software engineer to help out with the so-called fan website (at

least in the initial stages), and having someone from the Creative Artists Agency (Greg

Goodfried’s wife, Amanda Goodfried) to assist with the community management,

shows that the team had professional (albeit free) help on the road to success.

They mobilized a devoted community around the show by following the forums,

making subtle changes to the plot according to viewer feedback, and teasing followers

with clues embedded in videos in the early stages to generate further discussion on the

message boards. This proved successful as some fans claimed to be refreshing their

20

browser almost every second around the times when they expected a new video to be

posted. This leveraging of the community attracted the mainstream media attention the

team needed to legitimize LG15 as a “show.” Within months, the mainstream media

outlets such as Wired, MTV, and The New York Times bloggers took an interest in their

project.

No doubt some of their fans entertained similar ambitions of becoming

legitimate storytellers on their own. The LG15 team leveraged seemingly overnight

success to inspire these fans to participate with the hopes that they too could make the

cross over from amateur to professional. Xeniph, for example, who has been a fan of

LG15 from its earliest days, remembers reading a post by Miles Beckett in the forums,

encouraging the audience to create their own characters within the LG15 universe,

explaining that the lines between actor and fan will be blurred in the show. In a private

message that Xeniph received through the LG15 Forums, she was encouraged to

contribute however she wanted to (either as herself or as a character), and was informed

that there was always the possibility that the team might be incorporating some of the

fans into the LG15 canon. The message from the creators explained that “[t]he best

thing to do is to create a profile page on the main site and start making videos. We’re

gonna add a TON of features so that you will be able to create your own storylines and

manage them” (Xeniph, personal communication, July 31, 2008).

Using the affordances of convergence culture, gift economy, and the myth of

celebrity, the LG15 team was able to mobilize fan labour and transform an experimental

storytelling initiative with questionable prospects into a robust franchise. From there,

they were able to raise enough funding to launch their own media company. In this

sense, their success confirms Abigail de Kosnik's (2013) argument that fan labour is not

to be dismissed as insignificant and a waste of time, but rather, is a new form of work

21

badly needed by corporations (p. 99). Jenkins's work that traces fan activities as one

moving from the margins of cultural production to the centre of industrial production

anticipates this trajectory as well (1992, 2006). Fans invest time, effort, and imagination

on cultural artefacts by infusing them with their own meanings, but in so doing, provide

free advertisement and increase the exchange value of the products of a capitalistic

regime.

Be that as it may, the same empowerment also puts fan labour in the midst of a

matrix of contested issues. As Chin (2014) observes in her discussion about

crowdfunding, fan investment (she refers to monetary, but I would include other types

of investment as well, such as, time, effort) means that fans feel entitled to the outcome

of the project. She rightfully wonders how creators would retain artistic integrity while

at the same time not going against fans' expectations of how the project should evolve.

The risk here, of course, is the alienation of fans all together. LG15 is perhaps one of the

first initiatives in which these tensions were exposed, likely because it became the first

franchise that took root on social media that developed into a platform conducive to fan

activity. In the following section I examine how the creative team walked a tight rope

balancing what they initially promised the fans that they would do, i.e. an experiment in

community-based storytelling, and what they actually needed to do to retain their

artistic control and create a financially viable social media franchise. This meant that

they had to subtly control fan activities when directing the development of the

franchise.

Interfaketivity and Modelling Fan Behaviour

Although LG15 was not initially an industry-backed project, it was born amidst

a production culture in which storytelling occupies a central role in integrating culture

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and commerce. As the suppliers of culture, the agenda of industries has been to cultivate

and perpetuate particular tastes among audiences so that demands are forged and

consumption is regulated (Lefebvre, 1971, p. 69-109). To be sure, convergence logic

that brought in a hybrid type of economy --digital economy or Digi-Gratis—

complicated the field of production and laid bare the inherent tensions within it. LG15,

in this sense, exposed the uneven power structures between producers and fans.

In order to create a commercially sustainable show using a unpredictable

platform like YouTube, the LG15 team developed its own strategies that allowed them

to retain some amount of control over their franchise while allowing them to benefit

from the power of fan labour that promised them the buzz they needed in the road to

corporate success. The creative team achieved this by defining the taste cultures around

their story world. They carefully curated the boundaries of the LG15 canon by subtly

determining what would be legitimate within, and create deeper appreciation of,

Breeniverse and what they would discount as merely "fan fiction." In so doing, they

effectively built a brand around their story IP and transformed it into a robust social

media franchise, but in the process, they alienated some of their most devoted fans.

Sociologists like Sarah Thornton, Herbert J. Gans, Pierre Bourdieu, and Dick

Hebdige observe that taste cultures are characterized by shared aesthetic values and

standards of taste and consumption of common media (Thornton, 1996, p. 3-4; Gans,

1999, p.6-7, Bourdieu, 1984; Hebdige, 1979). Participating in a particular taste culture

further socializes one into knowledge of "the likes and dislikes, meanings and values of

the culture.” Taste cultures embody cultural hierarchies because "the privileging of what

is considered authentic over what is deemed phoney, the hip over the mainstream, and

the underground over the media" frequently become a concern (Thornton, 1996, p. 3-4).

Bourdieu and Hebdige, in particular, argue that through taste cultures society develops a

23

cultural capital that creates a hegemony of the dominant class over other social classes,

while Hebdige demonstrates how subcultures challenge this hegemony obliquely

through signs that create noise in the symbolic order, as the 70s punks in England have

done with their swastikas (Hebdige, p. 17-18).

It is this conceptualization of taste cultures that leads Abigail de Kosnik (2013)

to consider them akin to fan cultures. In fact, fan labour generates the shared tastes and

values within a community that emerges around a cultural artefact. It functions very

much like immaterial labour in that it comprises "the kinds of activities [that are]

involved in defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumer

norms, and, more strategically, public opinion" (Lazzarato, p. 133). In effect, fan studies

scholars depict the fan not just as a viewer, but rather, as a participant in a complicated

social structure that replicates the social and cultural hierarchies exhibited within taste

cultures. Kosnik observes that around cultural commodities

fans build societies with particular hierarchies, values, and belief systems. A great deal of the work of fans consists of the construction of the rules and codes of participating in fan cultures; fans moderate the interactions of other fans, establish the terms of the fans' discussions and play..., and initiate and teach newcomers to the fandom. (Kosnik, 2013, p. 101)

Through activities such as these fans become agents of legitimation who curate taste

cultures.

In the case of social media sites where user-generated content is the primary

form of capital, ordinary users (who comment on, vote, and tag content, or even create

reply videos) increase the social capital of productions within the fan community and

consequently, play the role of agents of legitimation. Part of the strategy that the LG15

team deployed in controlling fan activities was to resort to the agents of legitimation

that emerged within the community. Some of the LG15 fans started blogs (e.g., LG15

Today which was later renamed Web Series Today) and online radio/podcasts (e.g., Bree

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FM) about the show, and/or contributed to LGPedia to generate a story bible for the

show that included all the information on all the videos, cast members, fan spinoffs, and

anything that was remotely related to LG15. Creators benefitted from the work of these

superfans and used it to their utmost advantage. For example, LGPedia was used by the

creator's themselves when training new talent and writers.

Although the show was flexible enough to incorporate and respond to the

reactions of its audience to a certain extent, the branding concerns of LG15 and attempts

at rendering the series a viable commercial initiative necessitated a somewhat controlled

environment in which interactivity could be exercised without compromising the

integrity of the franchise. Fans were offered opportunities to affect the direction of the

story through their interactions, to be sure, but interactivity was presented in a much

more contrived manner, one less threatening to the integrity of the main series and

protective of the franchise that was being built. When there was an important decision

to be made about the storyline, fans got the impression that the creators somehow made

sure that the desired outcome was presented as what the fans wanted, either by carefully

selecting the fans who made the decision regarding the issue at hand or allegedly by

creating fake fan accounts, an aspect of the show that fans eventually dubbed as

"interfaketivity."3

In order to craft what appeared to be a community-led collaborative storytelling

initiative, the LG15 team subtly modelled fan behaviour. New characters in LG15, for

example, were never officially introduced in the story itself, but rather, appeared as

YouTube fans posting replies to the videos of the show until Bree acknowledged them

in her own videos. Naturally, when a fan replied to Bree’s videos developing the plot in

some fashion, fans speculated on the message boards about whether this was a new

character in the LG15 canon or whether it was merely a fan trying to get into the canon.

25

The first character to be introduced in this manner was Gemma, posting on YouTube as

gemmers19, who claimed to be Bree’s childhood friend from Nottinghamshire (UK).

During the brief time Gemma posted her vlogs, fans debated endlessly whether she was

an actual character in the show or merely a fan posing as a character. These

speculations, like those that emerged around other new characters, continued until Bree

acknowledged her on the 64th video in the series entitled “Thanks Gemma.”4

The introduction of characters primarily as pseudo-fans, led to the assumption

that if the fans participated in the story and interacted with its characters, they

themselves could be a part of the world and possibly change the outcome of the story.

Greg Gallows (one of the fans) explains that, in the beginning, mainly because Gemma

and Jonas (another character in the show introduced to replace Gemma) made their

debut as fans, a lot of people thought that if they participated and made videos talking to

these characters, they themselves could become a part of the story. The myth of DIY

celebrity was a real possibility for some of these fans that spurred their efforts. He adds

that even though this was usually not possible, the creators gave you the impression that

it was. Thus, fans with explicit encouragement from the creators, took it upon

themselves to introduce new characters, develop marginal characters, and parody others,

hoping that their additions might be adopted by the main series (Xeniph, personal

communication, July 31, 2008).

The discrepancy between the intentions of the creators (that is, to stage a

collaboratively narrated story) and the misunderstanding of these intentions by the fans

(that fan interactions with the show could alter the story’s outcome) resulted in an

implicit struggle of ownership between both parties. The creators’ plan was to build a

world in which there was a place for content created by the fans without necessarily

incorporating it into the LG15 universe. The fans, on the other hand, were not content

26

with being restricted to the sandbox created for fan creations and were eager to take on

a more meaningful role within the parameters of the Breeniverse.

A cursory glance at LGPedia shows that countless spinoffs emerged around the

Breeniverse. In fact, some of them were far more successful at what LG15 had initially

set out to be, a community-based collaborative storytelling initiative, but eventually

failed as the team went corporate. One such series was born out of the "New Girl"

challenge started by a fan who used the moniker immortal1. Seeking the stories of other

trait-positive girls, the challenge ultimately aimed to introduce more fan-created

characters into the story, an initiative that eventually developed into its own spinoff

series called the Flock. The founding premise of this series was that the Order was

always looking for more trait-positive girls. Although the Flock series presented the

LG15 team with an excellent opportunity to incorporate fan fiction into the main series

in line with the existing canon, the Flock creators were disappointed to see that the

group was not even acknowledged in the Lonelygirl15 show.

The eagerness of fans to be somehow included in the main series (and thereby

considered to be legitimate storytellers in their own right) gave the creators subtle

control over the spinoffs. Implicitly encouraging the fans to create extra content around

the LG15 universe while controlling any real interactivity was not just a way of

exploiting the myth of DIY celebrity, but also served to alienate fan labour. For

Andrejevic (2013) “alienation subsists not just in the surrender of conscious control

over productive activity, but also, consequently, in its product. Exploitation, then, [is

the] loss of control over one’s productive and creative activity” (p. 154). To “be

mentioned” in the show meant that one’s videos attracted more views, which in turn,

was a form of being acknowledged as legitimate storytellers. This implicit

understanding held fan activity close to the creative team’s storyline and was the

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impetus behind the fan dynamic that emerged early on.

Xeniph, whose own storyline was later incorporated into the Flock fan spinoff,

states that it was hard for fans to create legitimate spinoffs that attracted viewership. In

order to ensure being included in the main series, the fans, especially in the beginning,

competed with one another to be mentioned by the actual characters of the show so that

they could be included in the LG15 canon. Because of this implicit competition, Xeniph

explains, fans were cautious with whom they interacted through their videos and with

what they said about the Breeniverse. She explains

if you’re going to be a member of the religion or Order, anything you say is in [jeopardy]. You could say you believe something, for instance, try to explain what the eternal hymn or whatever means to you, but any minute [the creators] could come and say, ‘No, that’s wrong.’ [A]nd then you lose all credibility. It’s also that you feel you have nothing new to add info-wise about the religion [of Hymn of One].

Similarly, if the fans interacted with someone whose stories were going in a direction

that the creators did not approve, they lost their chances of becoming included in the

canon. Although Beckett messaged Xeniph encouraging her and other fans to create

their own characters, she feels that the team did not back these words up with action.

ModelMotion (2009), another long-standing fan who is one of the founders of LG15

Today blog, reiterates the negligent attitude displayed by the creators after the show and

its sequel, LG15: The Resistance, ended:

Fans of lonelygirl15/LG15: The Resistance have long requested that the creators allow for a much closer integration of their fan creations with the main series. The idea was that this could have been done by creating a “hook” within the main series that fans could play off to create their own stories. This is a request that was consistently ignored by the creators. Fans of course did end up telling their own stories but if one of them came too close to looking like it was part of the main series the creators would “out” the series as “fan fiction” which often killed it in terms of the excitement these fan creations brought to the universe. The argument given by the creators was [that] they needed to protect their story. (ModelMotion, 2009)

28

Jan Libby, a professional game designer who was introduced to replace Glen

Rubenstein and who was hired to include a fan-ARG5 into the franchise, explains that

even if the creators wanted to integrate fan-created content into the mainstream show,

doing so would bring about legal concerns, such as copyright, where the fans would

have to sign over the character/spinoff to LG15. Explaining that fan content is part of

the community, not the show, she surmises that the creators simply wanted to create a

space for the fan-based content without necessarily integrating them into the main show

(Libby, J., personal communication, August 14, 2008).

While the issue of copyright is a legitimate concern, the initial representation of

what LG15 was about gave a different impression to the fans. As a consequence, the

show lost its most ardent followers one after the other. The initial collaborative attitude

of the creators that suggested a more meaningful space for the fans transformed into a

more contrived representation of such interaction. Jeromy Barber, the creator of another

popular fan-ARG, Madison Atkins, describes the contrived interactivity present in LG15

as decorating a house with cardboard furniture and renting it as fully furnished (Barber,

J., personal communication, April 20, 2009). Those who realized that their contribution

could only be in the form of attending contests and that none of their creations would be

a part of the show (which was the initial appeal in participating in LG15), abandoned

their hopes of becoming a part of the canon and instead started making videos for other

fans, others dropped the show all together.

Unbearable Lightness of Unpaid Labour

As it has been apparent time and again (LG15 case being a landmark case as one

of the first social media franchises), convergence logic has traditionally exposed the

uneasy relationship between market economy and fan labour. While the former is

defined by creative control and copyright, the latter has a decentralizing effect that

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undermines that control. By setting out to experiment the blurring of actor/producer and

fan divide, the LG15 team initially dived into this uncharted territory, and in the

process, their initiative exposed immaterial labour as labour. As such, it brought up

tricky issues of compensation and copyright. Even though fans do not expect to get paid

for their work as fans, Kosnik postulates that one of the few forms of fan compensation

is the elevation of fan labourers from amateurs to paid professionals or the boosting of

fans’ careers (Kosnik, 2013, p. 110). The myth of the DIY celebrity that YouTube has

generated definitely points toward the possibility of this form of compensation.

Even though a majority of the fan creations were excluded from the canon, the

LG15 team did hire a few of the superfans who were able to generate a significant

following with their fan content. Glen Rubenstein was hired to include his wildly

popular fan ARG, OpAphid, into the canon, but they parted ways four months later

following unsubstantiated claims that Rubenstein was sending out clues for favours

(Waite, 2007). Later, Jenny Powell was briefly hired as the Production Assistant to

Amanda Goodfried following her series LonelyJew156 in which Goodfried herself

played the role of one of the characters in the show. In these instances fans were able to

cross the divide between amateur and professional because they garnered a considerable

following within the community. Their careers picked up later as they went on to work

on other projects. This is, after all, how the myth of the DIY celebrity works.

Be that as it may, the myth of DIY celebrity does not represent a genuine

democratization of the media because projects based on social media like YouTube

reproduce the distinctions between the media world and the ordinary world by hiding

the inequality of symbolic power that media institutions represent. Graeme Turner

(2006) argues that even when ordinary people become celebrities through their own

creative efforts, "there is no necessary transfer of media power: they remain within the

30

system of celebrity native to, and controlled by, the mass media." Burgess and Green

observe that this is the case for YouTube as well,

More accessible new media technologies and platforms can open up possibilities for the commercialization of amateur content, and in some cases turn the producers of that content into celebrities. But… the marker of success for these new forms, paradoxically, is measured not only by their online popularity but by their subsequent ability to pass through the gate-keeping mechanisms of old media—the recording contract, the film festival, the television pilot, the advertising deal. (p. 24)

The case of LG15 both supports and subverts the mythologies around the

significance of YouTube’s amateur content. One could argue that LG15 was an

initiative powered by ordinary people, but that the project’s claim to fame came only

after the mainstream media took an interest in the show. Similarly, the few fans who

were hired into the show enjoyed only brief tenures and were quickly replaced by

professionals outside of the community. Indeed, the hiring of fans proved to be

problematic one way or another.

Once the fans made the transition to professionalism their expectations of

compensation changed. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the controversy around

the final contest that the creators announced after they were done with the franchise,

"The Show is Yours" (TSIY). Once the show ended in December 2008, the creators

announced a contest (which—as fans later found out— was not really a contest because

of legal issues) called “The Show Is Yours”. The call solicited fans to submit a 5-minute

pilot and 8-week treatment for a social show derivative of the LG15 Universe. The

producers of the winning show, they announced, would have an opportunity to post

their videos on the LG15 website. Having been disappointed by the lack of interest

displayed toward their creations, fans were now cynical about the creators' efforts to

include their creations in the show. The results of this competition perpetuated

previously established patterns in the show that emerged from lack of trust that the

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submitted entries would be judged on their creative merit. A lack of transparency on the

part of the creators dampened fan potential.

The competition was won by Jenni Powell and Logan Rapp, both of whom had

been fans, but both of whom had also worked professionally for the LG15 team. Aside

from their production experience, they had access to the original actors, two of whom

they brought back in their pilot, The Misfits. Because the LG15 team had insisted that

this was not a contest, even though it involved a competition, fans erroneously assumed

that they were going to get paid as employees, i.e. professional producers. EQAL, on

the other hand, never made any efforts to disabuse them of their belief (Miller, 2009).

Powell and Rapp backed out of the project once they found out that EQAL had no

intentions of financing the production of the series, but instead was expecting the

competitors to produce a month worth of videos for a small stipend.

Although these cases demonstrate that, indeed, the show blurred the lines

between actor and fan (as suggested by Miles Beckett in his message to Xeniph) and

producer and consumer (as argued by Henry Jenkins), such crossovers are

fundamentally problematic. Also significant to note here is that, as Graeme Turner

(2006) suggests, the move from amateur to professional only happens to a select few

who are able to pass the traditional measurements upheld by established media. When

someone does cross the line, this move presents a host of issues regarding labour and

compensation.

Conclusion

LG15 comes at a crucial time in the history of YouTube, just around the time it

was purchased by Google when the pressure of monetization came to the fore. Since the

acquisition, many scholars have noted that YouTube bears contradictory tendencies

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derived from its earlier democratization goals and its future economic potential. Little

wonder, then, the LG15 franchise mirrors the growing pains, anxieties, and uncertainties

of its parent platform.

Thus far, what little has been written about LG15 hails it as an unquestionable

triumph for social media. It goes without saying that the show was a triumph in this

respect. LG15 proved, in no uncertain terms, that YouTube was not merely a repository

of cat videos, but rather, bore the potential to be an economically viable platform. If

anything, the show became the harbinger of successful Web series like The Guild

(produced by a team of World of Warcraft gamers, including Felicia Day) and Lizzie

Bennet Diaries (produced by a group of Jane Austen fans). These shows cleared the

path for lucrative partnerships between brands/mainstream media companies and

YouTube celebrities who were once consumers themselves (Adweek, 2015). At first

blush, such developments indicate the empowerment of consumers.

Be that as it may, examining the LG15 franchise throughout its lifespan, instead

of merely considering its initial stages, and from the perspective of fans yields a more

nuanced picture. Such survey demonstrates that the alleged collapse of the barriers

between media producers and consumers does not necessarily yield a truly democratic

approach to content creation, an idea that the LG15 team actively experimented with

early on. Rather, John T. Caldwell (2008) argues that convergence is about co-creating

with audiences as audiences remix, redistribute, and advertise on behalf of media

companies (p. 325). It is a clever strategy that plays into the hands of corporations in

that it allows them to find "new, cheaper, and more flexible [labour] arrangements"

(Caldwell, p. 275-276). Industries extract value from fan labour in that they use it as

"attention-attractor, buzz generator, as brand enricher, as community-builder" but fans

are "only allowed to do so as long as the communication is (potentially) valuable to the

33

industry" (Bratich, 2011, p. 624). Framed this way, the success of LG15 as a social

media franchise could be framed as a case of real subsumption whereby the once

marginal (fan activities) come to function as a source of capitalist value (EQAL).

As discussed, the LG15 team's earlier claim to be experimenting with

community-led collaborative storytelling mislead fans into thinking that their

participation would have a more meaningful impact on the show proper and implicitly

toyed with fans' desire to see their contents included in the show. Their strategy was

successful. The explosion of fan interest and countless fans-generated content around

the show attracted the attention of the main stream media outlets. But once their project

was in the spotlight, the team looked for ways to keep creative control and manage fan

participation in subtle ways to secure advertisement and attract investors. It wasn't long

after the team received funding to form their own company, EQAL, that they moved the

fan site to a more professional looking umbrella site that omitted the previous fan

comments and fan videos. This was a serious blow to the fans because community

interaction is what made the site most special to them (ModelMotion, 2007). Before

long, the fan administrators' access to the LGPedia servers were cut off on account of

security issues. Fans effectively lost control over years of work invested in the wiki and

feared that the creators would eventually take the wiki offline, which they did.

The lesson here is that leveraging fandom for marketing and monetization

purposes is a tricky business. Even if creators begin with good intentions, they have to

walk a tight rope crossing a mine field of issues like creative control, compensation, and

copyright. Because of this enigma, mobilization of fan activities have mostly been

relegated to asking fans to fund projects through platforms like Kickstarter,7 even

though the issues of retaining creative control and negotiating fan expectations have

continued to be a consistent theme (Chin, Jones, McNutt, Pebler, 2014). Any greater

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control given to fans has taken place in smaller projects funded by smaller venues.8 In

many ways, LG15 is an early examples demonstrating how complex the inner workings

of convergence can be.

1 ARGs are immersive games that blur the lines between reality and fiction by conveying a hybrid gaming experience through online and offline mechanisms. The gameplay consists of solving complex puzzles that unlock various stages of the game, retrieving clues scattered across the web or in real-world locations, receiving and making phone calls, and even participating in live events. Their effectiveness in building communities around stories through play is what makes them so powerful as games. For this reason, ARGs have frequently been deployed as a form of viral marketing for franchises like Lost and Heroes that have used these games to build a robust following (Bakioğlu, 2015). 2 One fan discovered that the domain name of the phony fan site was registered prior to the first video posted on YouTube, a discovery that unquestionably undermined the authenticity of the vlogs. Another fan noted that the site was registered on the same day as Bree’s MySpace page and Yahoo! e-mail address were created (on March 12). In August 2006, yet another fan discovered and posted the trademark application by Goodfried, which suggested that these videos were at least in part a commercial venture. Then, in September 2006, three tech-savvy fans, working together, set up a sting on the e-mail address that was being used by “Bree”; the operation netted them the Internet address of a computer at Creative Artists Agency, the Beverly Hills talent agency who represented the team (Rushfield & Hoffman, 2006, September 8). On September 12, 2006, Matt Foremski from Silicon Valley Watcher, while searching Google’s cache of online sites, found the original MySpace page of the actress who played Bree and exposed her as Jessica Lee Rose (Foremski, 2006). This obsession with uncovering the truth about LG15 added to the extreme popularity of the show and accelerated its viral distribution in its early stages. 3 When Gemma was phased out of the show, the team introduced Jonas as an independently wealthy "fan" posting video responses to Bree offering to help her and Daniel escape the Order. Citing the mysterious origins of his fortune and the absence of his parents, fans were suspicious of Jonas's motives and started an aggressive anti-Jonas campaign. Ultimately, Daniel announced that he was going to let one of the fans, GoodGollyItsHolly, decide on whether or not the pair should meet with Jonas and encouraged everyone to contact her with their opinions. Much to the dismay of some of the fans, GoodGollyItsHolly decided that meeting with Jonas was in the best interest of the pair. When asked what would have happened had she said no to Jonas, some of the fans responded by claiming that the creators would have done it anyway. They assumed that this particular fan was picked because of her well-known affection for Jonas. LGPedia notes that fans were suspicious regarding whether GoodGollyItsHolly was a real person. Even if she was, some assumed that she was connected to the creators. Events like this raised concerns about the genuineness of the interactivity surrounding LG15 which fans came to characterize as "interfaketivity.” 4 Since the videos posted by new characters were not initially deemed to be a part of the LG15 canon until Bree specifically acknowledged them, these fake "fan replies" were not included in the original LG15 site. They were included only after it was clear that s/he was a character in the show. Even then, the earlier videos of these characters would roam at large in the depths of

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YouTube. The very first video of LG15, for example, was not included in the early version of their site because Bree and Daniel were not considered to be characters at first, but rather, mere vlogers on YouTube. The intentional omissions of the early videos of newly introduced characters helped sustain some degree of verisimilitude as they appeared to be video responses posted by real fans. 5 ARGs are an experimental gaming genre that blurs the lines between reality and fiction by conveying a fractured narrative through websites, text messages, snail mail, phone calls, and even real-life interactions. Fans who initially assumed LG15 to be an ARG, upon finding out that it was not, took it upon themselves to create several ARGs around Breeniverse. When doing so, however, they did not merely follow the guidelines set forth by the creator's themselves, i.e. creating characters that fit in the canon and making videos around those characters, but rather, they followed what they thought the creators of LG15 were doing in the early stages of the story: designing an engaging experience around a mystery which was, ultimately, the trademark of an ARG. 6 Jenni Powell is the creator of LonelyJew15, a video series about Anne Frank, a Jewish girl who became well-known after her diaries were posthumously published. The series explores what could have been if Frank had a Webcam instead of a pencil and paper. LJ15 attracted so much attention from other fans that eventually other people from the community started posting video responses as characters in the series. To this day, fans maintain that LJ15 is what LG15 claimed to have been. In no time, the series attracted the attention of the LG15 creators. Seven months after the launch of LJ15, not only did Amanda Goodfried, the lead producer of LG15, briefly play one of the characters in the series, Kitty, but also hired Powell as her assistant in the production of LG15, a position that lasted all too briefly. After several months, Powell was let go without explanation, a decision that fuelled the resentment felt by fans. 7 Veronica Mars, the teen detective drama with a considerable fan following, is one of the most successful examples for a fan-funded project. After it was discontinued on television and the team behind the project could not find a studio to finance it on the big screen, they took to Kickstarter and raised over five million dollars and made it happen (John, 2014). 8 Jay Bushman, the transmedia producer of Lizzie Bennet Diaries created a spinoff Web series based on an unfinished Jane Austen novel entitled Welcome To Sanditon (Andersen, 2013). The project boasted of a substantial interactive content that asked the fans to play the residents of the town and gave them tools to tell their own stories in parallel with the main story they were telling. Every other week they made an episode out of the highlights of the user-created stories. The project was funded by Pemberly Digital, through a financing deal with the MCN DECA (now called Kin Community). There was no monetization of fan-contributions.

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