'My Friend Bubz': Building intimacy on YouTube’s beauty community

This chapter presents the scholarly dialogue focused on digital culture practices at the intersection of digital fandom and celebrity culture. It examines the way in which content fosters different modes of address and promotes various types of connection with viewers. The chapter describes how viewers consume Bubz's different types of content, and often reciprocate by engaging in self-disclosing narratives through comments. Bubz's more than 300 videos can be grouped into four categories, which it term 'content-oriented', 'market-oriented', 'relational' and 'motivational'. The chapter shows that YouTube videos or videos disclosing intimate and personal moments as 'videos of affinity' that strengthen feelings of closeness and connection between viewers and content creators. It focuses on a broader ethnographic examination of YouTube, specifically its beauty community, between 2013 and 2015. The chapter considers a purposeful sample of 20 videos, which were transcribed and interpreted in light of their qualities of building and strengthening feelings of connection and intimacy with viewers.