Natalie Tran - CommunityChannel

admin — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 16:33:00 +0000

Natalie Tran, a 22-year-old Australia vlogger, has created a small sensation on YouTube. The reigning queen of Australian YouTubers, she is a young, fresh-faced woman with self-deprecating humor who picks on the mundane snags of life that often get under our skin. It's a Seinfeld approach to humor, except this channel features a smart-mouth Vietnamese woman who begins each video with a quirky wave and smile.

The videos are often short, less than five minutes, with mild irreverence and profanity scattered throughout. Her satirical style is engaging, highlighting comments she receives from viewers and labels that portion of her videos "Comments/Porn Music Time," which is befitting of her overall "your mum" jokes and "ugly word of the video" persona.

A community channel with nearly 200,000 subscribers, Natalie's place is dubbed the site where "bandwidth commits suicide and cool goes to die," and has been embraced all over the globe, deeming her the number one most subscribed Australian channel on YouTube.

In some comments there are references and comparisons to HappySlip, another popular Asian comic female vlogger based out of New York, who stamped her Internet fame with the Filipino flag and primarily focuses on the Philippines and Filipino American culture.

Both have strong followings, but the difference between the two is target audience. Tran, who came on the interwebs in 2006, utilizes YouTube without an independent website, and appeals to a wide variety of viewers, but has a younger flavor to her videos. She speaks on the fly and grounds her 130 videos (and growing by the week) in casual humor relating pop culture, sexuality, Australian temperatures, and everyday grumbles.

Christine Gambito from HappySlip, who also launched her comedic career in 2006, has fewer sketches (eighty-one videos), and her skits play on the safer but still hilarious side of web entertainment. Topics range from her personal connection to the Philippines, to a friend passing away, to Facebook etiquette. Unlike Tran, she steers clear of any sexual innuendo and often showcases her musical talents. With her own domain and easy to navigate website, HappySlip has a more mature feel than Natalie’s community channel, which works in Natalie’s favor.

Natalie’s appeal to a young generation has spread far and wide and her success story proves that YouTube remains the hotbed for raw talent and creativity. Her popularity has skyrocketed so quickly it will not be surprising when a global linguistic trend begins to take hold; when "yeh" replaces "yeah," while "man" and "mate" are tagged at the end of sentences.

Written by: Lisa Factora-Borchers, April 4th 2009