10 Easy Ways to Support Unpopular Youtube Artists Without Spending $ or Time

This question comes up now and then, so I thought it'd be useful to have a cheat sheet. We're in a time of financial calamity but people still make art, and in the social media age there are ways for fans to help/validate/enable artists which are quick and free and essential to your favorite-but-struggling videomaker/musician/writer/cat photographer continuing on their path and being able to make more art, which is what this is all kinda about, que no? 

In descending order from MOST GENEROUSLY HELPFUL to JUST SORTA HELPFUL. 

1. Give them money or gigs. (Okay, this one is not free. The rest are. But venmo'ing @dominic-mah-1 is a thing.)

2. SUBSCRIBE to their Youtube channel. Or whatever their official channel is. Subscribing should be easy for anyone who has a Youtube or Google account. Every Youtube video's got a red SUBSCRIBE button next to it if you haven't subscribed already. Subscribing is extremely helpful because when producers or hiring folk look at an artist's Youtube page, they like to see that the page has a healthy regular following. And the best part is, subscribing obligates you to nothing, you don't even have to actually follow the artist, or have deeply considered all of their videos -- but by subscribing you've helped them a LOT. Subscribing means you might get an extra email from Youtube once in a while, big deal, you can get out of that on your preferences page. All the benefits of being a working artist who can pay some bills with their Youtube stuff (people do do this) lie in the direction of having LOTS OF SUBSCRIBERS. And it takes, like, 30 seconds at most.

Let's take my recently published karaoke vid as an example. First, go to its main page by clicking "YouTube" in the lower right corner there.

See the subscribe button? Or do you only see the dimmed-out "subscribed" button? Well then that's because I ALREADY LOVE YOU. 

3. Like all their content. On Youtube or whatever their prime platform is, not on Facebook. Again, those Like numbers on the origin page are looked at and judged, a lot. 

4. Share their content. Share that shit LIKE A VIRAL DISEASE. Especially if no one's shared it yet. The snowball has to start somewhere. If you are a picky sharer, share it on Google+ or somewhere where no one cares too much. 

5. Like/follow their Twitter. Because people think Twitter is a big deal. Personally, I recommend creating an account and following every single artist or personality whom you care about still doing their thing in 5 years....and then never using Twitter for anything else. It's a crazy negative feedback loop up in there. 

6. Like/follow their Facebook page.  Liking an official facebook page has a similar weight to subscribing to a youtube channel, except less. If you like the artist, you should do both. If they're just a friend or colleague that you want to be nice to without risking anything of yourself, you should do both. LIKING the official FB page is a lot more helpful than liking individual posts or the person's personal page. 

"Hey, Karaoke Rhapsody has a Facebook page! I should LIKE it and minimize notifications from it if I don't want to see every single Karaoke Rhapsody post!"

7. Retweet their Tweets and share their Facebook posts, and credit them with a link so that others may know the origin point. 

8. Comment on their content ON THEIR OFFICIAL PAGES, even negatively. Every artist who's anywhere has benefited from a little troll-flame battle about their content at some point. Comments create the vibe of, "people are talking about this person's stuff!" But again, they only help if they are publicly viewable on the official Youtube or Facebook page.

9. If you have the urge to gush, compliment, or say how great something is, please resist the urge to comment on their personal Facebook page and GO TALK ABOUT IT ON THE OFFICIAL/PROFESSIONAL PAGES. The reason is, traffic on personal facebook pages is nice and appreciated and social, but it doesn't, in the bigger picture, benefit anyone except Facebook, which is data-mining all your personal interactions so it can take over the world, yadda yadda. So write rants on our official pages, please. They will be seen. We're checking them. A lot. Believe me.

10. Like all our stuff on Facebook. There's no reason to not continue doing what most people do, which is just like-buttoning posts and content that you actually like. But again, liking individual posts pretty much only goes towards Facebook tracking your preferences....while doing the 9 things above FIRST will directly, concretely help the maker of the content that you're liking, and give that maker a much improved chance of making more of that content you like. I know it sounds crazy because those 9 steps altogether only take like 119 more seconds than normal FB like-buttoning...but it's true, and in those 119 seconds, that unsung-unpopular-obscure-emerging artist whom you like is actually falling in love with you. True fact.

Links to practice on, if you happen to wanna do Dom Mah a solid today:

KaraokeRhapsody.com a.k.a. https://www.youtube.com/user/dommah
https://twitter.com/dommah
https://twitter.com/thorhulkcritic
https://www.facebook.com/ThorHulkCritic
https://www.facebook.com/karaokerhapsody
http://www.yomyomf.com/users/dominic/