YouTuber Spotlight: Alex Day
Ever since I started this column on my favourite YouTubers, most of the people I’ve covered have been from the U.S. and Canada. I did focus on French YouTuber trudbol a while back, but I noticed today that I’ve yet to feature someone from the U.K. So I thought, “Who better to represent that country’s YouTube stars than Alex Day?”
Also known by his channel name ‘nerimon’, Day is a musician and vlogger with more than 500,000 subscribers and 74 million collective views. While most of his videos take the form of vlogs, he also posts occasional music videos and sketches. Perhaps his biggest hit was the series “Alex Reads Twilight”, a set of videos where he reads and ridicules Stephanie Meyer’s first novel for his viewers. Read on for more about why Alex Day is a dependable addition to your YouTube subscriptions!
Like many of Day’s fans in North America, it was the “Alex Reads Twilight” series that first lead me to his channel. There’s a total of 16 videos in the series, and all of them are uproariously funny. They also work as a pretty competent literary critique – anyone who hates Twilight will want to forward the videos to their Meyer-loving friends to show them why the books are terrible. Check out the first one here:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2L253VLwH3w]
As much as I enjoyed Day’s series, I didn’t subscribe right away. At first, it didn’t seem like he had much of a theme for his channel, and I was already following enough vlog channels. I changed my mind, though, when I checked back in with Day’s channel after a few months and caught up on some of his material. I found that a lot of his other videos had that same biting English humour that I loved about his Twilight critiques, so I clicked the “Subscribe” button.
Soon after, I realized that Day shares a house with English YouTube sensation Charlie McDonnell (charlieissocoollike), and that they often collaborate on videos. Together, Day and McConnell put out catchy music videos set to songs that Day writes and performs for his “day job” as an indie musician. Here’s a taste of a McConnell and Day collab, based on Day’s hit song “Forever Young”:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOW2eEz9cYk]
One of the things I really like about Day is how frank and honest he is in the vlogs he posts. There’s no sense that he’s playing a character of himself or hiding his personality. Perhaps that’s because he isn’t as caught up in the YouTube “machine” that many of his American counterparts are. Alex Day isn’t so much a brand on YouTube, but a guy who has a weekly chat with his fans.
That lack of pretention carries over into Day’s music career. He’s spoken on YouTube about his disappointment with major record labels, and how he prefers to produce and market on his own. In fact, it's his self-marketing that has helped spread his name well beyond YouTube. Recently, he inspired his fans to push him into the #4 spot on the U.K. Christmas charts, all through crowdsourcing his followers (who he dubbed the Nermie Army) as marketers.
Of course, it helps that Day's music has a light, pop-infused sound that shows off some real technical skill. While I'm not a huge fan of his lyrics, his songs are better than the majority of music marketed on YouTube. I’d call Alex Day a guy to watch, whether for his music or his quirky YouTube presence.
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What do you think of Alex Day? Are you a fan? Do you find him annoying? Did you discover him by way of the “Alex Reads Twilight” series, or through another video? If you’re new to his work, will you consider subscribing to him? Share your thoughts in the comments section below. You can also check out the rest of my YouTuber Spotlight series here:
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YouTuber Spotlight Series:
Lindsey Stirling | Rhett and Link | Julien Neel (Trudbol) | EpicMealTime & FPSRussia
Philip DeFranco | Freddie Wong | Toby Turner | Julian Smith | MysteryGuitarMan
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