It’s a sunny Saturday May morning in Cardiff city centre, and shoppers are throwing confused glances at a large, cordoned-off queue outside WHSmith attended by a hulking cluster of guards. The queue is here for an author signing – a common enough sight at high-street bookshops – but the barriers and the bouncers are all new. “Even Charlotte Church didn’t have security,” the shop manager tells me. The queue is waiting for Caspar Lee.
The general population divides into two categories: those who have never heard of Caspar Lee and those who think he is one of the biggest stars in the UK. Lee, a 22-year-old British-born South African, is a YouTube star. Vlogging, or video blogging, first took off around 2005 – also the year that YouTube was founded. By July 2006 it was the fifth most popular site on the internet. A huge amount of content is uploaded every day, but Lee and his friends are the site’s celebrities. At the time of writing, he has 6.7 million subscribers on his main account – and his videos have notched up 633 million views.
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