Meet the new breed of celebrity: inside the YouTube convention In London last week, 10,000 teenagers turned out to take selfies with the most popular faces on the internet. Harry Wallop went in search of their appeal

Rarely have I felt so out of my depth. Hundreds of teenagers, mostly girls, some of them crying, are queuing to meet Dan and Phil. I have not heard of Dan & Phil, though the one with lank hair looks a bit familiar.

Bafflingly, many of the fans are wearing animal hats, with long dangly ears, which I discover later are llama hats. “Are you a Danosaur or a Philion?” explains Nate Jackson, 16. “Danasaurs wear llama hats, Philions wear lion hats.”

They are a mystery to me, but Dan & Phil are huge -- and I’m not just judging from the line of girls hyperventilating and waiting for their selfies. These two flatmates, aged 24 and 28, make internet videos which feature them sitting on their sofa, waffling on about the perils of changing duvets, or attempting to put makeup on each other blindfolded, or waxing their legs.

It is puerile, if harmless, nonsense -- and cheaply filmed nonsense at that. But their weekly videos are watched regularly by more than five million people. The most popular have been watched by over 9 million. These are the sort of viewing figures Channel 4 or BBC Two can only dream of.

Welcome to the new age of celebrity: YouTubers.
TomSka, Vsauce, Laci Green or Dan and Phil may lack the name recognition of Ant and Dec or Taylor Swift, but they are what your children are watching in their bedrooms, on their phones or laptops.
And in East London a clutch of the biggest YouTubers have come to meet their fans.
Harry gets a selfie with Thomas Ridgewell, aka Tomska
The event is called Summer in the City. It started six years ago in a marquee in Hyde Park with a few hundred people turning up, but it soon swelled in size. A few years later it moved to Alexandra Palace (the site, symbolically, of the first BBC television transmissions) but that soon became too small, so this year it has had to come to one of Britain’s biggest exhibition venues: the vast, windowless, ExCel Centre.
In total, about 10,000 fans are here -- mostly girls, mostly under-18, many of them sporting blue hair. This too I find perplexing, along with almost many aspects of the weekend: the obsession with gender, or rather the large number of teenagers who say they prefer me to use the pronoun “they” rather than “he” or “she” when I quote them; the number of people wearing Pokéman masks; the endless, and good-natured hugging. But mostly, why this new breed of celebrity has managed to become so fantastically popular without using any of the traditional routes to fame: magazines, making records, modelling, films, television shows. making records, modelling, films, television shows.

One of the reasons, as the fans make clear, is because the YouTube stars are so approachable.
Alex Tapper, 16, who is half English but lives in Madrid, has flown over especially to Summer in the City along with her school friend Bea Perez. They are two of the lucky 300 to have won tickets (or, rather wristbands) to meet Dan & Phil.
Alex Tapper and Bea Perez, both 16, who flew in from Madrid to meet Dan & Phil
Bea says: “You spend all year round watching these people, and this is your once chance to meet them.”
Alex adds: “We feel we know them.”

When I ask if they fancy Dan & Phil, they both look horrified and shout: “No!”.
So what’s the appeal? “They are just really funny. They are really entertaining, and they are real,” says Alex.
After they have had their thirty seconds with the two video stars, I ask what it was like. “It was so nice,” says Alex. Worth flying across Europe for? “Oh, yes. It was worth it. They are not like celebrities. They interact with fans. Bea is a huge fan of Harry Styles [the pop singer], but never in a million years would you get to meet him.”
“When I watch Dan and Phil on YouTube I will now always think: I know that I’ve met you. They will never remember me. But I know.”
Michael Stevens, aka Vsauce, on the right, meeting fans
Another 16-year-old I meet is Ellen Jones from Bishops Stortford (“so white, so conservative”, she says dismissively). She has spent a large chunk of the morning queuing to meet Bry, an Irish singer, who has achieved significant success without a manager, an agent or record label -- thanks to YouTube.
I ask what she got out out of her brief meeting, hug, and selfie with the singer: “He was very lovey and wanted to talk to us. And that’s what the YouTube relationship is all about. YouTubers benefit from having a positive fan base. It’s mutually beneficial and it’s what differentiates it from standard media.”
Nate Jackson and Ellen Jones, both 16 and from Bishops Stortford. Jackson is wearing a llama hat, popular with many Dan & Phil fans
This view is backed up by the YouTube stars themselves.
Tom Ridgewell, 24, is known as TomSka on YouTube, where he broadcasts various videos -- including his popular series of asdfmovie (named after the second line of a computer keyboard) ultra-quick cartoons.
“I love coming here just to meet people. It’s really nice to put a face to the numbers. If you just looked at the numbers you can get desensitised to seeing one million, two million people. You don’t know what that means.” Ridgewell has 3.7 million subscribers to his YouTube channel. “If you come here and meet 1,000 -- you’d think it make you more arrogant. But in fact it’s very humbling to see the effects you have. And remind yourself that you are doing this for people.”
Dan Howell and Phil Lester, known as Dan & Phil on YouTube, meeting Alex Tapper
He spends much of the day -- when he is not appearing on a panels discussing internet trolls -- signing soft toys and T-shirts and posing for selfies with fans, who have paid £40 for their entrance tickets.
Of course, it is impossible for YouTubers to meet all their fans, or even tweet them or like their Facebook posts. These stars have a reach far beyond this dreary conference centre and their ardent fans because so many of them chime with the teen zeitgeist.
Michael Stevens runs a channel on YouTube called Vsauce, which broadcasts witty, and surprisingly complex, science videos. One of the most popular answers the question: what if everyone in the world jumped at once. (Answer: not very much.) But he does so in an enlightening and quick-fire way.

He explains the secret to creating viral videos: “No one is sharing a video I make because they want to help me get subscribers. They are trying to do it to reflect back on themselves. If they show on Facebook that they like one of my videos, what they are really saying is: “Hey, aren’t I cool, or smart or funny or hip for knowing about this before you did, or for appreciating this’.”
The Hill family from Bodmin, Cornwall, drove 9 hours to come to Summer in the City. Here they are meeting Bry, the Irish singer (centre)
And, it turns out, many teens want to seem funny or smart. YouTube has helped the geeks find a voice. “It’s what I call the dinner party quotient,” says Stevens. “Will this video help people prepare to be the coolest person at the party? Will they have just not facts and trivia, but perspectives?”
Ridgewell says most of his videos are aimed at his 15-year-old self, sitting in his bedroom at the very dawn of the YouTube era. “When I was 15 I was getting bullied. Now, I have dedicated a big part of my workload to preventing other people making the same silly mistakes.”
Tom Ridgewell has 3.7 million subscribers to his YouTube, where he is known as TomSka
This is the secret of so many YouTubers success: they understand all the strange obsessions, anxieties and humour of teenagers.
Ellen Jones says: “All the people with high-flying jobs in TV, they make these programmes which they think will appeal to us. But they’re not what we really want to watch.
“YouTube’s influence should not be underestimated. It’s such an an amazing source of education. If you want something, you can find it on YouTube.”
When I say that I’m surprised by how low-tech many of the made-in-bedroom videos are, she says: “Maybe our generation have learnt that being genuine is more important than slick camera work.”