Beauty YouTubers’ Career Path as Creative Workers

This research aims to investigate the career paths of South Korean beauty YouTubers. This study regards them as creative workers and it focuses on the trajectory of their career. For this thesis, I adopt the mixed methods of quantitative and qualitative research. Samples, 100 South Korean beauty YouTubers, were selected encompassing beginning, growing, and influential stage. With the samples, several analysis were performed including regression, contents analysis, and in-depth interviews. The results say that educational factor doesn't significantly affect the success of their career. Also, I found that they start the career with various reasons such as sharing pure passion towards makeup, adopting a suitable method to show their knowhow, chasing the trend from blog to vlog and so on. Some of them show multiple job-holdings because the job at the early stage is not enough to sustain livelihood. During the career development, the repeated labour routines are identified. In building up reputation in the market, they get help intermediaries like MCNs. They apply entrepreneurship by using their cultural and social capital to make create new outputs. When they become influential to the market, they launch their signature products developed with big cosmetic brands, showing innovation. These empirical study will add understanding on the career paths of beauty YouTubers and contribute to the studies of creative labour markets and creative workers’ entrepreneurship.