Sergio Razta

Sergio Razta is a teenage kid from Chicago who makes videos on YouTube. Sergio’s first videos were strictly of him sitting in front of a camera ranting and raving about first world problems and teen issues. After attracting a large audience, Sergio began making skits and grew even larger on YouTube. He now has over 600,000 subscribers and travels the country to host concerts and meet fans. His audience started out being his friends and then his school, then Chicago and then it grew outwards to other cities in the United States thanks to social media. Sergio’s audience is primarily Hispanic teens since a lot of his videos have topics most relevant to Mexican-Americans and other Hispanic-Americans. Sergio’s videos are available exclusively through YouTube but Twitter is one of the main ways that his videos get shared. I found out about him on Twitter and ended up “binge watching” all of his videos one night. Sergio’s videos are reminiscent of Joel McHale’s “The Soup” where he just rants comically.

Sergio’s channel qualifies as independent media because he makes all of his videos on his own with just a camera and ideas. Although he is on YouTube, which is an extremely large outlet for media, he does not publish his videos under any large corporate ownership. Sergio started as a bored teen with a camera and turned into one of the most popular personalities on YouTube. The growth of his channel represents how successful independent media can still be. YouTube does have a knack for “mainstreaming” independent channels into the large media fields such as Timothy de la Ghetto who had a channel similar to Sergio’s and got a TV show and now appears regularly on MTV. While he does have some mainstream appeal because of his popularity, Sergio’s videos are great because they are something that anybody can make and there isn’t the barrier to entry to have a successful time doing it, that is the beautiful thing of independent media.


http://www.youtube.com/user/SergioRazta