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equivalent to paid professionals such as actresses or writers. In other words, some media professionals are not famous and some non-professionals on YouTube are quite famous on the site and beyond. For many YouTube researchers, an important goal seems to be to study video makers who are ’ordinary’ in that they have no formal training or professional ties to media. Yet it is unclear at this juncture how easy it is to find ordinary users on a video sharing site. While this will surely change in the future as more people make more videos, at the present time, many people that I have interviewed do have some important connections to professional or at least advanced-amateur media making. This important experience includes related media such as photography. This information may not be apparent from reading their channel page, analyzing single videos, or even viewing a collection of videos. People who do not participate on video sharing sites may avoid such a visible exchange as posting a video. They may be wary of making investments in time and equipment to make videos, or post them publicly on YouTube, with its current reputation. When a colleague of mine saw my experimental research channel on YouTube she deferred establishing her own research page on the site saying that she was not ready to be so visible. Ironically, I am a private person who initially began posting as part of a participant-observation project. I rarely show my face in my videos and I do not include colleagues, family members, or close friends interacting with me in private situations. I only record behavior that is public or, with their permission, interviews with media experts. Yet, I am perceived as being ‘out there’ by conservative colleagues, and thus not ordinary by certain definitions. Arguably, YouTube is weighted towards the non-ordinary, at least in the current, diverse Internet environment. Although many people watch videos and some even comment, a much smaller sub-population actually posts videos. Therefore, if you are posting videos on YouTube, you are arguably no longer ordinary, if by ordinary we mean a person who has no special interest in or connections to intensive media-making. Despite the fervent do-it-yourself rhetoric (which I admire and support), it still takes a personal infrastructure of equipment and time to learn how to use a camera, work with editing software, understand compression techniques, and be willing and able to post videos for global distribution using a decently fast Internet connection. Participants on YouTube often express gratitude for having a site in which they can connect with others in ways that are not possible with local friends and family. People close to a video maker do not always understand their need to make videos. Arguably, as it is currently used, YouTube already contains a group who is not at all ’ordinary’ in the sense of having an interest in and willingness to put themselves ’out there’ through technicallyoriented video exchange. The drive to seek ‘ordinary’ participants also does not accommodate the changing abilities of video makers. It is a synchronically-laden categorisation to seek a person who posts videos on YouTube, and assume that they were, are, and always will be ‘ordinary’. Yet, many participants on YouTube intensely desire to improve their work. They may not have started off as very skilled, but interacting with other YouTubers and video makers helps them develop important technical and participatory knowledge. Interviewees say that they can see improve-