Tana Mongeau is an American Internet personality, actress, musician, and model. She is known particularly for her "story time" videos and similar vulgar comedy videos that display her very loud and outgoing personality.
I chose to analyze 21 year old influencer Tana Mongeau for my LEAP #1 because of her current uprising. Tana's career began with her explicit "story time" YouTube videos all about her crazy day-to-day life experiences. She then moved onto creating music, a perfume, and even has her own reality TV show on MTV show called 'No Filter: Tana Turns 21' featured on MTV's Youtube channel.
When starting this project I was very unsure where to begin as Tana Mongeau is very different compared to a lot of other topics my fellow classmates chose. I felt myself wanting to change my topic multiple times as some of Tana's content is relatively explicit and she is slowly turning herself from YouTube star to reality star, as do many famous YouTubers. After watching hours of her videos and scrolling through her social media platforms I came to the conclusion that Tana is just a normal 21 year old who was lucky enough to become famous. Her videos are mostly about her life updates including her relationships, including ex-husband Jake Paul, friendships and family.
Something very interesting about Tana is that all of her videos are not sponsored by regular companies that YouTuber's similar to herself are sponsored for. I believe this is because of her content as companies tend to gravitate towards choosing people with ‘family friendly’ content. Companies want to reach as wide of an audience as possible when choosing people to sponsor products and also want someone who is shone in a rather positive light. Tana has come out to make comments on her stance on sponsorship. In 2019, Bang Energy’s CEO approached Tana with a $1.1 million sponsorship deal, then upped it to $2 million after she declined and then she declined again. She came out to say that sponsorship is not her as she does not want to have to give random shout outs and wants to keep her content as real to her as possible. I think this adds to the content of Tana’s videos as she is not constantly talking about sponsorships and has more time for actual content.
After gathering all of this information about Tana Mongeau I came to the conclusion that she would be an Influencer that would be trivial, but interesting to evaluate for LEAP #1. The biggest struggle I had with the project was finding a way to organize everything. Deciding between which information was most important for the video versus the response and what was not important at all. Tana has so much content and it was rather difficult for me to pick out which actually added value in terms of this project. Technology wise, I had a hard time figuring out Notion, but after watching videos I feel slightly more comfortable in my abilities with this platform. This academic semester, three of my professors use internet platforms for us to post our work that I have never used before. Learning and understanding how to use different platforms is often difficult and takes time. I personally put off learning how to use Notion as I am still figuring out Pathwright, so at the beginning this could have been avoided if I took the time to explore before LEAP #1 was almost due.
Overall I enjoyed this project. It was very different than anything I have done before and it was interesting to me because we had the ability to choose our topic focus. I feel as though it taught me how to analyze YouTube content in a way I have never before. I have taken courses in my past that have dealt with social media analysis, but never have I analyzed a specific influencer. This project taught me how to analyze not only a specific influencer, but also all of their different social media platforms.
