Japanese Celebrities to YouTube Stars: Haruna Kawaguchi
Bloggers, artists and others who’ve gained fame through social media have been moving into the mainstream for a while now, and over the past few years as social networks became our primary communication channels, it’s gone the other way as well.
Celebrities, athletes, business people and more have been increasing efforts in building a presence on social networks and YouTube.
Will Smith is a prime example.
In Japan, celebrities becoming social media stars is just beginning.
Enter Haruna Kawaguchi.
The actress/model already has the 33rd most popular Instagram account in Japan (as of April 1, 2020) with 2.5 million followers.
Rather than put out a highly curated feed, which can be expected at times in Japan especially due to overly controlling agencies, some of her posts are almost questionable (photographer’s bias!).
It’s clear that she’s providing the value of access.
She often provides relatively honest, inside looks at her life - where she talks about things from dealing with emotions to the pain of a pimple.
And now that access is being provided on YouTube.
In February 2020, Haruna Kawaguchi became Japan’s latest celebrity to become a YouTuber.
Posting around a video per week so far, she’s been vlogging about things like grocery shopping with her mom, spending time at her parents’ house on a small island off of Nagasaki, and trying to learn English.
This authentic, real life approach seems to be working.
In about 2 months, she’s put out 10 vlogs and has grown her channel to over 882k subscribers, adding as many as 15k subscribers each day in the past 30 days, according to TubeBuddy.
This YouTube audience places her well inside Japan’s top 300 biggest channels.
She’s also gotten a total of 23.5 million views. For reference, it would be typical that these views have earned her tens of thousands of US dollars each month from ads so far.
Her latest video got over 1 million views in the first 24 hours.
The more celebrities dip into vlogging, the more will follow.
For actors like Haruna Kawaguchi and Will Smith, YouTube in particular provides entertainment in a format (video) that people are already used to seeing them in and want to see them in.
The increased exposure through these vlogs provides fans increased access, and it allows them to be relevant them during the times they’re not on TV or in theaters.
This also helps strengthen existing connections, giving them more leverage in the future than they’d likely have just relying on traditional media.