Global creator culture? Converging values and generic practices in YouTube reviews

Abstract Social media facilitates new forms of cultural production from professionalized and commercialized users known as creators. While some have posited the emergence of a global creator culture, others have identified substantial gender differences and local variation. To assess how these factors influence content production, we focused on the critical case of YouTube review videos, a successful genre that is both internationally popular and heavily gendered. We operationalized culture through the framework of values and compared 200 makeup and tech reviews in five languages (English, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean). Our findings reveal substantial commonalities: creators invoke similar values to justify their evaluations yet downplay their recommendations with qualifications pertaining to the scope, style, source, and content of the recommendation. We conceptualize this push-and-pull dynamic as qualified influence, a communicative strategy that emphasizes authentic self-expression while mitigating potential disagreement. Qualified influence helps creators navigate structural tensions related to the competing interests of platforms, audiences, and advertisers. The strategy also disrupts conventional differences in communicative styles associated with individualist and collectivist cultures and, to a lesser extent, the gender of creators. We conclude with a discussion of the study’s implications for understanding the globalization of cultural production.