YouTerps Part 3

Did you know that around 100 minutes of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute? The site is an unstoppable cultural force, one that has made an impact around the world -  including on our campus. This is the third in a series of three profiles on students who use YouTube in different ways.

Over the weekend, it was as if every single student who lives on the campus of this university subscribed to the YouTube channel of sophomore Antonio Lievano. Don’t be alarmed, nobody hacked your account. 

But in terms of numbers, between Friday, Saturday and Sunday, more people subscribed to the video prankster than live on the campus. That’s a fact and it’s typical for SoFlo. 

That name may ring a bell. SoFloAntonio? It’s the name of his personal video page, the one with more than 300,000 subscribers. Or maybe you’re one of the more than 86 million people who have seen a video by SoFloComedy? That’s also him. So is SoFloPrank and MW3stream. All four are wildly popular YouTube channels run by the sophomore marketing major out of his North Campus dorm room.

Maybe you’ve seen him around the campus, camera usually in tow? He is tall and athletic with dark features, a normal looking kid with smooth talking skills that come in handy when he’s filming. He is fairly well known on and off the campus for his prank videos, which paint him in many eyes as either a hysterical hero who amasses more views than most fledgling YouTubers can imagine, or a pompous con man with no regard for the people he befuddles. 

Spend any time with him, and you start to see both sides of the guy: SoFlo and Antonio. Both are confident, strong communicators. They are funny and easygoing, navigating conversations with ease. 

He is a man who knows what people want, who knows the right thing to say and the right thing to do.  

Due to this knowledge, most of his videos have to do with kissing, money or both. They’re clickbait, and good bait at that: One video begins with him saying, “Hey guys its SoFloAntonio and I’m going to teach you how to kiss some girls with fake magic.” Charming, I know. Another: “Today I’m going to go kiss some girls without talking.” Enticing. 

As impolite as they might sound, both of those videos amassed more than a million views apiece. And because numbers are what really matter in the virtual life of a YouTube star, here are a couple more: 

5,456: that’s how many people subscribed to SoFloComedy on Sunday. 

1 million: the number Lievano wants to reach at some point this year, preferably before the one year anniversary of the channel in February.   

5,135,350: the amount of views the most popular video on the SoFloAntonio channel, “Slap, Hug or Kiss!”, has as of this writing. 

“That’s the reason my channel blew up. It blew up because of those [kissing] videos,” Lievano said. “And it’s unfortunate because I’d rather get a girl’s number than to kiss them. I don’t want to make out with random girls and whatnot, it’s just weird. I don’t want my channel to be like, ‘Let’s watch a compilation of a kid kissing girls.’” 

But this sentiment goes against the formula — titillation, provocation — that made him famous. Another example of his work: In one video, he asks girls on the street to guess a number between one and 100. If he guesses it right, the girl has to flash her breasts to the camera. Don’t worry, he keeps it PG-13 by covering all nudity with a red bar that tells viewers to subscribe. 

At first glimpse, these videos don’t really present Lievano in the best light. He comes off as a manipulator and a misogynistic con man seeking cheap laughs and big numbers. And maybe that was him at some point, an entertainer who thrived off the feeling of a viral video. 

But after talking to him, it’s clear there is a gap between the student and the on-screen persona, one that Lievano wants to widen. He is not the man in front of the camera, that man is an entertainer. 

“You can see, I have one where people flash me which I didn’t even like,” he explained. “I knew that would go viral and get a lot of views but I didn’t enjoy doing it, it felt really awkward doing that.” 

The comments section on these videos is typically a wasteland of some of the world’s worst minds. They’re a vitriolic mix of people begging him to remove that subscribe bar, to give them the real thing, and others who managed to stop by amidst a ride on their high horse. “You’re what’s wrong with humanity,” one comment read. 

But these don’t mean anything to Lievano, they’re just words on the Internet. That’s not life. They’re talking about SoFlo, not Antonio. Those worlds need to be separated sometimes, Lievano insists.   

“I guess sometimes in my pranks I have some bits and pieces of how I regularly am but when I’m trying to get a certain reaction or trying to be in a certain manner, of course I’m not the same. That’s not me,” he said. 

But both worlds are far too large not to collide sometimes. 

“Everyone has haters,” he said. “I even have them at Maryland, just random people. I have people come up to me and I guess they don’t like it and they feel like they should share that.” 

Other times, the reminder of reality is not as subdued. In one of his highest viewed videos, Antonio pretends to drug a girl by slipping something in her water. The two girls involved were in on the prank but bailed early before explaining the situation to the clearly fooled onlookers, leaving Lievano to deal with some concerned male bystanders who thought he was a predator. Cries of “it’s a prank, it’s a prank” can be heard as he gets thrown on the ground and beaten for a minute or two. 

A couple of days later, it was on the Web, beginning its ascent to more than one million views. 

“It’s funny because that happens a lot. When a person isn’t involved in a prank and they hear about what’s going on, they don’t understand the logic and they just go all out,” Lievano said. “That’s how it went down really poorly. And after the fact I was like, OK this is going to go viral. But it’s not like I would ask for that.” 

Does he ever feel bad about what he’s doing, like he’s preying on the public’s naivete? 

“I used to not care. But lately, if I’m going to do a video and I’m going to piss someone off and they deserve to be pissed, then I don’t like doing it, just because there’s no point,” Lievano said.  

Pissing people off was funny and it was popular; it still is, and probably always will be. But now, Lievano wants to just make videos for himself, stuff that he can do to have fun with his friends. SoFlo no longer has to dominate his identity. The accounts will always be there to make money, something he does often by posting and promoting other user’s videos. 

But the gulf between the two figures continues to widen: SoFlo and Antonio.