Lsbu first year marketing student Lily Keohane, 18, is secretly a YouTube superstar who has one hundred and ten thousand subscribers on her channel – Lilymaexo.
Lily first started her YouTube channel when she was ten years old. She was inspired by popular Disney channel show ICarly and began posting skits on her channel with a school friend. Over 5 year’s time, Lily had branched out on YouTube alone and had reached 6000 subscribers by the time she was fifteen. Lily’s success on Youtube skyrocketed when she posted a ‘Night-time routine’ and a ‘First day of year eleven’ video. She said: “Both of the videos did really well, the night-time routine video got 700,000 views and the first day of year eleven video got around 600,000 views.”
Lily described the experience as a ‘great feeling’ and explained that her channel continued to grow from there up to 25,000 subscribers within a few weeks of posting the videos. Lily now post relatable content such as vlogs and lifestyle videos that still gain great interaction from subscribers. Many people when experiencing success on social media decide to focus solely on growing their followers and opportunities within that industry. However, Lily decided to attend university alongside creating content for her channel. The marketing student said: “University was never part of my plan, I never dreamt about the day I would attend university.” Despite this, Lily decided to attend London South Bank University as for her, YouTube is a ‘hobby not a full-time job’ and she wanted a degree to fall back on and study a subject that she enjoys.
When asked where she sees herself and her YouTube journey in five years’ time she said: “I would like to grow my social media platforms, have a clothing line and grab any opportunities I can get.” Whilst three of these next five years will be spent gaining a degree, Lily will have her hands full with a full-time course and levelling up her social media platforms to stay relevant in such a competitive field.
Lily is determined to meet more subscribers, do well in her degree, save for a house and branch out into other aspects of social media.
“I’ve got big dreams to achieve.”