YouTuber Evelyn Ngugi is not a stranger to the versatility required of a content creator.

With job roles ranging from scriptwriter, public speaker, actor, comedian, journalist, reviewer, and mixologist, Ngugi — better known to her 248,000 subscribed “internet cousins” as Evelyn From the Internets — does it all. 

Ngugi traveled from Austin, Texas, to visit Arkansas for the first time Oct. 29 to be a guest speaker at Reynolds Performance Hall.

Ngugi said, “I was invited by the Women’s Leadership Network, and they’re just having a networking event like a mixer, where people get to know each other, and they just wanted to have speakers come, and I was invited to come to talk about social media, content creation, because I’m a full-time content creator on YouTube.”

“I think it’s really cool to be invited to places like this, because oftentimes when we talk about content creators or even influencers, we’re talking about the 1% of people who are at the Met Gala or have a zillion subscribers, but the majority of us, this is like a regular job and we just do regular things,” she said. “It’s cool that this is our job, and it doesn’t have to be fancy or flashy and can be like a really honest job.” 

When Ngugi started college as a journalism student at the University of Texas at Austin, YouTube was just starting to gain popularity.

“I went to college for journalism because I thought that was the path,” she said. “I was going to work for, like, Rolling Stone magazine and follow rappers or actors around, or make documentaries, or be a producer on the Oprah show or something because that’s what there was at the time. There weren’t really internet people doing things full time.”

Ngugi said she had also started college at the end of the Great Recession.

“Unfortunately, at that time, newsrooms were firing photographers, they were firing videographers and so if you were a reporter, you had to do everything by yourself,” she said.

Ngugi said this inspired her to improve her skills in Adobe, Windows Movie Maker and Final Cut Pro.

“I thought, okay, I’ll be a journalist who can do all this extra stuff and at the same time, I was just uploading stupid little videos to Facebook because I wasn’t on YouTube at the time,” Ngugi said.

She said that when she graduated, she was briefly a reporter and then went into advertising where she began climbing the ranks. 

Eventually, she ended up quitting her job to work on YouTube full-time.

Ngugi said, “I would say [my channel is] like comedy, lifestyle content. So it’s just following my life and whatever I’m into at that moment, whether it’s skits, whether it’s more lifestyle content, like vlogging and cooking…I think it’s just like general lifestyle, but with like, a comedic slant.”

Ngugi said that she hopes that her viewers can feel as though they are just hanging out with her when they watch her videos. 

Ngugi also calls her viewers her “internet cousins.”

“I’m from the genre of YouTube where people had names for their viewers, and that always made me feel weird, mostly because my name doesn’t make anything cute or anything. And so I was like, ‘Okay, well, how do I actually feel about them?’,” Ngugi said. 

“Being on the internet and talking to people felt a lot like talking to my cousin… you don’t see them every day, but when you do get to see them it’s a good time, you laugh, you have fun, you can talk about serious stuff, and then it like, ‘I’ll see you later,’ …and so that really is what drew me to the term ‘internet cousin’ because it feels like hanging out with your cousin,” she said.

Ngugi said she is inspired by the media she grew up with.

“Whether it was like being raised watching Food Network or watching MTV music video countdowns and stuff like that and just being like, ‘Oh, what would it be like for me to make my version of that?’ and I feel like that’s what I’m always trying to do: make my version of things I saw growing up and kind of be what I wish I had seen. 

“Because YouTube and digital media, social media, didn’t exist as much when I was growing up there was this idea that if you were to break into that world, you had to go to Hollywood, you had to be a producer on the Oprah show, or work for CNN one day, and that that was the only way you were gonna get in front of the people you were trying to get in front of,” she said.

Ngugi said social media has made content creation more democratic.

“As long as you have a WiFi connection from somewhere and the device to upload a video with, you can say what you want to say and get your message across,” she said. “Those kind of barriers to entry aren’t as big anymore.”

She said, “I’m passionate about community building…we put all our energy into…one action, instead of taking the time to build a community that happens every single day, things that have to do with your school board, things that have to do with your neighborhood, your council person, the district you live in, things like that. And so I try to use my little ways to remind people how to build community with people who are similar to you and people who aren’t similar to you. I think also we have an intolerance for being uncomfortable and like disagreeing and I think we have to do a lot better about being okay with disagreeing.”

Ngugi said that over the course of her career, she’s learned to be a better collaborator.   

“When you’re a content creator, you’re kind of solo, and you’re kind of doing things on your own for a while, and then you realize that if you want to grow, or if you want to get bigger or be in spaces that you might not have access to, it requires that you team up with people and collaborate,” she said. “And what’s necessary for collaboration is understanding how to articulate your ideas to another person… I think that’s how I’ve grown. Is able to articulate, being able to articulate my ideas better.”

Ngugi said the two highlights of her career were when Beyonce posted a snippet of one of her reviews on every stop of the Formation World Tour in 2016 and when her short film was screened in Toronto at a packed theater and got a standing ovation and won best in comedy.

Ngugi said she would like to add more “theater things” to her repertoire.

“I haven’t fully tapped into the theater kid of it all,” she said. “I was trying to do that with my variety show [‘Evelyn and Friends’], and I kind of did, but I want to continue on with that project and do more theater-y things like parody, songwriting and singing. I have friends who do drag so just like diving into the drag world and just like creating characters that aren’t me, I think that would be so much fun.”

Ngugi said she is currently working on her second short film, a comedy horror.

Ngugi said she encourages those still in school to “try as much as possible in universities while it’s free or very low cost because once you leave, the cost just keeps stacking.”