It’s not a bad salary for a clean-cut, cornfed, mall-preppy kid interviewing tattooed, pierced, black-clad guys in gothic makeup, using liberal profanity and often-crude questions. If the interviews are not-ready-for-prime-time, the advertising is: spots for the Mini Roadster and Stihl saws pop up on his videos. Besides, Odell is pretty sure his future has nothing to do with prime time, or covering Rib Fests, or moving to New York to scrape for attention from TV bigwigs. “In college, other people decided what would happen to me,” he says. “With YouTube, it’s really not up to anyone but me, and the audience.”

About half of the Next Up winners live in and around Los Angeles, and I assumed they were attracted to the area by the idea of Hollywood, with its showbiz ecosystem. That turned out to be not quite the case. Many had come not for Hollywood but for other YouTubers. A parallel ecosystem has taken root, built by born-on-YouTube creators who “went pro” years ago and are now supported by production companies and agencies with a YouTube-specific focus.

I met Jimmy Wong and Meghan Camarena at Wong’s apartment in downtown L.A. At 24, Camarena has a sweet-little-girl quality about her, with bright eyes, a camera-ready smile and a singsong voice. She talks about how hard it was to move away from her close-knit family in Modesto, about 90 miles inland from San Francisco. As a child, she told me, she watched Nickelodeon and wondered how she could get inside the television set and be on that screen. Later she discovered YouTube, and the skits and home movies and music videos from all kinds of people, delivered to a different screen. “If they’re doing this all on their own, then that means I can probably do it,” she remembers thinking. She got a video camera for Christmas in 2007, and under the handle Strawburry17, she started video-blogging and “lip-dubbing” songs by up-and-coming bands.

Camarena used her Next Up money to move to L.A., where her roommate, Catherine Valdes, is another YouTuber she met online. Camarena’s life is now grounded in the local YouTuber community and the business infrastructure it has spawned. When we met, she was about to travel to India to make a video for the nonprofit Water.org. The job was arranged for her by a year-old firm called Big Frame. (Big Frame describes itself as a “network” representing about 75 YouTubers and brokering moneymaking and audience-growing deals.) She had also just signed a six-month contract to make videos for Teen.com — a property of Alloy Digital, the entertainment and branding firm, which has been signing up its own network of YouTube talents — with Valdes and another cute young YouTuber friend named Joey Graceffa.

She and Graceffa and another YouTuber also formed a band, of sorts, called the Tributes, to record songs and videos inspired by “The Hunger Games.” The movie was coming out in March, and Camarena told me they needed to get out in front of the release with appropriately tagged content, so that they would benefit from the inevitable online search frenzies. “If you’re gonna jump on the bandwagon,” she explained, “you have to do it soon.”

Her fellow Next Up winner Jimmy Wong, an accomplished musician, had a far less systematic approach to YouTube. During his senior year in college, he watched his older brother, Freddie Wong, start building freddiew, a channel for action-comedy shorts that has become one of the most popular channels on YouTube. Jimmy was unsure about devoting himself to YouTube so completely. But then his third video went viral. It was a musical-parody response to a very unfortunate video made by a U.C.L.A. student complaining about Asians in the school library. He ended up discussing “Ching Chong! Asians in the Library Song” on NPR — and that helped him become a Next Up winner.