Superwoman is late. This is to be expected.

Her interview with the Star was scheduled to begin an hour earlier, but Superwoman has fans — hundreds of them here, pressed up against a security fence in the Brampton SilverCity parking lot — and they all want an autograph.

Superwoman obliges, taking the pens thrust at her from the crowd.

“Oh my God,” says one girl, maybe a dozen times, after her grey rectangle of bristol board is signed.

“I’m gonna cry, I swear to God,” says another, trembling fan.

Tween after tween, they looked flushed, even a little distraught, at the intensity of the experience. Some are tearful, others wear T-shirts emblazoned with the iconic red-and-yellow “S.”

Subscribe for daily vlogs!

Superwoman is the screen name of 25-year-old Lilly Singh. Born and raised in Scarborough and now living with her parents in Markham, she has become one of the world’s biggest YouTube stars.

If you’re older than 16, you probably have no idea who she is. If you’re younger than 16, there’s a decent chance she’s your hero; nearly four million people subscribe to her YouTube channel, on which she posts short, funny videos twice a week.

Singh is part of a generation of YouTubers cornering the entertainment market of the future: low-budget, self-produced, alternately intimate and goofy and, most importantly, 100-per-cent digital.

Today, she’s helping launch the soundtrack for Dr. Cabbie, a movie about Indian immigrants to Canada in which she has a small part. Thousands have turned out for a glimpse of Salman Khan, the Bollywood heartthrob who co-produced the film. But #TeamSuper, Singh’s social media-based fan club, is well represented.

A day before the event, she posted an online appeal for viewers to show up and stage a digital insurgency against the impending silver-screen worship.

“I really have this desire to make it known that the Internet exists and YouTubers are important,” she says earnestly into a hand-held camera. “And not only are YouTubers important, our followings are incredible.”

“I want this event to happen, and I want there to be a sea of Superwoman there. Not because of me — because of us.”

The call to arms worked. As one of the dozens of signs held aloft in the melting late August heat said: “Superwoman and YouTube brought us here.”

Just about everyone with an Internet connection has some use for YouTube. It’s an almost infinitely flexible platform and, with 100 hours of video being uploaded every minute, a storehouse of everything from Maria Callas singing opera to footage of people falling off their roofs.

YouTube has been particularly good at targeting adolescent girls. Increasingly, when tweens come home from school looking to veg out, they flip open their laptops rather than reaching for the remote.

People between 12 and 17 watch less conventional TV than any other age bracket: about 21 hours a week compared to the 34 weekly hours watched by their parents (people aged 35-49). A 2013 study by the New York Times found a third of millennials watch mostly online video or don’t watch broadcast TV at all.

YouTube receives over a billion unique visitors a month, and those viewers aren’t just watching sitcom reruns or old movies. The online video boom has created its own genres, with its own standards of quality and its own constellation of stars.

Lilly Singh is one of those stars. She is, in the Internet parlance, a YouTuber.

Defining what exactly a YouTuber is can be difficult for those raised on mainstream popular entertainment (for 13-year-olds, the word needs no definition).

Generally speaking, they are Brits, Americans and Canadians in their early 20s who make seven- to 10-minute videos with rudimentary, store-bought equipment showing them in their bedrooms chatting about dating and school and friends and online etiquette.

Some have cooking themes or give advice on hair and makeup; others have slightly higher production values. Some, like the megastar Jenna Marbles, swear and talk about sex and drinking. Others, like Superwoman, abjure profanity and treat racy subjects obliquely, if at all.

But the YouTubers share a clubby sense of camaraderie — they often appear in each other’s videos — and pepper their speech with the same distinctive lingo: “Slayyyy” means ‘good job.’ “My queen” means ‘someone I revere.’ “Ship it” means wanting two people to be in a relationship.

It’s the kind of dense, parent-proof jargon that teenyboppers have always employed, and sure enough, adolescent girls make up the fan base of most YouTubers. It’s likely why you haven’t heard any of their names. But those names — Tyler Oakley, Zoella, Hannah Hart, Bethany Mota — are ubiquitous amongst preteen girls across the English-speaking world. (Singh says 80 per cent of her audience is female, except in India, where more of her fans are men.)

Based on the evidence available at Brampton SilverCity, Team Super has few members old enough to drive in Ontario, and even fewer with a Y chromosome. As Singh herself wryly put it, “You need to know who your ideal viewer is, and mine is a 14-year-old screaming female. And I’m thrilled about that. I am thrilled.”

The source of YouTubers’ popularity can be hard to discern at first glance. They’re not really standup comedians: too earnest and upbeat, plus not always very funny.

Most of them aren’t actors, either. The authenticity of their personalities is part of the appeal, kids say. Keza Matsuk, a 13-year-old 8th grader who goes to school downtown and subscribes to 365 individual YouTubers — one for every day of the year — said she likes Superwoman and her ilk because they are “relatable.”

“I like that it’s just someone in their bedroom,” Matsuk said. “It’s not some big Hollywood production.”

Indeed, a conversation with half a dozen 13-year-olds about YouTube on Wednesday saw the word “relatable” emerge as the defining adjective of their fandom. (The panel agreed that, as Canadians, they could “relate” to Superwoman’s video diaries about braving winter car troubles.)

Like this video? Click here to share it on Facebook: http://on.fb.me/PY6uve

YouTubers understand that their popularity hinges on a perception of normality, and it’s an air they seem to cultivate. Many of Superwoman’s posts deal with travails she has long since outgrown. “Types of Kids at School,” her ethnography of the high school scene, is one of Singh’s most popular videos, with over seven million views and 25,000 comments.

But despite her relatively advanced age and widespread fame, Singh has maintained an uncanny ability to channel the adolescent psyche. This may have something to do with her domestic arrangement: she still lives with her parents in Markham, and many of her posts deal with the frustrations of submitting to paternal scrutiny.

Her first YouTube video, uploaded in 2010, was in the perennial adolescent genre of bad poetry and inspired by the classic tween concerns of hair and clothes.

“It was a really bad video,” she says, breaking into embarrassed laughter. “It was actually a spoken word piece. And I only posted it — to be real with you — because my hair was really doing it that day and I had a new blazer, and I was like, ‘I need to make a video right now.’ ”

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

She has a bachelor’s degree in psychology from York University and was applying to master’s programs when she decided to pursue YouTube full-time.

“I went to my parents’ room,” she remembers, “and I was, like, ‘I don’t want to go to school, I want to make YouTube videos’ . . . And then the ambulance left.”

Spoofing the accent and harsh manners of conservative Indian families helped launch Superwoman’s online celebrity — as she readily admits, the elder Singhs are actually supportive and soft-spoken — but her range of topics has grown to encompass the full ambit of teen preoccupations: texting, school, boys, Instagram.

She’s always gathering material. Backstage at the Brampton movie theatre, she hears the word “brouhaha” and laughs — “Punjabi people never say that. Remind me to put that in my video: ‘Vat is this brouhaha?’ That’s going in there.’ ”

Meanwhile, her persona has grown more assured: her tomboyish strut more confident, her vocal gymnastics more manic. There’s something Robin Williams-like in the way she moves in and out of voices and accents, one second squeaky, the next basso profundo, toggling between Punjabi and Jamaican patois, contorting her face with a cartoonish elasticity.

And when her audience grew to include extended family, who called to say they had seen her on the Internet, her parents warmed to the unconventional career.

Click here to share this on Facebook: http://on.fb.me/1lNbQFr

A steady income also helped. The biggest YouTubers must also be shrewd entrepreneurs, stretching their appeal with marketable catchphrases — Singh’s is the bewilderment-expressing “Shemurr?” — lengthy appeals to subscribe and follow, deals with distributors, live events, merchandise and incessant social media self-promotion.

Superwoman’s video blogs of her day-to-day life now occasionally feature half-reluctant conference calls with unnamed suits.

Singh refuses to discuss financial details, but with a following of her size she could easily be making six figures a year.

“If you want to make YouTube your career, you have to accept that it is also a business,” Singh said. “I know everyone’s like, ‘It’s my passion, it’s my hobby.’ And that’s fine, I support that. But if you want to make it your career, it does have a business side.”

YouTubers are paid for every ad that viewers watch before their videos. According to TubeMogul, a video advertising company, the ads that preface most Superwoman clips go for $12.22 per 1,000 views. At that rate, Singh’s nearly 400,000,000 total views to date could have netted her millions of dollars in revenue — at least before Google, which has owned YouTube since 2006, takes its 45 per cent of ad revenue generated on the site.

Like many YouTubers, Singh has product placements in some of her videos, though she won’t say for which products. (Hint: conspicuous cans of Rockstar energy drink often appear on screen.) On top of that, her website features an extensive merchandise section offering hoodies, hats, signed posters and a dozen different T-shirt designs.

YouTubers also stage semiregular conventions in places such as London, Chicago and California. Singh is paid for some of her appearances, though, again, she doesn’t like to say how much.

It can be a lucrative world and, while a few YouTube stars have had crossover success — clothing lines, awards show appearances, bit parts in movies — they tend to regard the conventional entertainment industry the way an energetic religious sect looks at a sleepy mother church.

“If you look on Twitter, at any given moment, all the trending topics are probably related to YouTubers,” Singh said. “When Angelina Jolie got a breast reduction, I was trending right under her.”

Asked whether a recent appearance on the CBC radio show Q and her part in Dr. Cabbie made her feel like she had “made it,” Singh paused.

“I’m going to be totally honest — this is just honest, honest, honest — I feel like traditional media and digital media are coming closer together. Of course it’s wonderful to be on TV, traditional media, but these days, kids watch YouTube as opposed to TV. So I think, yeah, it’s great exposure for me, but in the most humble way, it’s amazing exposure for them — for them to be on my YouTube platform, and for YouTube people to come see them.”

Hollywood has started to agree. A recent Bloomberg Businessweek cover story documented the efforts of major studios such as DreamWorks and Fox to buy up networks of YouTube creators. The German conglomerate ProSiebenSat.1 Media already owns 20 per cent of Collective Digital Studio, the YouTube network Superwoman belongs to.

In March, Walt Disney bought Maker Studios, one of the biggest online video outfits in the U.S., for $500 million, plus a possible $450 million more down the road.

After the Dr. Cabbie event and the hour-long autograph line, Singh finally makes it backstage. She seems flustered. A friend asks if she wants a cold drink, but Superwoman doesn’t answer immediately, pacing back and forth in front of the makeshift green room, breathing deeply.

“I just need . . .” she says several times without finishing the thought, her eyes wide and darting.

She admits later that the crush of fans was “exhausting.”

“I saw dots a few times today,” she smiles.

It’s the price of celebrity in a medium that thrives on a feeling of intimacy between audience and performer. It’s what happens when million of teenage girls can “relate” to what you say in a Markham bedroom.

“It’s a talk I have with myself every day,” Singh said. “It doesn’t matter how tired you are, it doesn’t matter how exhausted you are, you’re gonna do this because it’s what you believe in.

“I mean, I think it’s definitely something new. There’s that celebrity status, but people feel more connected,” she goes on. “It’s because people see us twice a week, once a week. People see us at the malls. We don’t have security guards at the malls, we’re so accessible to them. We do live shows, we reply to them on Twitter. It’s like having a celebrity that’s a friend.”

Read more about: