mma Chamberlain is 18 years old and grew
up watching YouTube videos. Over the past
two years, she has entered the fray herself,
becoming one of the most dynamic contrib-
utors to Google’s video-hosting behemoth,
posting prosaic videos documenting her mis-
adventures as a nascently independent adolescent. She vlogs
trips to Coachella and fashion hauls and tours of Los Angeles’s
many coffee shops. Her subscriber count hasn’t yet topped
9 million, but her videos regularly earn 5, 6, 7 million views
each—an engagement rate that’s proved enticing to Louis Vuit-
ton, which commissioned a video from Chamberlain for its
2020 cruise collection—and contribute to a very healthy teen-
age income. Though an imprecise science at best, the tracking
company Social Blade estimates her revenue from views alone
to be as high as six gures some months. She is as au courant
as one can get on YouTube: cool, self-deprecating, exuberantly
youthful (slightly world-weary), and utterly of the platform.
When I spoke to her on the phone this summer, Chamberlain
was chipper and sanguine about her life and career online, rel-
ishing in the continuing evolution of a still-new concept she’s
always known. “I didn’t have cable, so YouTube was my car-
toons,” she told me of her childhood.
What Chamberlain has witnessed in her life span is the bur-
geoning of an enormous medium, one that encompasses so
many forms, genres, and styles that to describe it is, in essence,
to talk about the whole planet. “It’s like you have the little
hometown that just has one-story buildings and little ice cream
shops and stuff,” Chamberlain says of the earlier, quainter
YouTube. “But now there’s like malls and apartments.” New
names and tropes pop up overnight like mushrooms.
Throughout my own metastasizing addiction to the plat-
form, it’s taken many shapes. I’ve watched the sudden rises
and gentler falls of so many sunny YouTubers, Brits and Ange-
lenos and people beaming in from God knows where. I love
commentary videos, and food videos, and aviation vlogs cov-
ering rst-class ights I’ll never take.
YouTube fame is a ckle, mercurial thing; it’s entirely pos-
sible that Chamberlain will be passé by year’s end. But I doubt
that. She’s uniquely trained, through the osmosis of nearly life-
long fandom, to maneuver the platform with preternatural ease.
“I feel like if I start to calculate too much and strategize too
much, I’ll just lose who I am in it, and I’ll lose my career also,” she
says. “If I’m making videos I’m proud of, the rest doesn’t matter.
Worse comes to worst, everyone stops caring but I’m still making
videos that I love. And I’ll get a job somewhere else.”
That sense of uncertainty, optimism, and fatalism com-
mingling in a very Gen-Z way pervades pretty much any con-
versation one has with a YouTuber these days. The creators
seem restless.
YouTubers are now, nearly 15 years after its inception, enjoy-
ing what could be called the beginnings of nally bestowed
legitimacy, the rst indications of real longevity. That’s not just
because, say, Lilly Singh, a stalwart YouTube star, debuted her
own NBC late-night show in September. The YouTube-to-TV
conversion has been happening for a while now, with folks like
Colleen Ballinger (aka Miranda Sings) and Grace Helbig hav-
ing spells in more traditional entertainment. Really, the digital
creator class’s legitimacy is arising out of the passage of time.
YouTube fame isn’t novel to Gen-Zers. It simply is.The Third Epoch
This July, I traveled to VidCon, an annual convention
held in Anaheim for digital creators, to survey the scene,
as I had done four years ago, when YouTube stardom was
a newer and stranger thing, and was met with an even more
skeptical eye than it is now. The idea that one can earn a
living posting videos on the internet has inured itself to our
economy. With that has come feelings of satisfaction and
stability, for some. For other creators, it’s led to new stresses
and concerns.
VidCon was flashier and sleeker this year than it was in- More major media outlets covered the event. The brands
were bigger. YouTubers exist in a strange liminal spot at the
moment, then, both hugely famous and not famous at all,
depending on the age bracket you talk to.
As YouTube has gotten bigger, the broader and less high-
minded appetites of the public have elbowed out the softer,
gentler content of old. “YouTube used to be a place where
the weirdos and the outcasts would go to nd comfort and
¢ind their community,” says Joey Graceffa, a veteran cre-
ator who now stars in YouTube Premium’s Escape the Night.
“Now...it’s almost like the popular kids kind of in¢iltrated
our secret hideout.”
He meant, I think, the kind of big, noisy, brash Vine-to-You-
Tube émigrés who have come to dene the latter site’s roughly
third epoch. There are so many clearly staged prank videos
and “look at my fancy cars” exing videos now that it’s easy to
forget that YouTube celebrity began with earnest kids on the
edge of their beds. This new class of creators has infected You-
Tube with a witless braggadocio that has, on occasion, given
way to real o¦ense, such as the video Logan Paul posted after
encountering the scene of a suicide. The mix of the (maybe)
accidentally obscene and the silly has become a hallmark of
the current YouTube. Paul got a lot of views, but they came
with the revulsion of millions—especially when the story went
mainstream. The outside world was suddenly paying atten-
tion, and it didn’t like what it saw.
While a lot of YouTube content is fun and eminently con-
sumable, a lot of it is imsy—at best. Sifting through all the
pranks and rambling “story times,” the boyfriend challenges
in which no one’s actually dating each other and the end-
less stream of person-tries-food videos, YouTube looks pretty
weak next to the output of most traditional media. The lazi-
ness of many of YouTube’s biggest stars makes a viewer feel
frustrated and helpless about the future of entertainment.
“We don’t get to decide what’s quality,” says Chris Wittine,
an agent at CAA who represents popular creators. That was
a chilling sentiment to absorb amid the clamor of the Hilton
Anaheim, where the biggest talent was cordoned away from
the masses and the riot of the convention. Wittine and many
others insisted to me that the line between video content
and TV or movies is ever blurring. That seems like more of a
talking point than a reality when one compares YouTube to,
say, Netix’s output. But there is an undeniable sense of it as
a soon-to-be totalizing force.
Eyeballs —and Burnout—at Scale
Ashlee Margolis runs The A List, a marketing company that
connects brands with social media inuencers. We spoke in
her sprawling Beverly Hills showroom, skylighted and stu¦edE
All subscriber numbers are based on data through September 2019.120 VANITY FAIR NOVEMBER 2019