with products—shoes, dresses, bespoke cannabis parapher-
nalia—that creators will tout to their legions of followers.
“Some clients don’t want YouTubers,” Margolis says.
“But we have slowly been convincing them: Trust us, the
eyeballs are huge here if you want to convert to sales. If your
demographic is the millennials, then this is where you have
to be.” Therein may lie the answer to any existential ponder-
ing of this whole enterprise—like so much else that’s pre-
ceded it, the utility of YouTube can be boiled down to what
it’s able to sell. Many top-tier creators are becoming extraor-
dinarily wealthy under the gaze of all of those eyeballs. (Some
buy Lamborghinis. Others just let their new, nicer homes hang
in the background, a subtle acknowledgment of what digital
fame has a
orded them.)
During VidCon, I sat down with Krystal Hauserman, senior
director of marketing and communications for the digital tal-
ent agency Fullscreen, in a Hilton conference room the com-
pany had done up to look like a trendy enchanted forest. I asked
her a vexing question for any industry that relies on the eeting
attention of young people: How do you foster longevity for a
YouTuber’s career? Is it even possible, considering how many
once-huge YouTubers have since been relegated to arcana?
“We don’t want that life cycle to be 24 months,” she says. “It’s
something we’re really focused on, growing with clients.”
A big topic at VidCon this year was the concept of burnout,
a feeling of creative exhaustion and frustration. That stress is
often a product of not knowing what to do with one’s chan-
nel once it’s achieved a certain degree of visibility. How does
one feel secure in a forever scaling and demanding industry?
“I’ll get comments from people and they’ll be like, you should
have way more subscribers, you should be bigger,” says Jackie
Aina, whose beauty and fashion channel has a solid but not
mega-size fan base. “And I’m like, at what point is 3 million
gonna be success?”
Smaller channels—and, yes, 3 million subscribers is relative-
ly small—can still be lucrative. But the busier YouTube has got-
ten, the harder it is for the stranger and more interesting stu
to
gain any real attention. Many such YouTubers have forgone ad
revenue, earning a living from donations. On YouTube, “fame”
has almost become a stand-in term for “existence”—a certain
number of subscribers means you can stay, that there’s a point
to all your uploading. But then you have to gure out how to
sustain—and prot—from it.
Plenty of other YouTubers are happy to be obsessed with
numbers. Collins Key, who makes loud and antic videos
involving slime and food for a rapacious audience of (mostly)
children, has close to 20 million subscribers. His videos, on
average, garner about 29 million views, he says. Paying atten-
tion to those stats is a core part of Key’s business. “There’s no
need to take unnecessary creative risks,” he tells me, his pale
blue eyes and intense bar mitzvah hype-man energy boring
into me. “With a TV show, you create a season and then it
goes out and then you nd out how it does. For us, we’re get-
ting weekly feedback.”
Such industrialization has proven too much for some of
YouTube’s older guard, the version 1.0 or 2.0 stars—who gen-
erously built the infrastructure that many less techy, less wonky
creators now enjoy—who have faded from or abandoned the
platform. Charlie McDonnell, a retiring, science-minded Brit,
was once the biggest YouTuber in the United Kingdom. More
than a decade later, at age 29, he’s o
the platform entirely. “I
feel like I didn’t really know how I wanted to present myself
on YouTube,” he says. “To be someone who was more fun and
interesting than I was in real life, which is what I think every
YouTuber does.... I realized I liked who I was in real life more
than the guy I was being onscreen.”
McDonnell recalls, wistfully, the bygone days, when a cre-
ator could directly email the guy who ran YouTube’s homepage.
These days, nearly every creator I spoke to seemed haunted
and awed by the platform’s fabled algorithm. They spoke of it
as one would a vague god or as a scapegoat, explaining away
the fading of clout or relevance.Double-Edged Agnosticism
The sleepy channels of once-white-hot YouTube legends
like Tyler Oakley or any number of Brit squad folks like Mar-
cus Butler o
er ample proof that YouTube fame is eeting. But
while talk of sustainability animates so much conversation in
the YouTube space, there is something darker threatening, or
overshadowing, the whole shiny economy so proudly on dis-
play at events like VidCon.
Thanks to the tech libertarian streak that governs YouTube
(and much of Silicon Valley), there is a lot of noxious material
on the platform, and it has gained traction in direct propor-
tion to the sunnier stu
, particularly videos promoting white
supremacy, misogyny, and other grim ideologies. What works
so well for the daylight side of YouTube—its inviting intimacy,
its conversational ease, the algorithmic nudges down rabbit
holes—is chillingly e
ective for the bad stu
too.
YouTube is moderated to some extent. There is some vague
shape to it, the borders of which can be seen in the distance.
Up close, it’s innite chaos, a clamoring reection of our dispa-
rate needs and interests. It is clearinghouse and shelter, a place
that doesn’t so much directly challenge and destroy orthodoxy
as much as atten it into nothing. In that way, there’s a direct
line connecting some kid’s earnest coming-out video and
neo-Nazi content.
Carlos Maza, a 31-year-old producer and writer who makes
political YouTube videos for Vox, has had direct, and galling,
experience with the platform at its worst. Maza is gay and
Latino and politically progressive, a trifecta that has earned
him the angry attention of an insidious and highly active
group of users. He’s been so harassed for calling out what he
sees as pervasive—and, in his situation, personal—bigotry
that he had to leave his house for several days earlier this
year amid threats.
Throughout that ordeal, Maza says he saw a callousness
from YouTube that began to seem downright irresponsible,
he told me in a knotty, intense conversation over lunch this
June. “I realized that there’s no appealing to YouTube’s bet-
ter angels,” he says. “They only react to crises. No one in thatYouTube fame
isn’t novel to Gen-Zers.
It simply is.
NOVEMBER 2019 VANITY FAIR 125