Generation Famous: Growing As A YouTube Star Is Harder Than You Think - Michael Humphrey
Generation Famous: Growing As A YouTube Star Is Harder Than You Think
You are at a Starbucks and you are Internet famous.
Sometimes that means you come, you caffeinate and you leave like anyone else. But sometimes it means a member of your millions-plus community will have a moment of serendipity.
“A mom and her daughter came up to me,” YouTuber Meg DeAngelis remembers, “and her mom especially had a lot to say about being happy that my content was clean and appropriate for her daughter.”
She is telling me this story in the press room of VidCon 2016, just before she rushes to a freight elevator, which will eek its way down to the backstage of the Signing and Photo Hall, a vast salon in the Anaheim Convention Center. Starting in 30 minutes, she will meet 500 fans in two waves. Downstairs, the first 250 are forming a line that puts a Starbucks’ rush hour to shame and they are chanting for her.
With a subscriber base of more than 5.4 million, DeAngelis has joined the elite YouTubers. That means opportunities galore—brand deals, acting roles, music projects—but during that polite and seemingly uneventful moment at Starbucks, DeAngelis saw, in that mom’s comment, something else: Responsibility.
“She was talking about a video that was fun for me to make,” DeAngelis continues, “but it was a very pointless video, just for entertainment. But what about the other side? What if I started to put important things in it?”
You are Internet famous and you are growing as a person. That in itself is worthy of respect, because Internet fame is hard to navigate, both for the aspiring famous and the vulnerable fan.
“If you have a platform, especially if it’s a big group of people, everyone has a moment where they think, ‘Oh my gosh, I am responsible,’” DeAngelis says.
At least they should feel that, but there is even a challenge with handling the fame well: As I wrote about two weeks ago, many YouTube stars built their audience by performing a version of themselves, which creates a very 21st Century-style of relationship with the audience. As DeAngelis turns 21 years old, she understands she has assumed the role of virtual big sister (“I refer to myself as the mom from ‘Mean Girls’”) to millions of teens, who carefully observe how she presents aspects of her life. The connection is based on certain consistencies, but like many YouTubers DeAngelis is young and still growing as a person and entertainer and changing as a person would naturally change the character.
How YouTubers manage this growth varies widely, with shifts from subtle to seismic, and the decisions they make are likely to determine their “brand’s” long-term prospects.
Two weeks ago, Food Network announced it had signed Hannah Hart to a six-episode food and travel series. For Hart, it is a continuation of significant accomplishments including starring in the Lionsgate feature film “Dirty Thirty,” coming out in September, a second book, “Buffering: Unshared Tales Of A Life Fully Loaded,” which follows her New York Times Bestseller “My Drunk Kitchen: A Guide to Eating, Drinking, and Going with Your Gut.” All that, in addition maintaining her YouTube channel of 2.5+ million, means Hart has leveraged her digital fame about as well as anyone could, and primarily because she makes people laugh.
Posting such a passionate video about gun control so soon after the mass shooting in Orlando, you might imagine, is a risk. The video generated more than a million views and close to 30,000 comments (at this writing), with every kind of opinion, many levels of admiration and vitriol, much of it pointed at Hart.
Celebrities speaking out about social issues is not new. But saying right where that celebrity made her name … that is different. It would be like an actor stopping a movie so she could make a point about a hotly debated topic.
“I’m Afraid of You” was not the first time Hart engaged substantive issues, including gender identification, health care (and meeting the president), bullying,coming out as gay, among others. But in most of the videos listed above, Hart’s usual sense of humor still led the way. Not this time. What comes across is still clearly Hart, a raw and honest version, and perhaps that is all that matters. Her second book, Buffering, is about letting out more of that authentic self.
“It’s not even necessarily about letting it out,” Hart says, “it’s about being it.”
Hart, 29, remembers the first self-revelation, something she refers to as ‘course-correcting,’ that made her nervous. It was a video about coming out.
“I was really nervous,” Hart says, “because not everybody in the States feels great about gay people and it’s not only a national but global platform. But it turned out really, really well.”
Meaning she got enough positive feedback to make it worth it? No.
“The thing about course correcting,” Hart says, “is the outcome is already known to me. The goal is I need to say this, so once I’ve said, I’ve achieved the goal. It’s not about the comments, it’s not about the views.”
And what if it significantly turns off the community?
“If I’m doing something right,” Hart says, “I don’t think I have to worry about that. I’m not a product of my community, my community is a product of what I do. So if I’m, oh man, now I’m a jazz singer. I’m a jazz singer, that’s what I do. And if you like jazz, come along. But if I’m constantly in a ‘trying to please other people’ cycle, you’re not going to be very happy. That’s what I’ve found.”