These viral vloggers are much more savvy about digital marketing than all their cash-for-clicks
selfies may suggest.
Still, they must evolve from the influencer stew from whence they spawned, or risk extinction.
From Jake Paul to Lilly Singh, these social media stars need to realize they aren't famous
anymore.
In 2012, Cameron Dallas was a star on the rise.
Vine was the hot new social media jam and annoying your parents with 6-second pranks
was all the rage.
Dallas even broadened his appeal just as the app officially shuttered in 2017 by securing
lucrative modeling gigs with both Calvin Klein and Dolce & Gabbana.
He was also doing the movie-star-in-the-making rounds at Los Angeles and Manhattan media
events.
"In 2011 I tweeted that I wanted to be a Calvin Klein model, and now I'm here, like, what?'
But that's where the new kid hit the skids.
Cameron's exactly on-brand feature film debut was the 2014 prank flick, Expelled, which
got a dismal audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with only three critics bothering to weigh
in.
Next came Chasing Cameron Dallas, his low-rated 2016 Netflix reality series that was canceled
after just one season.
Professional troubles became personal struggles as Dallas was arrested for assault in January
2019.
At the time, he claimed self-defense.
Eight months later, he revealed a two-and-a-half year battle with, quote, "addiction, anxiety,
depression," and "family trauma" that included a stint in rehab.
Dallas has since opened up about his vices, rebranding himself as a crooner in a series
of slick-looking music videos that have not exactly taken off, no thanks to his 21.5 million
Instagram followers.
"I go to a lot of therapy."
Woah Vicky realized sometime in 2017 that Insta-fame was there for the trolling if you
could just troll other trolls hard enough.
If you're not familiar with Vick's schtick, she's the white girl who took a DNA test to
prove she's 100 percent not that.
"I just wanted to like let them get to know like the real me, you know.
I don't want them thinking that I'm actually like crazy like that."
With her appropriating-for-clicks scheme in the works, she collaborated on a pair of fake
fights with another infamous appropriator, Bhad Bhabie.
And while she seemingly won at least one of their on-camera knockouts, she lost the war.
Unfortunately for Woah, where Bhad Bhabie was able to turn her Dr. Phil assist into
a shockingly effective rap career, Vicky's fans weren't buying it.
Literally.
In spite of her more than one million YouTube subscribers, only one of her singles has cracked
even a million plays as of 2020.
But perhaps the most telling indicator that this aspiring celeb's career hasn't even taken
a legitimate first step, is that she cites a free Gmail account to book her for gigs,
instead of, you know, an agent or manager.
Back to the long-dead Vine.
Nash Grier turned his piercing eyes and boy-next-door looks into some great gigs after his home
platform wilted, including a 2019 appearance on the runway for Dolce & Gabbana alongside
his buddy Cameron Dallas.
But like Dallas, Grier's move to the small screen hit one minor snag: acting is actually
really hard, even if you're kinda good.
Grier headlined a single season of a forgettable thriller series called The Deleted.
He also starred alongside Bella Thorne in 2017's You Get Me which has a worse audience
score than infamous bombs like Showgirls.
"I'm sorry, mom."
As of 2020, Grier's Instagram bio now reads "stay at home dad," which clearly could be
tongue-in-cheek.
But he is definitely using the platform to share endless snaps of his son Malakai, who
was born in September 2019.
The prankster may have traded his juvenile antics to become a daddy-lifestyle vlogger,
but it appears fans just aren't as interested in his handy household tips as they were in
his hot-guy hijinks.
Still, maybe a guy who can afford to be a stay-at-home parent at age 22 knows something
the rest of us don't.
YouTube-famous Cody Simpson might be Hollywood's most surprisingly lucky loverboy.
The singer turned his penchant for cutesy covers of corny songs into a whirlwind romance
with supermodel Gigi Hadid that ended in 2015 and peaked in his music video for "Surfboard."
Better singers would eventually steal Hadid, but Simpson remained undaunted and eventually
replaced Liam Hemsworth as the apple of Miley Cyrus' wandering eye.
Meanwhile, Cyrus and Simpson publicly flexed their Corona-romance in 2020 proving that
couples who thirst trap together, stay together.
"How would I describe myself to someone who doesn't know me.
Relaxed, introspective, relatively calm.
And a guy who loves pineapple."
Professionally, however, Simpson has paused on releasing his conventionally average tracks
for a new musical-poetry project called Prince Neptune.
There's a book of these licks apparently, available now, for anyone interested in, quote,
"themes of freedom and the ocean with the wisdom of an old soul" — whatever that means.
Lilly Singh rose to viral YouTube fame with her wildly condescending caricature of bigots
in her breakout video "A Geography Class for Racist People."
It's a stunningly smug four minutes as she chides straw-man dummies of the world with
lines like:
"India is all the way over here across the ocean, so, unfortunately, you won't be able
to drive your trailer there."
Yes, for this starlet worth an estimated $16 million, the enemy is poor people living in
homes on wheels.
Regardless, the video blew up, with 14 million views and counting, and Singh became the first
bi woman of color to land a late-night talk show.
NBC's A Little Late with Lilly Singh debuted in September 2019 with all 96 episodes pre-recorded
in a studio over a three month period.
The result was not well-received, particularly from fellow YouTubers, three of whom released
a scathing takedown critique that deemed the whole enterprise a silly and stale cringe-fest.
General audiences didn't embrace Singh's twist on late night either, rating the show 17 percent
on Rotten Tomatoes and a 1.8 out of 10 on IMDb.
"I just wanna be myself."
"What are we just yelling what we wanna be?
I wanna be Adam Levine!"
Want to peer deeper into the void?
Teen Vogue even used Singh's own fame-making identity-logic against her, dubbing her trademark
schtick as problematic for being:
"Indicative of non-Black people performing Blackness."
Jake Paul answers the question, what if the villain from Karate Kid was your best friend?
Both Jake and elder bro Logan Paul rose to Vine-cum-YouTube fame by modeling clout-chasing
and generally anti-social behavior for an army of admiring youth.
The next move in the Youtube daily-vlogger playbook was releasing novelty hip-hop songs
that oddly rack up hundreds of millions of views as actual musicians weep themselves
to sleep.
"You have to rise and be original to stay at the top, to succeed."
Jake, however, called an audible with the 2018 launch of his now-defunct "Edfluence"
online courses.
The grift came in the form of a 74-video program about how to influence like Jake, that today
resolves in an error page.
Apparently even Jake's fanbase of gullible children could see you don't get famous by
sending your internet idol your mom's credit card.
"People don't understand."
The younger Paul further diminished himself in 2019 by playing second fiddle to Logan
on the undercard of a DaZone network celebrity boxing match.
Jake scored a first-round knockout in his pro debut — against an awkward opponent
nearly 5 inches shorter.
The 6'1" nearly 200-pound Paul has made a habit of beating up on undersized fellow influencers.
But while Logan's main event beef with KSI generated genuine buzz, Jake's participation
feels a bit like a little brother just tagging along.
Amanda Cerny is another former Viner reframed by the explosion of genuine short-form creativity
on TikTok.
With a quick look, it becomes increasingly apparent that her old content was definitely
repetitive, if not sometimes problematic.
Or as Affinity reported, Cerny is among several influencers who are…
"Responsible for the repeated exploitation and degradation of women through their videos."
It all begs the question: Was Cerny's initial reputation as a comedian just hot-person privilege
the whole time?
Perhaps fittingly, she's transitioned to filling her time as a lifestyle YouTuber who creates
biblically long videos of herself trying on yoga pants.
"(Sigh) I'm out of breath."
Other than that, Cerny's attempts at mainstream success have been limited to cameos in a series
of straight-to-streaming disasters like 2017's Logan Paul led Airplane! ripoff, called Airplane
Mode, which was so utterly ignored it doesn't even rate on Rotten Tomatoes.
Cerny has, however, landed a speaking role in the sequel to Bella Thorne's well-received
horror-comedy gem, The Babysitter, so perhaps a violent death could be a great rebirth.
Belle Gibson might have innovated the worst thing you can do on social media: pretend
to have cancer.
According to her since-vanished Instagram presence, via The Australian, her body was
riddled with various tumors and she even claimed to have, quote, "momentarily died on the operating
table" during one of her multiple open-heart surgeries.
Then, in 2014, the former social media star released a book called The Whole Pantry, based
on her "wellness" app of the same name, claiming to have cured herself with things like, quote,
"colonics and oxygen therapy."
Gibson even added a dash of anti-vax controversy, alleging she got her fake cancer from the
life-saving HPV anti-cancer vaccine which is, in reality, crucial to women's health.
"How can we believe anything you say now?”
“Tara, I have lost everything."
Two journalists eventually uncovered her fraud in 2015.
Gibson was also forced to pointedly admit the truth when asked by Australian Women's
Weekly, quote, "if she has, or has ever had cancer."
The answer was "no."
Australian courts hammered her with hundreds of thousands in fines for defrauding the public
and taking fake charity donations.
But even that didn't keep Gibson from her influencer-inspired jet-setting lifestyle.
Aussie courts claim despite her outstanding public debt, she brazenly jaunted to Bali
and Africa and spent $91,000 between 2017 and 2019, all while not paying her fines.
Nicole Arbour famously gorged on overnight YouTube fame via her 2015 video, titled "Dear
Fat People," where she declared,
"Plus sizes stands for plus heart disease, plus knee problems, plus diabetes."
"Maybe I'm a little jealous that you get to eat whatever you want."
At least one blogger managed to piece together a flimsy freedom of speech defense for Arbour,
but most people thought she was just a pretty, skinny girl getting social media famous for
fat-shaming those less fortunate.
YouTube briefly removed the video, but it got so much attention, the ladies of The View
invited her on the show and then surrounded her like five righteous vultures and picked
apart the corpse of her "satire" defense.
But later, Arbour documented her own battle with chronic disability, pain, and depression
following a car accident.
So, was she saying her struggle was real, but that of others wasn't?
Arbour appeared to want it both ways, and as coronavirus began spreading throughout
the U.S. in 2020, she applied her manic style to doubting the seriousness of the epidemic,
declaring, among other controversial claims, quote, "China is filthy."
Her Covid-19 takes are hovering around 120,000 views, as of June 2020, with one of her top
commenters perfectly summing up her present career status, writing:
"Oh hey, you're still a thing?"
An entire listicle could be devoted to the various controversies and crimes of former
Soundcloud rapper Tekashi 6ix9ine.
As confusing as his story is, 6ix9ine is basically a foul-mouthed kid who got YouTube-famous
by pretending to be a gangster, and then ironically, upon fraternizing with actual gang members
in his viral video "Gummo," became a real one.
6ix9ine was facing 32 years to life in the slammer for his post-fame crimes, when he
had a drastic change of heart.
Maybe the saddest fact of 6ix9ine's short career is that fans didn't turn on him until
he stopped attempting murders and started testifying against his gangster pals in exchange
for leniency.
According to the New York Times, the tatted rapper tearfully lamented:
"I know I was wrong.
I was weak.
I was easily influenced.
I can't believe that was me.
Again, your honor, there is no apology good enough."
Prosecutors were impressed, and 6ix9ine only got two years.
He then signed a $10 million record deal from behind bars and eventually walked out of federal
custody four months shy of his already light term because of a Covid-19 outbreak at his
facility.
Sure, 6ix9ine skirted the law and secured a bag, but after being branded a snitch, it's
unlikely his hip-hop career will survive.
"For everyone who watches this..."
"They watch it, cuz they, it's either one, they love me or two, you hate me."
In 2010, Jenna Marbles was voted by everyone you know as the YouTube star most likely forwarded
to your Hotmail account.
Any negative thought you had about your own face, Marbles had a funny beauty tutorial
for that.
Any weird thought you had about Marbles, she would beat you to the punchline.
"YouTube didn't exist until half way through college, for me, so it's not like I can just
go educate myself on how to do my makeup, okay."
But as of 2020, Marbles was looking more like a lifestyle vlogger — probably because documenting
what her dog got for her birthday is an infinite source of content on a decade-old channel.
And these days if Marbles got mainstream media mentions she was usually being described as
quote "wholesome" or the subject of totally invented canine controversies.
But Marbles made real headlines in June 2020, when she shocked fans by announcing that she
was quitting her channel.
In an emotional video titled, "A Message," Marbles apologized for her older, racially
insensitive and discriminatory content.
While she might not be pursuing a massive Hollywood career like some of her peers, it
looks like Marbles is taking ownership of her past missteps, and advocating for positive
change on social media.
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