month, Charlie McDonnell was upfront with his fans. He was the first UK YouTuber to reach a million subscribers, and he has been uploading videos to the site since 2007. Then in March, he told his followers on Twitter: “I have, essentially, quit the YouTube thing.” Part of his rationale was that it “Turns out that tying up your perceived worth with your level of success on a website is a Very Bad Idea.”
He is one of many who have created a living for themselves on the world’s most popular video-sharing website, and built up an audience from its 1.9 billion monthly users, only to find that the gilded cage they have built themselves is just that: a cage.
Take also Gabbie Hanna, a US YouTuber who migrated to the site when the app she made her name on, Vine, closed in early 2017. She now has 6.5 million subscribers who lap up her every word. As she sat on stage in front of several hundred fans this February at VidCon, a conference on online video, she too shared her feelings. YouTube had her mental health, and, like McDonnell, she now equated her self-worth with the number of views each of her videos received.
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YouTube is battling negative headlines about dangerous videos, the way videos might encourage children to overeat fast food and the risk of inappropriate videos appearing on toddlers’ television screens. But there is a potentially bigger issue bubbling away: the fate of the stars who make it so popular.
YouTube’s biggest names are now established celebrities, as recognisable to young audiences as mainstream celebrities. But they also came to fame younger than most, and are pressured by their viewers to continue posting – and to keep being the same person that first made their fans fall in love with them.
“Viewers don’t just let YouTubers into their living rooms, they are on their phones, in their bedrooms”
“Audiences can be very supportive and provide a great flow of positive energy, but they can also suspect, for example, things like the show being fake,” says Evelyn Keryova, . Authenticity, or the impression of it, is considered the key commodity on YouTube. To win over audiences, you have to give up a small piece of yourself, and receive back plenty in return.
“People are expressing their emotional concerns and fears to YouTubers as if they know them,” says Leslie Rasmussen at Xavier University in Ohio. “The reality is they don’t, and what they do know about the YouTuber is very different to what the YouTuber will ever know about them.” This one-sided relationship, often between an adoring audience and a celebrity, is known as a parasocial relationship.
These relationships have been studied for more than 60 years, but they have never been felt as intensely as they are now. Some of the earliest known ones were between the stars of soap operas or TV news anchors and their viewers, who let them into their homes through the screen every night.
Now the relationship has evolved: viewers don’t just let celebrities into their living rooms, they are on their phones, in their bedrooms and bathrooms. They are appearing across social media, entwined into the same news feeds as their real friends.
“That intensifies the web that is woven through the various social channels we have access to, and intensifies the relationships,” says Rasmussen. One experiment she ran examined how we form parasocial relationships with social media celebrities. Some 80 per cent of those she surveyed identified with or trusted influencers with high numbers of subscribers. She has a hunch – which she plans to explore – that social media and sites like YouTube have increased the strength of that connection.
YouTube engenders a feeling of closeness to the extent that viewers feel they become friends with celebrities. But that intimacy can create twinned difficulties. For one thing, it means the star can feel trapped in the persona they present in front of the camera.
This was a difficulty McDonnell felt when he decided to step back from YouTube at the age of 28. “Simply put, I’ve grown out of my internet persona,” he wrote. “I made that mask when I was 16 and it just doesn’t fit me anymore.”
But the other fear is that closeness turns to unhealthy obsession. Christina Grimmie was a YouTuber with nearly 1 million subscribers when she appeared at a “meet-and-greet” at an Orlando theatre in June 2016.
Such events are a way for fans to meet their favourite YouTube stars and grab a selfie and stilted conversation with their idols. More than 250 people turned out to see Grimmie, including her killer, Kevin James Loibl, who brought two handguns and a hunting knife with him.
Loibl shot Grimmie dead, then turned a gun on himself. He had spent months watching her videos, and wanted to become a famous YouTuber himself so he could gain Grimmie’s attention. Loibl’s only friend said that he watched “all her YouTube videos, how she interacted with fans, and how she interacted in general”. That friend also said Loibl called Grimmie “his soulmate”.
This is, of course, an extreme example of obsessive behaviour, better known as erotomania – and it isn’t new. John Lennon, Gianni Versace and many, many other celebrities have died at the hands of fans, long before the advent of social media. But social media has made it easier to slip into obsession. And Grimmie’s death awoke YouTubers to the risk of being too open with viewers.
“A lot of YouTubers are being more reserved about saying the cities they live in and I think that’s because they have a real fear,” says Rasmussen. “They need to find that balance between building a business and crafting what they want to disclose. We’re building relationships that could go south really quickly. It takes one person who takes this a little too far, and we have a situation where danger is involved.”
Tiffany Ferguson is a YouTuber who set up her first channel at the age of 12. Now 23, she has some 170,000 subscribers who watch her video essays about YouTube culture. She regularly talks to another YouTuber (off camera) about the dangers of her most obsessed viewers. “We’re both relatively small channels, less than half a million, but even at this stage, you do get creepy messages and people invading your privacy and personal life,” she says. “Regardless of the scale of it, that can be overwhelming.”
Bigger stars can struggle with fans turning up uninvited at their door. Alfie Deyes, one of Britain’s biggest YouTubers (and one half of a social media power couple with Zoe “Zoella” Sugg), has often complained .
It is an unenviable situation. Worse, it is hard to fix. YouTubers must open up their hearts and lives to the camera – and to their viewers. Precious few can get away without giving up some aspect of intimacy in exchange for fame. The more people that offer up an insight into their lives, the more normalised doing that becomes.
The research on its long-term impact is only now beginning, and when we get the answers, it could be too late to do anything. On YouTube, oversharing is the new norm – with all the tragic consequences that can ensue.
