YouTubers

How YouTube Shook Up TV and Created a New Generation of Stars

Chris Stokel-Walker

• Publisher: Canbury
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781912454242
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Digital Marketing
• Index: Business

Jake Paul: cars, money and a burning swimming pool

Make your way the 100 metres or so up the gated driveway of a mountainside home in California and your eye is drawn to the rust-coloured statue in the middle of the front yard. Cast in metal, a stick man holds up four large boxes that appear to be toppling out of reach. Look left and you'll see a newly installed skate ramp on the front lawn. To the right of that you'll see the dirt ramp where the owner jumps his luxury cars, among them a Lamborghini Huracán Performante, a Tesla Model X P-100 D (nicknamed Bloodshark), and a tie-dyed Ford Focus RS called Rainbro.

But don't get distracted by the flashy motors and the general hullabaloo taking place in the grounds of this three-and-a-half acre property. Otherwise you'll miss the 15, 000-square-foot, eight-bedroom mansion, which has a custom-designed fish tank in the master bedroom and a 'merchandise shop' (which the public can't visit) showcasing a custom line of T-shirts, hoodies and sweatshirts.

The owner of this $6.9 million mansion is a high school dropout with a short attention span. A decade ago Jake Paul might have been consigned to a low-wage future scanning groceries in a supermarket in his native Ohio. Instead he is the modern face of YouTube; a boisterous millionaire with a frenetic lifestyle and a booming business. His story shows how YouTube is throwing jokers into the pack of modern media.

In 2014, Paul left school and the family home in Westlake, Ohio, aged 17, for the West Coast to upload videos to the internet. An early fan of sketch comedy channel Smosh (Paul and his older brother's first joint YouTube channel on the platform was called Zoosh, inspired by the Smosh name), he first came to real fame by doing jokey videos on Vine, the six-second social media video sharing app bought by Twitter. He bounded onto YouTube when Vine closed in late 2016. 'I was a savage from day one, ' he boasted in a video hyping his YouTube channel.

Certainly, he was too savage for some neighbours of the $17, 000-a-month home he was renting in Beverly Grove, California. For one 15-minute video, uploaded in July 2017, Paul decided to drive around in his newly souped-up truck, honking his extra-loud horn at passersby. One shopper, Ellis Barbacoff, later sued Paul, claiming that 'sustained shock and injuries to his body' had caused longstanding 'pain and suffering' and 'emotional distress'. (When this book went to press, the case was ongoing.) His neighbours threatened a class action lawsuit against him because of his outlandish behaviour – which included setting fire to his own swimming pool. You might wonder how someone would set fire to a swimming pool. The answer is: you throw a load of furniture into the empty pool, toss some lighter fluid over it, then set fire to it. If you have to ask why, then you don't understand Jake Paul.

His YouTube persona is the annoying, puckish person we all know and hate, with a whiny voice, attention-seeking attitude, bleached blond hair and gnat-like attention span – a Jedward for the online generation. This is how he introduces his YouTube channel:

WHATS UP?! Im Jake Paul.

Im 21, live in Los Angeles, & have a crazy life! Keep up: )

The squad 'Team 10' & I are always making comedy vids, acting, doing action sports, & going on crazy adventures.

Subscribe & watch daily to keep up with the madness

Paul is also – alongside his brother Logan, who is best known for uploading a video of a dead body hanging in a forest in Japan – one of the most successful YouTubers, with 17 million subscribers. He has interviewed a United States senator about gun control. He's been invited to – and illicitly stayed overnight in – the White House (the unexpected sleepover was a dare for a video, of course). He owns two absurdly expensive Audemars Piguet Swiss watches. He is estimated to earn anything between £250, 000 ($350, 000) and £4 million ($5.6 million) per year from advertising on his YouTube videos alone. He has done more with his life than many 52-year-olds, let alone other 22-year-olds from Ohio.

In many ways, Paul is the most successful postmodern YouTuber, transparent about the transactional nature of the relationship between him and his fans. He is clear that the reason why he's quite so annoying is that he knows it will gain him notoriety, and consequently lucrative views. He finally moved out of Beverly Grove in October 2017, not because of the fires or the car horns or the savage behaviour, but on a technicality. He was banned from filming in the building without a shooting permit – preventing him from legally creating content without risking a six-month jail sentence.

Paul now lives in the mansion in Calabasas with members of Team 10, a ragtag gang of fellow YouTubers, all of whom are believed to have signed contracts giving him a cut of their earnings from the video sharing website. He is backed by a crew of agents, runners, producers, and general hangers-on, focused on the bottom line and squeezing out every penny from his often young fans.

His constantly shifting Team 10 can range in number from a handful to a dozen – including a toddler called Mini Jake Paul – depending on who's in town and happy to hang out at his McMansion. All of them know that the quid pro quo for living in his orbit and enjoying the lifestyle is the requirement that they appear in his videos, shot by a cameraman trailing him at every moment and often edited while he sleeps by a British-based video editor, Jack Bell. (Paul's team declined a request to speak to Bell about his life as the person responsible for Jake Paul's inimitable video style.)

Regardless of who the supporting cast members are, his videos have a common theme: chaos. Like many lifestyle vloggers, Paul goes about his life – which just so happens to be wild and wacky – and brings along the viewers for a ride. Sometimes he plays pranks on his friends within his mansion; other times he sets fire to things because he is bored. He has made a habit of taking his colourful cars for a spin to visit the nearest supermarket, where he wanders the aisles picking up supplies for his next stunt. The result is like a scene from Who Framed Roger Rabbit?: the cartoon character, dressed head to toe in his own merchandise, or 'merch', stands out like a sore thumb, looking askance at packets of crisps and posters.

For all the antics, viewers are not in any doubt that Paul is running a business as well as living a lifestyle. Spend some time watching the videos he or his older brother Logan produce, and you'll find that they are driven by a messianic urge to make you buy their merch, including $42 shorts, and a windbreaker that costs $90. For this book I analysed 50 videos uploaded by Jake and Logan Paul in February and March 2018 – more than six hours of content – to see how often they mentioned their merchandise. On average, it was once every 142 seconds.

Nowhere is this desire to upsell you on… well, anything, more obvious than in Jake Paul's 2017 Christmas album. Litmas, the main track on the 18-minute album, is a vapid two-minute song with an industrial-sounding melody and a chorus that repeats the lines 'Christmas is lit/Christ-mas, lit-mas'. Even in a genre famous for its bad music, the Christmas single is a new low (comments on the video included 'This is easily the worst chorus to any song I have ever heard in my life'). No matter. Less than 24 hours after its release, it had been seen 2.4 million times.

A better glimpse into how modern-day YouTube works is Fanjoy to the World – a two-minute 16-second version of the Christmas classic Joy to the World with reworked lyrics. It starts by repeating 'Buy dat merch' seven times, adding: 'All I want for Christmas is that Jake Paul merch/All I want for Christmas is a Jake Paul shirt'. Later, Paul manages to incorporate the URL to his online merchandise store in the song, and tells the listener: 'Get in while you can/Before I sell it all' and 'Go tell your momma/She gotta buy it all'.

His approach is working. In 2018, Paul was the second highest-earning YouTuber, pulling in $21.5 million before management fees and taxes, according to Forbes. (The highest earning, who we'll meet later, was even younger. No, it's not Mini Jake Paul.)

Unsurprisingly, there are thousands of smaller scale Jake Pauls on YouTube, hoping to ape his success. Some of them even forked out $64 to learn more about Paul's business model through a dubious online course he set up called Edfluence.

How did Jake Paul happen? How did YouTube become a site where people create entire conceits so that they can pepper their videos with calls to buy their merchandise every two minutes? Where individual vloggers can command global audiences of millions and live in mansions, surrounded by sports cars and hangers-on? How did YouTubers start living the life which school children most want to lead?

Every story needs to start somewhere – and fittingly for YouTube, which can often seem like a madhouse full of party animals, it started in a zoo.