Dan & Phil Part 95: ASS (Aquarium Staff Seminar)

[Apple In My Pie]

Still 'hmmm' about this book.

Tell you what I'd love to see from Dan, although suppose it may be a v personal thing, is more of his piano playing. He's shown us snippets every now and then, and perhaps an entire video would be overkill, but I find it so very soothing!

[Megancita75]

I follow Bryony on Insta and she posted about being interviewed in the June 2020 Cosmopolitan UK magazine for an article about former YouTubers. I was interested, so I tracked down the article and am posting the text below, in case anyone else wants to read it.

What happens when your YouTube spotlight fades?
Fifteen years since YouTube began, Emily Gulla tracks down some of the platform’s original superstars. Her question? What happens when the camera stops rolling?

My very first video was about marshmallows.

The year was 2011. JLS were number one in the charts, skater skirts were all anyone wore and Robert Pattinson’s face shone down from my bedroom wall as I stuffed gelatine-based snacks into my mouth. I was a 12-year-old wannabe vlogger, convinced that the path to fame and fortune lay in marshmallows, or cinnamon or fireballs – or whatever the ridiculous internet trend of the moment was.

My spirit guide, career hero and (if I’m honest) pre-teen crush was called Charlie McDonnell. He was just like me. He made videos about tea and GCSE results from his bedroom, but the difference was he was getting rich from every single one. Just like all the kids in my year at school, I was obsessed with this new breed of star: part-boyband frontman, part-children’s TV presenter, part-boy-next-door and 100% compulsive viewing. But Charlie wasn’t in One Direction or The Wanted; he wasn’t on MTV or T4. He was a star on a new platform, one that reached into people’s bedrooms and captivated a generation: YouTube.

Unsurprisingly, my vlogging career didn’t quite take off. The height of my success was when I got 15,000 views on a video about The Hunger Games (now hidden where it belongs – on private mode). Charlie, on the other hand, joined a cluster of YouTube’s early stars. The same year that I uploaded my first video (2011), he became the first British person on the platform to reach one million subscribers – which won him the Gold Play Button plaque (since awarded to the likes of Alfie Deyes and Joe Sugg).

While the lives of huge stars like Zoella and PewDiePie loom large on our screens, as I flick, cringing, through the remnants of my brief foray into their world, all I can think is: what happened to the ones who came first?

THE PIONEERS
Charlie’s voice is so familiar that I have to remind myself we’ve actually never met. He’s phoning from Toronto, where he now lives, and it’s hard not to call him “Charlieissocoollike” – the moniker he was known by for over a decade. Back in 2007, aged just 16, he’d started making YouTube videos – goofy ramblings to camera filmed on a webcam “for fun – just to waste time, basically”. It was a hobby, and never his main ambition – he wanted to be a graphic designer. But by age 19, he’d moved to London, fully funding himself with his YouTube earnings. “Paying my rent was the main tipping point for me. I thought, ‘This is actually my job now; it’s sustaining me,’” he recalls. Charlie put his plans to study design at university on pause to focus on his burgeoning online career – and he reigned supreme as the poster-boy for British YouTube. We’re used to stories like this now, but back then this was a new, unprecedented phenomenon. It was seen as risky for him to abandon all future paths to focus on just this, but he was earning thousands of pounds a month – why wouldn’t he?

For Bryony Matthewman, now 36, it was a comedy sketch that changed the course of her life. Aged just 23, she was a graphic-design graduate working a nine-to-five admin job in Enfield when she first uploaded a funny video from her childhood bedroom. It was 2006, and being featured on YouTube’s homepage was enough to get you millions of views, and to establish Bryony (AKA Paperlilies) as one of the year’s biggest vloggers.

“I remember getting my first 10,000 subscribers and imagining 10,000 people in a room,” she recalls. “Even at that point, it was so many more people than I’d ever expected.”

With her subscriber numbers climbing daily, Bryony took the plunge and moved out of her family home, living with a friend to work full-time as a YouTuber. Her income came from promoting brands in her videos and from Google AdSense, which offers certain content creators a cut of their video’s advertising revenue (YouTube notes that revenue generated for creators is and has always been core to its business and how the platform can remain free). YouTube even invited her in to answer developers’ questions on how vloggers were taking over the site.

At her peak, Bryony was making around £2,000 a month from deals with brands – a fraction of what today’s stars make but, for the time (and for free branded trips to LA), pretty damn good indeed. But, as more and more people entered the site (Zoella’s first vlog was 2009) and new platforms launched (oh hi, Instagram), competition for eyeballs got tougher. Bryony, Charlie and those like them were suddenly, and unwittingly, battling to cut through the noise.

KEEPING IT FRESH
The problem with creating something new is that people start to expect it. They crave it. They want it straight away. And when that “newness” involves real people – with real lives, problems, anxieties and hang-ups – that can be tough. Watching their viewer numbers slowly fall, Charlie and Bryony found the race to create new and exciting content increasingly difficult at the exact same time that more and more creators were entering the marketplace. They both began to realise that when you monetise your hobby and downtime there’s no such thing as a day off.

Despite being flown around the world by brands and seeing huge success on her channel, in 2011 Bryony was 28 years old and craving the stability of a normal job. “I didn’t know if I was going to get another brand deal or if people would stop watching my videos. It’s so reliant on coming up with good ideas – and if you’re the face of it, you’re going [to be critiqued].” She cites YouTubers who’ve avoided this personal level of scrutiny, crediting Colleen Ballinger for creating a character persona, MirandaSings, which gave her a valuable distinction between Colleen the human being and Miranda the famous YouTuber. I get the feeling that Bryony wishes she had done the same. “When your whole channel is based on your own personality, any criticism feels like someone clawing at your soul. But if you create a completely separate character, even if it’s still your face, you can avoid that personal level of scrutiny.

“It’s all tied up in your own self-worth. The appeal of YouTubers, generally, is that they’re real people,” Bryony continues. She remembers starting to edit her behaviour in real-time while filming videos, forcing herself to appear more energised and alive in line with her YouTube persona but, she says, “I just didn’t feel very genuine any more.”

Charlie admits he was planning his contingency escape plan as early as 2013. Then over two million subscribers strong, he was noticing a slight drop-off in views, so began “building up a skillset” that would enable him to pursue jobs in the film industry should he suddenly need to, teaching himself to write film scripts. “I saw people dropping,” he says. “I did feel like I’d put all my eggs in this basket. I felt like I needed to be ready for the idea of the bubble bursting.”

What bothered Charlie was that, to keep his views up, he had to keep himself “on” – a constant pressure to keep “creating” at all costs. This vicious cycle sent him into depressive periods where he was “physically unable” to make videos. “Between 2010 and 2012, when I was at my most popular on YouTube, was also when I experienced my first bout of burnout and intense depression from working myself so hard and chasing that popularity,” he explains. “You feel trapped by a system of your own making.” Charlie revealed in a video that he eventually saw a doctor and was diagnosed with anxiety and depression in 2016 – though he suspects he’d been depressed for almost 10 years. He started taking medication and saw a therapist.

He tried one more time, creating what he describes as a “last-ditch attempt” franchise that involved his persona a lot less. But it didn’t take off. In fact, his views dwindled further. Eventually he filmed his last-ever video – shutting his laptop for good 18 months ago.

ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT
“Are you TheHill88?” It was the question Caitlin dreaded most, as she tried her best to smile at customers on the tills of Target – a budget clothes and homeware store in Brisbane, Australia. “It was always awkward. I’d be standing there in my uniform with no make-up on… but it’s a humbling experience.” She was 23 and, having abandoned her YouTube career just months earlier in 2011 to embark on a university degree in Theatre, she was now paying the bills by working in shops and waitressing.

Just a few years previously, aged 18, Caitlin had been Australia’s number-one YouTuber. Overnight, a comedy battle-rap she’d filmed in response to another YouTuber blew up, reaching over four million views. “My inbox just broke,” recalls Caitlin. Her parents were blissfully unaware until TV shows started calling the house for interviews. Realising that YouTube was something she could make money from full-time, Caitlin ditched her original dream of going to university, instead choosing to work on the now-defunct New York-based company HitViews, connecting YouTubers to brands, while making her own videos. By 2008, her channel had a cumulative view count of 17 million, making her enough money to live, but not enough to splash out.

But, alongside hundreds of comments saying “I want to be like you”, there were cruel ones too: sexual comments, strangers wanting to “destroy” her and trolls in Scream masks threatening to kill her in her own home. Caitlin couldn’t help but spend hours reading them, zoning in on the worst. “It’s no good trying to carve a career in something that actually causes you pain and suffering. We’re not all made to be stars,” she says. On top of that, she “felt tired of listening to myself talk. I’d rather play a character or help other people tell stories about characters. I didn’t want to be myself on YouTube,” says Caitlin. “I’d floated from opportunity to opportunity, until those opportunities ended and I got to go to university. I finally felt at home. And I realised: this is what I was meant to do six years ago.”

It also helped bring her peace. Getting recognised at work meant that Caitlin could hear nostalgic adults telling her they’d loved watching her as a teen. “It helps me appreciate what people saw in me, which I didn’t see at the time because I was caught up in negative comments.” Since then, she’s gone back to the platform, but as a hobby – she’s not trying to make it her job this time. Charlie feels the same, now working as a screenwriter he’s grateful to be behind the camera, rather than in front of it.

Bryony’s channel fizzled in 2012, and she found a job in social media branding strategy, something she acknowledges she may not have done had it not been for YouTube. And while she doesn’t regret a single part of her former career, she does sometimes worry about what else she could have achieved during those years. “Many people my age have bought houses and are further on in life. And that’s because I spent the best part of a decade on a different path.” Still, she feels it was worth it. “Maybe I’m slightly behind the curve in some of the other stuff. But how many people have had the chance to live that life? I still feel really privileged.”

THE NEXT GENERATION
After speaking with the YouTubers of the Noughties, I can’t help but look back at my failed vlogging attempts as a bullet dodged. All the people I spoke to were glad they did it, but felt the transience of that fame. It seems the YouTubers of old weren’t primed for their careers to be sustainable – financially, mentally or emotionally. For them, “there wasn’t a road map for long-term success”, Caitlin explains.

Now, research* has found that almost half of millennials plan to change jobs after just two years, and we can view the first YouTubers as early examples of the decline of the “job for life” ideology – something we now see everywhere as the gig and portfolio-career economies continue to evolve. However, like the first bankrupted dotcom millionaires, or pop’s one-hit wonders, the original YouTubers found out the hard way that sometimes the brighter your star burns early on, the more quickly it expires.

On the flip side, these internet stars almost certainly paved the way for today’s YouTubers to bank better deals, and agents to protect them. And, with kids as young as seven creating content, and TikTok making internet fame even easier, the need for that protection has, perhaps, never been greater.

YouTube was contacted for comment on the points raised but did not respond before this magazine went to press.

[rizzo]

I follow Bryony on Insta and she posted about being interviewed in the June 2020 Cosmopolitan UK magazine for an article about former YouTubers. I was interested, so I tracked down the article and am posting the text below, in case anyone else wants to read it.

What happens when your YouTube spotlight fades?
Fifteen years since YouTube began, Emily Gulla tracks down some of the platform’s original superstars. Her question? What happens when the camera stops rolling?

My very first video was about marshmallows.

The year was 2011. JLS were number one in the charts, skater skirts were all anyone wore and Robert Pattinson’s face shone down from my bedroom wall as I stuffed gelatine-based snacks into my mouth. I was a 12-year-old wannabe vlogger, convinced that the path to fame and fortune lay in marshmallows, or cinnamon or fireballs – or whatever the ridiculous internet trend of the moment was.

My spirit guide, career hero and (if I’m honest) pre-teen crush was called Charlie McDonnell. He was just like me. He made videos about tea and GCSE results from his bedroom, but the difference was he was getting rich from every single one. Just like all the kids in my year at school, I was obsessed with this new breed of star: part-boyband frontman, part-children’s TV presenter, part-boy-next-door and 100% compulsive viewing. But Charlie wasn’t in One Direction or The Wanted; he wasn’t on MTV or T4. He was a star on a new platform, one that reached into people’s bedrooms and captivated a generation: YouTube.

Unsurprisingly, my vlogging career didn’t quite take off. The height of my success was when I got 15,000 views on a video about The Hunger Games (now hidden where it belongs – on private mode). Charlie, on the other hand, joined a cluster of YouTube’s early stars. The same year that I uploaded my first video (2011), he became the first British person on the platform to reach one million subscribers – which won him the Gold Play Button plaque (since awarded to the likes of Alfie Deyes and Joe Sugg).

While the lives of huge stars like Zoella and PewDiePie loom large on our screens, as I flick, cringing, through the remnants of my brief foray into their world, all I can think is: what happened to the ones who came first?

THE PIONEERS
Charlie’s voice is so familiar that I have to remind myself we’ve actually never met. He’s phoning from Toronto, where he now lives, and it’s hard not to call him “Charlieissocoollike” – the moniker he was known by for over a decade. Back in 2007, aged just 16, he’d started making YouTube videos – goofy ramblings to camera filmed on a webcam “for fun – just to waste time, basically”. It was a hobby, and never his main ambition – he wanted to be a graphic designer. But by age 19, he’d moved to London, fully funding himself with his YouTube earnings. “Paying my rent was the main tipping point for me. I thought, ‘This is actually my job now; it’s sustaining me,’” he recalls. Charlie put his plans to study design at university on pause to focus on his burgeoning online career – and he reigned supreme as the poster-boy for British YouTube. We’re used to stories like this now, but back then this was a new, unprecedented phenomenon. It was seen as risky for him to abandon all future paths to focus on just this, but he was earning thousands of pounds a month – why wouldn’t he?

For Bryony Matthewman, now 36, it was a comedy sketch that changed the course of her life. Aged just 23, she was a graphic-design graduate working a nine-to-five admin job in Enfield when she first uploaded a funny video from her childhood bedroom. It was 2006, and being featured on YouTube’s homepage was enough to get you millions of views, and to establish Bryony (AKA Paperlilies) as one of the year’s biggest vloggers.

“I remember getting my first 10,000 subscribers and imagining 10,000 people in a room,” she recalls. “Even at that point, it was so many more people than I’d ever expected.”

With her subscriber numbers climbing daily, Bryony took the plunge and moved out of her family home, living with a friend to work full-time as a YouTuber. Her income came from promoting brands in her videos and from Google AdSense, which offers certain content creators a cut of their video’s advertising revenue (YouTube notes that revenue generated for creators is and has always been core to its business and how the platform can remain free). YouTube even invited her in to answer developers’ questions on how vloggers were taking over the site.

At her peak, Bryony was making around £2,000 a month from deals with brands – a fraction of what today’s stars make but, for the time (and for free branded trips to LA), pretty damn good indeed. But, as more and more people entered the site (Zoella’s first vlog was 2009) and new platforms launched (oh hi, Instagram), competition for eyeballs got tougher. Bryony, Charlie and those like them were suddenly, and unwittingly, battling to cut through the noise.

KEEPING IT FRESH
The problem with creating something new is that people start to expect it. They crave it. They want it straight away. And when that “newness” involves real people – with real lives, problems, anxieties and hang-ups – that can be tough. Watching their viewer numbers slowly fall, Charlie and Bryony found the race to create new and exciting content increasingly difficult at the exact same time that more and more creators were entering the marketplace. They both began to realise that when you monetise your hobby and downtime there’s no such thing as a day off.

Despite being flown around the world by brands and seeing huge success on her channel, in 2011 Bryony was 28 years old and craving the stability of a normal job. “I didn’t know if I was going to get another brand deal or if people would stop watching my videos. It’s so reliant on coming up with good ideas – and if you’re the face of it, you’re going [to be critiqued].” She cites YouTubers who’ve avoided this personal level of scrutiny, crediting Colleen Ballinger for creating a character persona, MirandaSings, which gave her a valuable distinction between Colleen the human being and Miranda the famous YouTuber. I get the feeling that Bryony wishes she had done the same. “When your whole channel is based on your own personality, any criticism feels like someone clawing at your soul. But if you create a completely separate character, even if it’s still your face, you can avoid that personal level of scrutiny.

“It’s all tied up in your own self-worth. The appeal of YouTubers, generally, is that they’re real people,” Bryony continues. She remembers starting to edit her behaviour in real-time while filming videos, forcing herself to appear more energised and alive in line with her YouTube persona but, she says, “I just didn’t feel very genuine any more.”

Charlie admits he was planning his contingency escape plan as early as 2013. Then over two million subscribers strong, he was noticing a slight drop-off in views, so began “building up a skillset” that would enable him to pursue jobs in the film industry should he suddenly need to, teaching himself to write film scripts. “I saw people dropping,” he says. “I did feel like I’d put all my eggs in this basket. I felt like I needed to be ready for the idea of the bubble bursting.”

What bothered Charlie was that, to keep his views up, he had to keep himself “on” – a constant pressure to keep “creating” at all costs. This vicious cycle sent him into depressive periods where he was “physically unable” to make videos. “Between 2010 and 2012, when I was at my most popular on YouTube, was also when I experienced my first bout of burnout and intense depression from working myself so hard and chasing that popularity,” he explains. “You feel trapped by a system of your own making.” Charlie revealed in a video that he eventually saw a doctor and was diagnosed with anxiety and depression in 2016 – though he suspects he’d been depressed for almost 10 years. He started taking medication and saw a therapist.

He tried one more time, creating what he describes as a “last-ditch attempt” franchise that involved his persona a lot less. But it didn’t take off. In fact, his views dwindled further. Eventually he filmed his last-ever video – shutting his laptop for good 18 months ago.

ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT
“Are you TheHill88?” It was the question Caitlin dreaded most, as she tried her best to smile at customers on the tills of Target – a budget clothes and homeware store in Brisbane, Australia. “It was always awkward. I’d be standing there in my uniform with no make-up on… but it’s a humbling experience.” She was 23 and, having abandoned her YouTube career just months earlier in 2011 to embark on a university degree in Theatre, she was now paying the bills by working in shops and waitressing.

Just a few years previously, aged 18, Caitlin had been Australia’s number-one YouTuber. Overnight, a comedy battle-rap she’d filmed in response to another YouTuber blew up, reaching over four million views. “My inbox just broke,” recalls Caitlin. Her parents were blissfully unaware until TV shows started calling the house for interviews. Realising that YouTube was something she could make money from full-time, Caitlin ditched her original dream of going to university, instead choosing to work on the now-defunct New York-based company HitViews, connecting YouTubers to brands, while making her own videos. By 2008, her channel had a cumulative view count of 17 million, making her enough money to live, but not enough to splash out.

But, alongside hundreds of comments saying “I want to be like you”, there were cruel ones too: sexual comments, strangers wanting to “destroy” her and trolls in Scream masks threatening to kill her in her own home. Caitlin couldn’t help but spend hours reading them, zoning in on the worst. “It’s no good trying to carve a career in something that actually causes you pain and suffering. We’re not all made to be stars,” she says. On top of that, she “felt tired of listening to myself talk. I’d rather play a character or help other people tell stories about characters. I didn’t want to be myself on YouTube,” says Caitlin. “I’d floated from opportunity to opportunity, until those opportunities ended and I got to go to university. I finally felt at home. And I realised: this is what I was meant to do six years ago.”

It also helped bring her peace. Getting recognised at work meant that Caitlin could hear nostalgic adults telling her they’d loved watching her as a teen. “It helps me appreciate what people saw in me, which I didn’t see at the time because I was caught up in negative comments.” Since then, she’s gone back to the platform, but as a hobby – she’s not trying to make it her job this time. Charlie feels the same, now working as a screenwriter he’s grateful to be behind the camera, rather than in front of it.

Bryony’s channel fizzled in 2012, and she found a job in social media branding strategy, something she acknowledges she may not have done had it not been for YouTube. And while she doesn’t regret a single part of her former career, she does sometimes worry about what else she could have achieved during those years. “Many people my age have bought houses and are further on in life. And that’s because I spent the best part of a decade on a different path.” Still, she feels it was worth it. “Maybe I’m slightly behind the curve in some of the other stuff. But how many people have had the chance to live that life? I still feel really privileged.”

THE NEXT GENERATION
After speaking with the YouTubers of the Noughties, I can’t help but look back at my failed vlogging attempts as a bullet dodged. All the people I spoke to were glad they did it, but felt the transience of that fame. It seems the YouTubers of old weren’t primed for their careers to be sustainable – financially, mentally or emotionally. For them, “there wasn’t a road map for long-term success”, Caitlin explains.

Now, research* has found that almost half of millennials plan to change jobs after just two years, and we can view the first YouTubers as early examples of the decline of the “job for life” ideology – something we now see everywhere as the gig and portfolio-career economies continue to evolve. However, like the first bankrupted dotcom millionaires, or pop’s one-hit wonders, the original YouTubers found out the hard way that sometimes the brighter your star burns early on, the more quickly it expires.

On the flip side, these internet stars almost certainly paved the way for today’s YouTubers to bank better deals, and agents to protect them. And, with kids as young as seven creating content, and TikTok making internet fame even easier, the need for that protection has, perhaps, never been greater.

YouTube was contacted for comment on the points raised but did not respond before this magazine went to press.

thank you thank you THANK YOU for this!!! it's genuinely so appreciated! i was looking for a way to read this.

it's a fascinating read, because, while we know and love bryony, charlie was definitely one of my favorite youtubers for a time. it's odd to read through his POV of old videos that feel like they came out yesterday. 2013 was 7 years ago and that blows my mind. so much has changed.

i'm most interested in bryony's take on a youtuber's personality being their brand, in the context of dan and phil. i know she's definitely speaking for herself, but given their close friendship, i can't help but assume they feel the exact same way. in particular, this bit:

“It’s all tied up in your own self-worth. The appeal of YouTubers, generally, is that they’re real people,” Bryony continues. She remembers starting to edit her behaviour in real-time while filming videos, forcing herself to appear more energised and alive in line with her YouTube persona but, she says, “I just didn’t feel very genuine any more.”

i completely see that in how and why dan and phil have stepped away from who they've been on yt. their "duoness" (for lack of a better word) brands their relationship and it's just not genuine. and they're certainly not gonna put the real thing on youtube.

anyway. great read. thank you a billion again for posting!!

[autumnhearth]

I follow Bryony on Insta and she posted about being interviewed in the June 2020 Cosmopolitan UK magazine for an article about former YouTubers. I was interested, so I tracked down the article and am posting the text below, in case anyone else wants to read it.

What happens when your YouTube spotlight fades?
Fifteen years since YouTube began, Emily Gulla tracks down some of the platform’s original superstars. Her question? What happens when the camera stops rolling?

My very first video was about marshmallows.

The year was 2011. JLS were number one in the charts, skater skirts were all anyone wore and Robert Pattinson’s face shone down from my bedroom wall as I stuffed gelatine-based snacks into my mouth. I was a 12-year-old wannabe vlogger, convinced that the path to fame and fortune lay in marshmallows, or cinnamon or fireballs – or whatever the ridiculous internet trend of the moment was.

My spirit guide, career hero and (if I’m honest) pre-teen crush was called Charlie McDonnell. He was just like me. He made videos about tea and GCSE results from his bedroom, but the difference was he was getting rich from every single one. Just like all the kids in my year at school, I was obsessed with this new breed of star: part-boyband frontman, part-children’s TV presenter, part-boy-next-door and 100% compulsive viewing. But Charlie wasn’t in One Direction or The Wanted; he wasn’t on MTV or T4. He was a star on a new platform, one that reached into people’s bedrooms and captivated a generation: YouTube.

Unsurprisingly, my vlogging career didn’t quite take off. The height of my success was when I got 15,000 views on a video about The Hunger Games (now hidden where it belongs – on private mode). Charlie, on the other hand, joined a cluster of YouTube’s early stars. The same year that I uploaded my first video (2011), he became the first British person on the platform to reach one million subscribers – which won him the Gold Play Button plaque (since awarded to the likes of Alfie Deyes and Joe Sugg).

While the lives of huge stars like Zoella and PewDiePie loom large on our screens, as I flick, cringing, through the remnants of my brief foray into their world, all I can think is: what happened to the ones who came first?

THE PIONEERS
Charlie’s voice is so familiar that I have to remind myself we’ve actually never met. He’s phoning from Toronto, where he now lives, and it’s hard not to call him “Charlieissocoollike” – the moniker he was known by for over a decade. Back in 2007, aged just 16, he’d started making YouTube videos – goofy ramblings to camera filmed on a webcam “for fun – just to waste time, basically”. It was a hobby, and never his main ambition – he wanted to be a graphic designer. But by age 19, he’d moved to London, fully funding himself with his YouTube earnings. “Paying my rent was the main tipping point for me. I thought, ‘This is actually my job now; it’s sustaining me,’” he recalls. Charlie put his plans to study design at university on pause to focus on his burgeoning online career – and he reigned supreme as the poster-boy for British YouTube. We’re used to stories like this now, but back then this was a new, unprecedented phenomenon. It was seen as risky for him to abandon all future paths to focus on just this, but he was earning thousands of pounds a month – why wouldn’t he?

For Bryony Matthewman, now 36, it was a comedy sketch that changed the course of her life. Aged just 23, she was a graphic-design graduate working a nine-to-five admin job in Enfield when she first uploaded a funny video from her childhood bedroom. It was 2006, and being featured on YouTube’s homepage was enough to get you millions of views, and to establish Bryony (AKA Paperlilies) as one of the year’s biggest vloggers.

“I remember getting my first 10,000 subscribers and imagining 10,000 people in a room,” she recalls. “Even at that point, it was so many more people than I’d ever expected.”

With her subscriber numbers climbing daily, Bryony took the plunge and moved out of her family home, living with a friend to work full-time as a YouTuber. Her income came from promoting brands in her videos and from Google AdSense, which offers certain content creators a cut of their video’s advertising revenue (YouTube notes that revenue generated for creators is and has always been core to its business and how the platform can remain free). YouTube even invited her in to answer developers’ questions on how vloggers were taking over the site.

At her peak, Bryony was making around £2,000 a month from deals with brands – a fraction of what today’s stars make but, for the time (and for free branded trips to LA), pretty damn good indeed. But, as more and more people entered the site (Zoella’s first vlog was 2009) and new platforms launched (oh hi, Instagram), competition for eyeballs got tougher. Bryony, Charlie and those like them were suddenly, and unwittingly, battling to cut through the noise.

KEEPING IT FRESH
The problem with creating something new is that people start to expect it. They crave it. They want it straight away. And when that “newness” involves real people – with real lives, problems, anxieties and hang-ups – that can be tough. Watching their viewer numbers slowly fall, Charlie and Bryony found the race to create new and exciting content increasingly difficult at the exact same time that more and more creators were entering the marketplace. They both began to realise that when you monetise your hobby and downtime there’s no such thing as a day off.

Despite being flown around the world by brands and seeing huge success on her channel, in 2011 Bryony was 28 years old and craving the stability of a normal job. “I didn’t know if I was going to get another brand deal or if people would stop watching my videos. It’s so reliant on coming up with good ideas – and if you’re the face of it, you’re going [to be critiqued].” She cites YouTubers who’ve avoided this personal level of scrutiny, crediting Colleen Ballinger for creating a character persona, MirandaSings, which gave her a valuable distinction between Colleen the human being and Miranda the famous YouTuber. I get the feeling that Bryony wishes she had done the same. “When your whole channel is based on your own personality, any criticism feels like someone clawing at your soul. But if you create a completely separate character, even if it’s still your face, you can avoid that personal level of scrutiny.

“It’s all tied up in your own self-worth. The appeal of YouTubers, generally, is that they’re real people,” Bryony continues. She remembers starting to edit her behaviour in real-time while filming videos, forcing herself to appear more energised and alive in line with her YouTube persona but, she says, “I just didn’t feel very genuine any more.”

Charlie admits he was planning his contingency escape plan as early as 2013. Then over two million subscribers strong, he was noticing a slight drop-off in views, so began “building up a skillset” that would enable him to pursue jobs in the film industry should he suddenly need to, teaching himself to write film scripts. “I saw people dropping,” he says. “I did feel like I’d put all my eggs in this basket. I felt like I needed to be ready for the idea of the bubble bursting.”

What bothered Charlie was that, to keep his views up, he had to keep himself “on” – a constant pressure to keep “creating” at all costs. This vicious cycle sent him into depressive periods where he was “physically unable” to make videos. “Between 2010 and 2012, when I was at my most popular on YouTube, was also when I experienced my first bout of burnout and intense depression from working myself so hard and chasing that popularity,” he explains. “You feel trapped by a system of your own making.” Charlie revealed in a video that he eventually saw a doctor and was diagnosed with anxiety and depression in 2016 – though he suspects he’d been depressed for almost 10 years. He started taking medication and saw a therapist.

He tried one more time, creating what he describes as a “last-ditch attempt” franchise that involved his persona a lot less. But it didn’t take off. In fact, his views dwindled further. Eventually he filmed his last-ever video – shutting his laptop for good 18 months ago.

ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT
“Are you TheHill88?” It was the question Caitlin dreaded most, as she tried her best to smile at customers on the tills of Target – a budget clothes and homeware store in Brisbane, Australia. “It was always awkward. I’d be standing there in my uniform with no make-up on… but it’s a humbling experience.” She was 23 and, having abandoned her YouTube career just months earlier in 2011 to embark on a university degree in Theatre, she was now paying the bills by working in shops and waitressing.

Just a few years previously, aged 18, Caitlin had been Australia’s number-one YouTuber. Overnight, a comedy battle-rap she’d filmed in response to another YouTuber blew up, reaching over four million views. “My inbox just broke,” recalls Caitlin. Her parents were blissfully unaware until TV shows started calling the house for interviews. Realising that YouTube was something she could make money from full-time, Caitlin ditched her original dream of going to university, instead choosing to work on the now-defunct New York-based company HitViews, connecting YouTubers to brands, while making her own videos. By 2008, her channel had a cumulative view count of 17 million, making her enough money to live, but not enough to splash out.

But, alongside hundreds of comments saying “I want to be like you”, there were cruel ones too: sexual comments, strangers wanting to “destroy” her and trolls in Scream masks threatening to kill her in her own home. Caitlin couldn’t help but spend hours reading them, zoning in on the worst. “It’s no good trying to carve a career in something that actually causes you pain and suffering. We’re not all made to be stars,” she says. On top of that, she “felt tired of listening to myself talk. I’d rather play a character or help other people tell stories about characters. I didn’t want to be myself on YouTube,” says Caitlin. “I’d floated from opportunity to opportunity, until those opportunities ended and I got to go to university. I finally felt at home. And I realised: this is what I was meant to do six years ago.”

It also helped bring her peace. Getting recognised at work meant that Caitlin could hear nostalgic adults telling her they’d loved watching her as a teen. “It helps me appreciate what people saw in me, which I didn’t see at the time because I was caught up in negative comments.” Since then, she’s gone back to the platform, but as a hobby – she’s not trying to make it her job this time. Charlie feels the same, now working as a screenwriter he’s grateful to be behind the camera, rather than in front of it.

Bryony’s channel fizzled in 2012, and she found a job in social media branding strategy, something she acknowledges she may not have done had it not been for YouTube. And while she doesn’t regret a single part of her former career, she does sometimes worry about what else she could have achieved during those years. “Many people my age have bought houses and are further on in life. And that’s because I spent the best part of a decade on a different path.” Still, she feels it was worth it. “Maybe I’m slightly behind the curve in some of the other stuff. But how many people have had the chance to live that life? I still feel really privileged.”

THE NEXT GENERATION
After speaking with the YouTubers of the Noughties, I can’t help but look back at my failed vlogging attempts as a bullet dodged. All the people I spoke to were glad they did it, but felt the transience of that fame. It seems the YouTubers of old weren’t primed for their careers to be sustainable – financially, mentally or emotionally. For them, “there wasn’t a road map for long-term success”, Caitlin explains.

Now, research* has found that almost half of millennials plan to change jobs after just two years, and we can view the first YouTubers as early examples of the decline of the “job for life” ideology – something we now see everywhere as the gig and portfolio-career economies continue to evolve. However, like the first bankrupted dotcom millionaires, or pop’s one-hit wonders, the original YouTubers found out the hard way that sometimes the brighter your star burns early on, the more quickly it expires.

On the flip side, these internet stars almost certainly paved the way for today’s YouTubers to bank better deals, and agents to protect them. And, with kids as young as seven creating content, and TikTok making internet fame even easier, the need for that protection has, perhaps, never been greater.

YouTube was contacted for comment on the points raised but did not respond before this magazine went to press.

thank you thank you THANK YOU for this!!! it's genuinely so appreciated! i was looking for a way to read this.

it's a fascinating read, because, while we know and love bryony, charlie was definitely one of my favorite youtubers for a time. it's odd to read through his POV of old videos that feel like they came out yesterday. 2013 was 7 years ago and that blows my mind. so much has changed.

i'm most interested in bryony's take on a youtuber's personality being their brand, in the context of dan and phil. i know she's definitely speaking for herself, but given their close friendship, i can't help but assume they feel the exact same way. in particular, this bit:

“It’s all tied up in your own self-worth. The appeal of YouTubers, generally, is that they’re real people,” Bryony continues. She remembers starting to edit her behaviour in real-time while filming videos, forcing herself to appear more energised and alive in line with her YouTube persona but, she says, “I just didn’t feel very genuine any more.”

i completely see that in how and why dan and phil have stepped away from who they've been on yt. their "duoness" (for lack of a better word) brands their relationship and it's just not genuine. and they're certainly not gonna put the real thing on youtube.

anyway. great read. thank you a billion again for posting!!

Yes thank you Megancita! Very helpful insight rizzo.

“When your whole channel is based on your own personality, any criticism feels like someone clawing at your soul.”

Yeah...

[alittledizzy]

PHIL LIVES

[Phantasy]

I follow Bryony on Insta and she posted about being interviewed in the June 2020 Cosmopolitan UK magazine for an article about former YouTubers. I was interested, so I tracked down the article and am posting the text below, in case anyone else wants to read it.

What happens when your YouTube spotlight fades?
Fifteen years since YouTube began, Emily Gulla tracks down some of the platform’s original superstars. Her question? What happens when the camera stops rolling?

My very first video was about marshmallows.

The year was 2011. JLS were number one in the charts, skater skirts were all anyone wore and Robert Pattinson’s face shone down from my bedroom wall as I stuffed gelatine-based snacks into my mouth. I was a 12-year-old wannabe vlogger, convinced that the path to fame and fortune lay in marshmallows, or cinnamon or fireballs – or whatever the ridiculous internet trend of the moment was.

My spirit guide, career hero and (if I’m honest) pre-teen crush was called Charlie McDonnell. He was just like me. He made videos about tea and GCSE results from his bedroom, but the difference was he was getting rich from every single one. Just like all the kids in my year at school, I was obsessed with this new breed of star: part-boyband frontman, part-children’s TV presenter, part-boy-next-door and 100% compulsive viewing. But Charlie wasn’t in One Direction or The Wanted; he wasn’t on MTV or T4. He was a star on a new platform, one that reached into people’s bedrooms and captivated a generation: YouTube.

Unsurprisingly, my vlogging career didn’t quite take off. The height of my success was when I got 15,000 views on a video about The Hunger Games (now hidden where it belongs – on private mode). Charlie, on the other hand, joined a cluster of YouTube’s early stars. The same year that I uploaded my first video (2011), he became the first British person on the platform to reach one million subscribers – which won him the Gold Play Button plaque (since awarded to the likes of Alfie Deyes and Joe Sugg).

While the lives of huge stars like Zoella and PewDiePie loom large on our screens, as I flick, cringing, through the remnants of my brief foray into their world, all I can think is: what happened to the ones who came first?

THE PIONEERS
Charlie’s voice is so familiar that I have to remind myself we’ve actually never met. He’s phoning from Toronto, where he now lives, and it’s hard not to call him “Charlieissocoollike” – the moniker he was known by for over a decade. Back in 2007, aged just 16, he’d started making YouTube videos – goofy ramblings to camera filmed on a webcam “for fun – just to waste time, basically”. It was a hobby, and never his main ambition – he wanted to be a graphic designer. But by age 19, he’d moved to London, fully funding himself with his YouTube earnings. “Paying my rent was the main tipping point for me. I thought, ‘This is actually my job now; it’s sustaining me,’” he recalls. Charlie put his plans to study design at university on pause to focus on his burgeoning online career – and he reigned supreme as the poster-boy for British YouTube. We’re used to stories like this now, but back then this was a new, unprecedented phenomenon. It was seen as risky for him to abandon all future paths to focus on just this, but he was earning thousands of pounds a month – why wouldn’t he?

For Bryony Matthewman, now 36, it was a comedy sketch that changed the course of her life. Aged just 23, she was a graphic-design graduate working a nine-to-five admin job in Enfield when she first uploaded a funny video from her childhood bedroom. It was 2006, and being featured on YouTube’s homepage was enough to get you millions of views, and to establish Bryony (AKA Paperlilies) as one of the year’s biggest vloggers.

“I remember getting my first 10,000 subscribers and imagining 10,000 people in a room,” she recalls. “Even at that point, it was so many more people than I’d ever expected.”

With her subscriber numbers climbing daily, Bryony took the plunge and moved out of her family home, living with a friend to work full-time as a YouTuber. Her income came from promoting brands in her videos and from Google AdSense, which offers certain content creators a cut of their video’s advertising revenue (YouTube notes that revenue generated for creators is and has always been core to its business and how the platform can remain free). YouTube even invited her in to answer developers’ questions on how vloggers were taking over the site.

At her peak, Bryony was making around £2,000 a month from deals with brands – a fraction of what today’s stars make but, for the time (and for free branded trips to LA), pretty damn good indeed. But, as more and more people entered the site (Zoella’s first vlog was 2009) and new platforms launched (oh hi, Instagram), competition for eyeballs got tougher. Bryony, Charlie and those like them were suddenly, and unwittingly, battling to cut through the noise.

KEEPING IT FRESH
The problem with creating something new is that people start to expect it. They crave it. They want it straight away. And when that “newness” involves real people – with real lives, problems, anxieties and hang-ups – that can be tough. Watching their viewer numbers slowly fall, Charlie and Bryony found the race to create new and exciting content increasingly difficult at the exact same time that more and more creators were entering the marketplace. They both began to realise that when you monetise your hobby and downtime there’s no such thing as a day off.

Despite being flown around the world by brands and seeing huge success on her channel, in 2011 Bryony was 28 years old and craving the stability of a normal job. “I didn’t know if I was going to get another brand deal or if people would stop watching my videos. It’s so reliant on coming up with good ideas – and if you’re the face of it, you’re going [to be critiqued].” She cites YouTubers who’ve avoided this personal level of scrutiny, crediting Colleen Ballinger for creating a character persona, MirandaSings, which gave her a valuable distinction between Colleen the human being and Miranda the famous YouTuber. I get the feeling that Bryony wishes she had done the same. “When your whole channel is based on your own personality, any criticism feels like someone clawing at your soul. But if you create a completely separate character, even if it’s still your face, you can avoid that personal level of scrutiny.

“It’s all tied up in your own self-worth. The appeal of YouTubers, generally, is that they’re real people,” Bryony continues. She remembers starting to edit her behaviour in real-time while filming videos, forcing herself to appear more energised and alive in line with her YouTube persona but, she says, “I just didn’t feel very genuine any more.”

Charlie admits he was planning his contingency escape plan as early as 2013. Then over two million subscribers strong, he was noticing a slight drop-off in views, so began “building up a skillset” that would enable him to pursue jobs in the film industry should he suddenly need to, teaching himself to write film scripts. “I saw people dropping,” he says. “I did feel like I’d put all my eggs in this basket. I felt like I needed to be ready for the idea of the bubble bursting.”

What bothered Charlie was that, to keep his views up, he had to keep himself “on” – a constant pressure to keep “creating” at all costs. This vicious cycle sent him into depressive periods where he was “physically unable” to make videos. “Between 2010 and 2012, when I was at my most popular on YouTube, was also when I experienced my first bout of burnout and intense depression from working myself so hard and chasing that popularity,” he explains. “You feel trapped by a system of your own making.” Charlie revealed in a video that he eventually saw a doctor and was diagnosed with anxiety and depression in 2016 – though he suspects he’d been depressed for almost 10 years. He started taking medication and saw a therapist.

He tried one more time, creating what he describes as a “last-ditch attempt” franchise that involved his persona a lot less. But it didn’t take off. In fact, his views dwindled further. Eventually he filmed his last-ever video – shutting his laptop for good 18 months ago.

ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT
“Are you TheHill88?” It was the question Caitlin dreaded most, as she tried her best to smile at customers on the tills of Target – a budget clothes and homeware store in Brisbane, Australia. “It was always awkward. I’d be standing there in my uniform with no make-up on… but it’s a humbling experience.” She was 23 and, having abandoned her YouTube career just months earlier in 2011 to embark on a university degree in Theatre, she was now paying the bills by working in shops and waitressing.

Just a few years previously, aged 18, Caitlin had been Australia’s number-one YouTuber. Overnight, a comedy battle-rap she’d filmed in response to another YouTuber blew up, reaching over four million views. “My inbox just broke,” recalls Caitlin. Her parents were blissfully unaware until TV shows started calling the house for interviews. Realising that YouTube was something she could make money from full-time, Caitlin ditched her original dream of going to university, instead choosing to work on the now-defunct New York-based company HitViews, connecting YouTubers to brands, while making her own videos. By 2008, her channel had a cumulative view count of 17 million, making her enough money to live, but not enough to splash out.

But, alongside hundreds of comments saying “I want to be like you”, there were cruel ones too: sexual comments, strangers wanting to “destroy” her and trolls in Scream masks threatening to kill her in her own home. Caitlin couldn’t help but spend hours reading them, zoning in on the worst. “It’s no good trying to carve a career in something that actually causes you pain and suffering. We’re not all made to be stars,” she says. On top of that, she “felt tired of listening to myself talk. I’d rather play a character or help other people tell stories about characters. I didn’t want to be myself on YouTube,” says Caitlin. “I’d floated from opportunity to opportunity, until those opportunities ended and I got to go to university. I finally felt at home. And I realised: this is what I was meant to do six years ago.”

It also helped bring her peace. Getting recognised at work meant that Caitlin could hear nostalgic adults telling her they’d loved watching her as a teen. “It helps me appreciate what people saw in me, which I didn’t see at the time because I was caught up in negative comments.” Since then, she’s gone back to the platform, but as a hobby – she’s not trying to make it her job this time. Charlie feels the same, now working as a screenwriter he’s grateful to be behind the camera, rather than in front of it.

Bryony’s channel fizzled in 2012, and she found a job in social media branding strategy, something she acknowledges she may not have done had it not been for YouTube. And while she doesn’t regret a single part of her former career, she does sometimes worry about what else she could have achieved during those years. “Many people my age have bought houses and are further on in life. And that’s because I spent the best part of a decade on a different path.” Still, she feels it was worth it. “Maybe I’m slightly behind the curve in some of the other stuff. But how many people have had the chance to live that life? I still feel really privileged.”

THE NEXT GENERATION
After speaking with the YouTubers of the Noughties, I can’t help but look back at my failed vlogging attempts as a bullet dodged. All the people I spoke to were glad they did it, but felt the transience of that fame. It seems the YouTubers of old weren’t primed for their careers to be sustainable – financially, mentally or emotionally. For them, “there wasn’t a road map for long-term success”, Caitlin explains.

Now, research* has found that almost half of millennials plan to change jobs after just two years, and we can view the first YouTubers as early examples of the decline of the “job for life” ideology – something we now see everywhere as the gig and portfolio-career economies continue to evolve. However, like the first bankrupted dotcom millionaires, or pop’s one-hit wonders, the original YouTubers found out the hard way that sometimes the brighter your star burns early on, the more quickly it expires.

On the flip side, these internet stars almost certainly paved the way for today’s YouTubers to bank better deals, and agents to protect them. And, with kids as young as seven creating content, and TikTok making internet fame even easier, the need for that protection has, perhaps, never been greater.

YouTube was contacted for comment on the points raised but did not respond before this magazine went to press.

thank you thank you THANK YOU for this!!! it's genuinely so appreciated! i was looking for a way to read this.

it's a fascinating read, because, while we know and love bryony, charlie was definitely one of my favorite youtubers for a time. it's odd to read through his POV of old videos that feel like they came out yesterday. 2013 was 7 years ago and that blows my mind. so much has changed.

i'm most interested in bryony's take on a youtuber's personality being their brand, in the context of dan and phil. i know she's definitely speaking for herself, but given their close friendship, i can't help but assume they feel the exact same way. in particular, this bit:

“It’s all tied up in your own self-worth. The appeal of YouTubers, generally, is that they’re real people,” Bryony continues. She remembers starting to edit her behaviour in real-time while filming videos, forcing herself to appear more energised and alive in line with her YouTube persona but, she says, “I just didn’t feel very genuine any more.”

i completely see that in how and why dan and phil have stepped away from who they've been on yt. their "duoness" (for lack of a better word) brands their relationship and it's just not genuine. and they're certainly not gonna put the real thing on youtube.

anyway. great read. thank you a billion again for posting!!

That’s sort of the frustrating thing though as an audience member—will we never see the authentic portrayal of their relationship? Were the 10 years of D&P as we knew and saw them through persona and social media different from “real life” Dan and Phil in any significant way?

I totally get not wanting to brand or sell out the relationship aspect and lose sight of the creators, but it makes me wonder if we were treated to such an inauthentic portrayal of their relationship before that they don’t want to serve that fiction anymore and simply opt not to show anything because we wouldn’t even recognize it? That’s probably a stretch, but why is there is such a hard line drawn to pre-BIG and everything after?

[Megancita75]

I was reading something the other day that made me think of DnP, which was the obituary for the American comedian and actor Jerry Stiller (and the actor Ben Stiller's father). He and his wife, Anne Meara, were married for 61 years and for about 10 of those years, between 1960 and 1970, they had a hugely popular act as a comedy team, appearing on all kinds of variety television shows. But in 1970 they deliberately broke up their act, at the peak of its popularity. This is what they had to say about it:

“I love Anne, but if I had depended on her in my professional life, I would have lost her as a wife,” Mr. Stiller told People in 1977.

Meara ... told the magazine, “I didn’t know where the act ended and our marriage began.”

The good news is that after taking a break from working together, they eventually worked together again, just in different ways. And they both had long and successful individual careers as actors and writers.

Anyway, that made me start thinking about other partnerships that are both professional and romantic, and whether most of those also end up with the couple deliberately choosing not to work together anymore.

[madzilla84]

I was thinking about this earlier, weirdly - I’ve seen a lot of people say they made a specific decision to not be seen on camera together after BIG, or that there was a specific decision made in that regard for the good of their relationship, but I’ve not always believed that’s the case (or perhaps, I should say, if it was the main motivator, but a nice side-effect maybe). It does seem like that sometimes, especially alongside their step back from social media (especially Dan), but I still don’t think that’s the main reason.

I feel like they did know at the time that II/the gaming channel hiatus would be the end of them working together in that sort of full-time way - perhaps not forever, but for a good while, because they had other things they wanted to do individually (as mentioned in the early II shows, and by Phil in his Draw My Life 2). I’ve always believed that what they said in late 2018 weren’t lies *at the time*, but that things changed over time - I think they took their break from the gaming channel, Dan worked on BIG and other projects, Phil worked on other projects alongside YouTube, and I think they - probably just didn’t want to re-introduce the rigour of making vids for DAPG among the new things they were doing that they presumably were/are passionate about, and that’s continued to this day. But I don’t think they’ve necessarily put a moratorium on ever working together again, I just don’t think they have a particular thing they want to do together at the moment. I do admit I find it a little strange that Dan never appears in Phil’s vids any more, but on the other hand, he’s just not around online *at all* any more so that’s just part of it, presumably. Whatever ‘it’ is.

It does break my heart that outside of those merch Christmas messages and the occasional Insta story, we haven’t actually seen them together on camera in nearly 18 months, but it is what it is.

But then again, there are things like the fact they specifically asked FBE and YouTube to appear separately, and you have to wonder … but until and unless they choose to talk about it (unlikely), we can only theorise.

tl;dr - I think they chose to work on things separately not solely because they didn’t want to be a double act any more, but just because they just wanted to do different things as 2018 came to a close.

Obviously as always, this is all conjecture.

[Amiaw]

I don’t mind them doing separate things but I haven’t loved them pretending not to know each other online and that’s what gets to me the most. Phil isn’t as bad about it because we’d get mentions in liveshows or even insta stories but on top of being largely absent Dan has most people on twitter believing he lives alone

[madzilla84]

I don’t mind them doing separate things but I haven’t loved them pretending not to know each other online and that’s what gets to me the most. Phil isn’t as bad about it because we’d get mentions in liveshows or even insta stories but on top of being largely absent Dan has most people on twitter believing he lives alone

Actually yeah, you're right; I didn't cover that in my post because I was mostly thinking about videos/projects but yes, that's the thing that bothers me the most *by far* in this whole thing, and the part I find much harder to understand. By the end of liveshows even Phil wasn't really mentioning him any more. I *did* wonder if it was deliberate or if I was just reading too much into it...

[Birdie]

Is Goodreads the only source for this book or is there an actual press release or something on the publisher's site as well? Because Goodreads usually isn't the very first place a book would be announced. Unless the person who put it into GR's database is someone actually working on the book in some capacity and then it would be highly unprofessional for them to just add it to Goodreads before there's an actual announcement from the publisher or author. Tl;dr: I'm sceptical about this being real.

Thanks for posting that interview with Bryony. I used to watch her a bit way back when and still follow her on Twitter, it was cool to read her thoughts on Youtube and her days as a Youtuber.

[Phanshy]

That’s sort of the frustrating thing though as an audience member—will we never see the authentic portrayal of their relationship? Were the 10 years of D&P as we knew and saw them through persona and social media different from “real life” Dan and Phil in any significant way?

I totally get not wanting to brand or sell out the relationship aspect and lose sight of the creators, but it makes me wonder if we were treated to such an inauthentic portrayal of their relationship before that they don’t want to serve that fiction anymore and simply opt not to show anything because we wouldn’t even recognize it? That’s probably a stretch, but why is there is such a hard line drawn to pre-BIG and everything after?

I don't think they've shut 99% of joint content down because what they shared before was inauthentic although I'm sure a lot was played up for the camera like most youtubers and probably a lot edited out for the sake of not outing themselves. I think maybe we underestimated the toll the analysing of their relationship took on them when they clearly weren't ready for it to be public knowledge. Dan particularly seemed very sensitive/defensive to comments about him "picking" on Phil in the gaming videos I think that would be even more difficult now. I think we all saw the toll the analysing took in 2012 and even though they seemed to be a lot more comfortable 2016-2018 they still had the "just friends" thing as a shield even if it seemed obvious to a lot of us.

When I imagined what it would be like if they came out I never thought it would be like this, I didn't expect them to really do couple type videos or talk about their relationship in any great details because that's not who they are I guess I thought it would be like 2018, because that's when they seemed most open and comfortable and that after the initial wave of excitement and happiness died down it would just continue, I guess I never really took in to account how much Dan wanted to pull back from social media. I have come to accept that we will probably never see anything remotely like that time again and its hard because while they've decided to let go of it most of us are still holding on to it so tightly that a voice behind the camera or a selfie with no one in between them causes a mini meltdown, and a ridiculous amount of happiness followed by waves of sadness and longing for what we had.

This isn't a criticism of that decision although the communication of it I will always be critical of. I completely understand that they may have needed to do it for their own happiness and I would never want them to do things that have a negative effect on them or their relationship I've always been more invested in them as people than as creators, but I'm still sad that this is how it's turned out.

[obsessivelymoody]

Is Goodreads the only source for this book or is there an actual press release or something on the publisher's site as well? Because Goodreads usually isn't the very first place a book would be announced. Unless the person who put it into GR's database is someone actually working on the book in some capacity and then it would be highly unprofessional for them to just add it to Goodreads before there's an actual announcement from the publisher or author. Tl;dr: I'm sceptical about this being real.

Nothing on the publisher's site, or anywhere else. Which puts me in the same boat as you on skeptics, but also increases my curiosity a lot, just from knowing Dan and Phil are never exactly conventional.

[alittledizzy]

Is Goodreads the only source for this book or is there an actual press release or something on the publisher's site as well? Because Goodreads usually isn't the very first place a book would be announced. Unless the person who put it into GR's database is someone actually working on the book in some capacity and then it would be highly unprofessional for them to just add it to Goodreads before there's an actual announcement from the publisher or author. Tl;dr: I'm sceptical about this being real.

Nothing on the publisher's site, or anywhere else. Which puts me in the same boat as you on skeptics, but also increases my curiosity a lot, just from knowing Dan and Phil are never exactly conventional.

The fact that their last book also leaked in a very similar way makes me not want to count that as too much of a strike. DAPGO was listed on an Asian Amazon listing before they or the publishing company ever announced it.

[alittledizzy]

A throwback from Louise - Dan liked it but hasn't responded.

[Birdie]

Is Goodreads the only source for this book or is there an actual press release or something on the publisher's site as well? Because Goodreads usually isn't the very first place a book would be announced. Unless the person who put it into GR's database is someone actually working on the book in some capacity and then it would be highly unprofessional for them to just add it to Goodreads before there's an actual announcement from the publisher or author. Tl;dr: I'm sceptical about this being real.

Nothing on the publisher's site, or anywhere else. Which puts me in the same boat as you on skeptics, but also increases my curiosity a lot, just from knowing Dan and Phil are never exactly conventional.

The fact that their last book also leaked in a very similar way makes me not want to count that as too much of a strike. DAPGO was listed on an Asian Amazon listing before they or the publishing company ever announced it.

Amazon is different though because Amazon is a retailer and was therefore notified that the book exists in advance by the publisher. They just put up the listing before they were officially allowed to (happens all the time). Goodreads is just social media for books, they don't get notified of new releases in advance like retailers do. So if this is real, the person who first added it to the Goodreads database (anyone with a GR account can do that btw) would have to be someone in some way involved with this book or in a position where they would know about it before it's officially announced. So it could be real if someone working on it leaked it but it's just weird.

Also it was deleted once before it reappeared, right? So I guess a GR moderator spotted it, found no announcement or source for it being real as well and deleted it. Anyways, I'm curious to see where this goes because it could be real of course, GR would just be a weird place to leak it. But since it has a publisher listed and everything it also seems a little too detailed to be fake or a hoax as well so I'm just puzzled.

[rizzo]

living for the graying quiff.

[Catallena]

Finally a new video!

Another Animal Crossing video wasn't really what I wanted, but beggars can't be choosers. I do hope we get some more variety in content soon though. In the end, Phil playing this game is still quite nice and entertaining.

Him trying to catch a betta was funny. Poor Phil, he just wants his virtual Norman. Thinking he caught it when it was actually a guppy was truly heartbreaking.

Serial Killer Egbert was another highlight, leave it to Phil to give at least one villager a sinister backstory.

And there were some joint content crumbs! Love to see it.

[alien]

that video has such chaotic energy and i love his editing so much. i also love the longer quiff. it's so endearing lol

dan naming his island danando's lol

[obsessivelymoody]

Phil's way of playing animal crossing stresses me out so much lmao. But the video was very fun! I missed his face and getting to hang with him like this Though the contacts at the start of the video were Not Great, I was so weirded out lmao. Blue eyes truly suit him the best!

Also the mention of Dan made me emotional due to my fragile mental state rn lol. I like to think about deps and Bryony having animal crossing parties now, sounds fun :')

[alittledizzy]

I'm slightly disappointed in another AC video but also I feel like maybe it's just the quarantine slump hitting Phil. In the past week I've seen it with multiple other youtubers/people I know that are full on quarantining - it's like past the point where things feel urgent (even if they still are, it's a perception thing) and now it's dulled into just... this is daily life, making kind of a maudlin burnout happen.

Am I just talking about me? Maybe I'm just talking about me.

Anyway, I'm glad he made something, and if a low effort fun to make video is what he felt up to then I'm all about it. I mean, I've already watched it twice.

[Phanshy]

I wasn't really looking forward to the video but I really enjoyed I needed a laugh.

[bluecaterpillar]

every time phil announces through his youtube community posts that he's doing another animal crossing video i sigh because i have never owned or played any of the animal crossing games and i'm not particularly interested in them. then a few days later he uploads a genuinely enjoyable and funny video which makes me instantly forget my scepticism. highlights for me this time included hazel's laughter exercise, egbert the slightly-serial-killer-esque chicken, the editing every time phil failed to catch a betta fish, the shoutouts to dan and bryony, and his joy at buying the godzilla statue.

[rizzo]

I'm definitely in the camp of "not really interested in AC", but I also... didn't love the video. I appreciate seeing it. I appreciated the references to Bryony and Dan, but I definitely felt the urge to fast forward a couple of times. And overall, the best bit for me was when he wore the weird contacts.

I understand it though. I fully get the slump alittledizzy mentioned, so I can't really fault him at all for it.

I just mostly feel meh and selfishly want Phil to make a more Phil-esque video instead of another AC. Also, tbh... Phil gaming without Dan still kinda pulls at my heartstrings in a painful way.

[Catallena]

Oh yeah this video wasn't a love for me either. It kinda seemed unnecessary after having already done two videos on it. Even though there's a lot of hype around it now, it doesn't seem like the most entertaining game to watch someone else play anyway. I enjoyed the video because it's Phil being wonderful, but it was one of the more inspirationless (is that a word?) videos he has done in a while. I don't blame him though, no one should be expected to deliver their best work during these times.

But I also can't help but wonder how much of the 'procrastinating on editing' was him being frustrated with the video not being his best.