When many of YouTube’s earliest stars describe the nascent years of the video platform, founded in 2005, they paint a picture of a close-knit community of creative-minded young people who, separately but simultaneously, fostered an extraordinary connection to audiences.
This was before the rise of Instagram and TikTok, a window when YouTube stood out among emerging video-sharing platforms for features like comments and subscriber alerts, which helped cultivate followings around user-generated content.
Despite a relentlessly changing digital landscape, YouTube has prevailed as the platform of choice for many creators because it simply offers more opportunities for them to earn money.
We talked to four who came aboard early and were among its first generation of major stars, long before there was any promise of a YouTube paycheck. They each talked about how they found success and how their relationships to YouTube changed as a result. Their accounts provide a glimpse into the platform’s past and a few warnings about creating there now.
MatPat
“It’s dangerous to build a business on someone else’s land.”
When Matthew Patrick, better known as MatPat, first started using YouTube over 15 years ago, it was “purely a means of getting employed,” he said. He first posted videos of himself acting onstage in modest productions to help him get noticed for theater work (he graduated from Duke with a double major in theater and neuroscience), then built a video portfolio to share with companies he hoped to work for like Google, Facebook or another media agency.
He landed at Big Frame as a data analyst working to improve the performance of others’ YouTube channels, lessons he’d apply to his own.
Soon, YouTube became the site for another experiment: The Game Theorists channel, where Matthew would take viewers on explanatory deep dives into video games. He produced the show with his creative and romantic partner who’d become his wife, Stephanie Patrick. It became the cornerstone of a YouTube empire that included spinoffs like Film Theorists and Style Theorists.
Matthew hosted all of it. Together, the Patricks’ channels have racked up over 12 billion views and are followed by over 45 million people.
But early on, with no track record of people having a career on YouTube, they had zero expectations of money or fame. The platform, they figured, could vanish overnight if the company folded, was regulated out of existence or just changed direction entirely. “It’s dangerous to build a business on someone else’s land,” Matthew, now 39, said. “We had full-time jobs elsewhere.”
The Patricks didn’t quit their day jobs, they said, until they hit three million subscribers, ahead of the debut of The Film Theorists in 2015. But even with dependable revenue, it was tough to convince writers and researchers to take the full-time roles they offered, despite coming with a salary, a 401(k) and health insurance. Freelancers still held out hope to, as the couple put it, “be a staff writer on the next ‘S.N.L.’ or ‘Game of Thrones.’”
Matthew retired as the face of the Theorists channels in 2024 in part to focus on family. The couple now advises the Creator Economy Caucus, a bipartisan policy-making effort introduced last June that educates lawmakers on the needs and challenges of what has become, by some estimates, a $250 billion industry.
“This is a legitimate form of production, a legitimate form of entertainment that is happening now at the scale of traditional media,” Matthew said. “And there’s not even a way to list it on your census or on your taxes.”
Miranda Sings
“I thought of it as, ‘This is my community. These are my friends. We’re all on the same level.’ That wasn’t true.”
Colleen Ballinger was 21 in 2008 when she began posting as Miranda Sings, an outrageously awful, overconfident aspiring entertainer and cringe-comedy masterwork. Her actual personality, she says, was always far from her online persona. “As someone who’s a nonconfrontational people pleaser, this is probably the worst industry that I could be in,” Ballinger, now 39, said.
On YouTube, where she gained tens of millions of followers, Miranda Sings became known for sassy catchphrases like “Haters back off!,” which she’d shout at naysayers, her lips ringed in her signature smeared red lipstick. In 2016, that motto became the title of her Netflix original series. The character even got her own episode of the Jerry Seinfeld show “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.” By 2019, Ballinger — not Miranda — was appearing on Broadway, a lifelong dream for her, a high school theater kid who had studied vocal performance in college.
As Miranda Sings, and under related accounts like PsychoSoprano, much of her life was still lived online. A video of her 2015 wedding to the YouTube personality Joshua Evans racked up millions of views, as did a video about their 2016 divorce. (Both have since been deleted.)
Then in 2020, as many top YouTubers came under intense scrutiny for questionable earlier content, Ballinger began facing accusations of inappropriate behavior with fans. Her sending unworn undergarments to a 17-year-old member of her fan group who’d requested them as part of a livestream giveaway was a particular flashpoint. Critics combed through volumes of her videos, pointing out jokes that treaded in racial stereotypes as well as comments that were considered body-shaming. The allegations spurred plenty of online drama but didn’t result in any legal repercussions.
Ballinger posted an apology vlog in 2020, in which she said she “should have never sent” the underwear, adding, “I am not a monster, I am not a groomer.” She apologized again for past behavior in 2023, in a song with ukulele accompaniment deriding misinformation and “the toxic gossip train” of online fandoms. She stepped away from posting to the Miranda Sings account.
“I never thought of myself as a celebrity or someone in a position of power,” Ballinger said of the parasocial relationships with her fans. “I thought of it as, ‘This is my community. These are my friends. We’re all on the same level.’ That wasn’t true. I had to fall flat on my face to wake up and go, ‘Oh, this is different than what I thought it was.’”
The disconnect was partially a result of the solitude required when she was regularly posting 13 videos a week herself, spending most waking hours tethered to her computer, “a hermit crab in my own home,” she said.
“There’s a lot things that all of us were saying and doing that might have been acceptable and normal behavior back then, that certainly now we’re all like, ‘Oh my god, that’s insane that that was normal,’” she said.
That cultural shift and the blowback she faced has significantly altered how Ballinger, now remarried and a mother of three, posts today. She maintains a presence on Colleen Vlogs (2.9 million subscribers), where Miranda is rarely mentioned. These days, her videos center her family, her chickens, and the push and pull of being online.
“Everything has changed drastically,” she said. “I’m much more careful with my words and with what I put out there because I don’t want to hurt anyone, I don’t want to offend anyone, and I want to be doing the right thing. That has definitely stifled my creativity and my comedy, but necessarily so.”
Ballinger has also returned to live performance (she announced a four-city tour in March). “I see people face to face. I get to perform and have these meet and greets and look at human beings in their eyes and talk to them.”
Grace Helbig
“I don’t know where the audience is.”
It was around 2015 that the comedian Grace Helbig realized she might really be famous. YouTube had started throwing ad dollars behind some of its biggest creators, using their faces on billboards and other campaigns. Helbig’s friends in New York City sent her photos of subway cars wallpapered with stills pulled from her channel. She noticed that they were on the train line she used to take to auditions. “It was a really bizarre full-circle moment,” she said, “and I think it also scared me.”
When Helbig began a YouTube vlog in 2007, it was mostly to stem her boredom while house-sitting. Her posts quickly led to a popular web series DailyGrace, which was owned by an early digital media company My Damn Channel. For years, she posted silly, cheeky content like “Tips for the Walk of Shame” and “Grace Will Teach You How to Dougie.”
As the show drew millions of views, Helbig began to wonder how much money she was leaving on the table by not owning her content outright. When she struck out on her own in 2014, fans followed. And within a couple of years her new series, It’s Grace, had nearly three million subscribers — around 500,000 more than DailyGrace at its peak. Opportunities in film and television rolled in, including her own E! talk show.
But Helbig’s rapidly expanding career took a toll. She said she was working around the clock, saying yes to everything and creating under extreme stress.
She recalled the early summits YouTube hosted for dozens of top creators, which were introduced in 2015: An invitation was a mark of validation. “The first couple years,” she said, “we were all just, ‘Yay! Yay!’ And then the third or fourth year, there started to be conversations dedicated to mental health because people were really spiraling in different ways without having language behind it.”
Helbig, now 40, said she also struggled with shifts that were happening around the platform. The camaraderie among peers waned as creators competed to outpace one another’s growth. YouTube kept tweaking its algorithm, the function that surfaces videos for users, in ways that were opaque and that transformed how a “win” was determined. Helbig, whose onscreen performance was largely a version of her real self, was also experiencing a cognitive dissonance she couldn’t quite name.
“I had such a tension of not being able to articulate that I didn’t recognize myself in videos,” she said.
In 2018, she posted a video titled “I’m taking a break,” prompted by the anxiety she experienced being her own studio. “It had to be higher quality, it had to be bigger concepts, it had to be a bigger production team, it had to be all of these things that just weren’t true to me,” she later explained. Her numbers had been dipping, and she’d turned to alcohol to numb her feelings of failure, she’s since said. When she returned a couple of months later, Helbig scaled back to posting a couple of times weekly.
In the years since, her posting frequency has varied based on what’s going on in her life. She began studies for a graduate degree in depth psychology — the study of how the unconscious can affect behavior — in 2020.
Her videos have dabbled in her lighter interests — testing out recipes, critiquing celebrity’s red carpet fashion — and more personal subjects like her treatment for breast cancer. She second-guessed whether she should share her diagnosis with viewers for fear that “people were going to criticize me and think that I’m doing it for attention,” but ultimately decided it would be worthwhile. The audience-building tactics that feed the algorithm have “always my biggest nemesis,” she said, a factor that has her worried about whether she can still find the magic of connection.
“I’m in a spot now where I don’t know exactly how to make content that I feel very fulfilled by, and I don’t know where the audience is,” she said. “I’m at a university versus a tiny liberal arts college where I started.”
WheezyWaiter
“If I’m going to shift to something I don’t want to do, I know that it’s not going to last.”
“Niching down,” or focusing on serving smaller loyal audiences, is the current buzzword among many YouTube creators after so many eras that rewarded virality and scale. It’s a path that Craig Benzine, or WheezyWaiter, leaned into well ahead of this moment.
Benzine, who lives in Wisconsin with his family and calls himself “a YouTuber’s YouTuber,” has posted over 1,700 videos since he first began vlogging in 2007 (starting with anecdotes about his life as an asthmatic restaurant server). Their range is stunningly algorithm-blind: a rock ’n’ roll edit of trying “Bad Parkour”; multiyear attempts at nailing a handstand; two minutes of suggestions for unique ways of cheering on a sports team.
“I never had like a viral hit; it was always just slow build of an audience,” said Benzine, 45, who has about 1.2 million YouTube followers. “I’ve never done the thing that it seems like you’re supposed to do.”
That goes for his actual content and the engagement-boosting digital chores that can zap the life out of creating (like cross-posting content across social platforms). There are no MrBeast-style payoffs to his videos, and even his big-bet effort — a feature-length documentary about Green Bay Packers fans in Tokyo that got a small theatrical release last year — has small-scale charm. “Dare to be pointless” is a guiding mantra.
Still, Benzine is acutely aware of platform shifts, including YouTube’s pivot from a subscriber to an algorithmic system, “which I ignored for five years,” he said in a 2022 post called “Why I Never Quit YouTube (yet)”. But, Benzine has explained, his posts still fulfill his primary creative impulse to edit video, rather than be an onscreen talent.
“If I’m going to shift to something I don’t want to do, I know that it’s not going to last,” he said. “I won’t be able to maintain it. You got to try to find that sweet spot of what you want and what the people want.”
Maya Salam is an editor and reporter, focusing primarily on pop culture across genres.
The post They Were YouTube’s First Stars. Here’s What They Wish They’d Known. appeared first on New York Times.
