Dwight Morrison was fresh out of college working at an Apple Store in 2017, grinding away at a side gig to sell clothes. A coworker let him in on a potential sales tactic: a network of popular Twitter accounts run by teens who helped each other reach audiences.
Morrison bought a couple accounts, hoping to boost business. One, imitating the popular Canadian singer and songwriter PartyNextDoor, fell flat. But another — a $300 Dragon Ball fan account called YaBoyRoshi — was a natural fit for the anime fan. It took off.
Today, Morrison is YaBoyRoshi, who along with his wife Sheera and best friend Lupasan are now among the most successful creators on Patreon with more than 26,000 subscribers. He hosts one of the most popular YouTube channels in the reaction genre, with 1 million subscribers and almost 900 million views.
Now Morrison and his group of friends, dubbed the TouchGrassTV collective, are among a wave of streamers and creatives using online fame to push fans to real-world, grassroots events like festivals and conventions, as creators try to build communities and break into other industries. Last month they brought their audiences together in real life for a new business venture, a music festival.
About 3,700 people attended the inaugural TouchGrass Music Fest at Orlando Amphitheater on Oct. 3, exceeding organizer expectations, Morrison said, with a solid, buzzy lineup that included JID, Aminé, Flo Milli, Tia Corine and — as fate would have it — the real PartyNextDoor as headliner.
“There aren’t a lot of independently owned, much less Black-owned festivals,” Morrison said. “Content creation has blessed us with the ability to own all aspects of our own event and not have to rely on anybody else. We can create exactly what we know our fans would want to be a part of without being a corporate event that’s soulless.”
The festival was a test of whether creators of their size could support the demands of a professional festival. Artist teams questioned whether the creators could deliver.
“Who are you? Why are you doing this? What kind of experience do you have doing this?” Morrison recalled agents asking. “We booked the venue, but had no idea of how to book artists or what goes into a festival. This last year has been the biggest learning period of my life.”
Answering those questions meant presenting their careers as pros in the freewheeling, decentralized world of streaming. Jasmine, a 31-year-old in Maryland and known as JazzyGuns, now boasts more than 625,000 subscribers on YouTube, where she plays video games. She once resisted seeking an audience at all, saying she’s an introverted, private person (she spoke on the condition that her surname not be published due to safety concerns).
Jasmine was working at the Children’s Place retail chain when her now-fiancé Dwayne suggested they make reaction content together. The pair already had viral success on the short-form video app Vine. For a few weeks, Jasmine resisted, but she figured it would be a fun way to spend time with her partner. Within a month, their channel took off.
Video games offered another opportunity for her. She played games often, but she saw few Black women like herself making content around it. Like other women online, she encountered people questioning her gaming credentials and she leaned into her visibility.
“I was looking at the space to see if anybody else does it and how they do it, and I saw AyChristene who looked like she’s having fun,” Jasmine said. “But then I realized there wasn’t anybody else that looked like me and her. So I was like, you know what, let’s increase the numbers … that we as Black women do play games too.”
Morrison and Jasmine met at Dream Con, the breakthrough Black-owned convention founded in 2018 by the RDCWorld comedy group. Touch Grass TV emerged from their friendship and their network, and Dream Con, where cosplayers met at the clubs for afterparties, inspired the idea of a festival. Music could bring those overlapping communities together.
Morrison used his old talents in networking with other creators to spread word, including RDCWorld and CalebCity.
“We had to prove ourselves through conversation with these agents,” he said. “We wanted to showcase a lot of the marketing we’ve done, using creators, our friends, to promote it, to showcase that it’s part of this ecosystem of content creators. It’s all part of a community and that’s who we’re building this for.”
It meant a lot of work. Morrison hired a friend more experienced with booking talent. On festival day, Jasmine oversaw artist hospitality, including a McDonald’s run for rapper Trippie Redd.
“Roshi called me and he didn’t even say hello or anything, he just said, ‘Two McChickens and a large fries,” Jasmine said. “My whole life at the festival was in the trailers, in the car and at Wal-Mart. I probably saw maybe 10 minutes of the performances.”
The festival is the latest among creators diversifying business to events and other media. RDCWorld built Dream Con as a Black-owned gathering, with a record 45,000 attendees this year, because they were constantly rejected in other games and anime conventions for not being a “good fit.” Gaming YouTuber Berleezy created the Dallas bash EEZYBALL, while food reviewer Keith Lee launched the food festival Familee Day. Meanwhile games and film YouTubers like Markiplier, Kane Parsons and Curry Barker expanded into filmmaking with hit horror films.
A creator’s road to success keeps changing, with YouTube in particularly making near-constant changes to discovery like last year’s retirement of the trending page. This forces creators to always adapt on how they reach and retain audiences. Asked about the changes, Morrison emphasized the inspiration of watching his peers build something that’s for culture, not algorithms.
“If you’re a veteran in the creator space, you’ve already learned how to navigate things to stay afloat. It’s more about understanding the value of ownership,” Morrison said. “I see people like [comedian] KevOnStage able to get all these shows produced and it puts the battery on everybody else’s back to say, ‘Oh, I can do that.’”
For Jasmine, expanding her work also means resisting pressure to become someone else. She worries other creators feel pressure to say or do outlandish things to gain attention via short, viral clips.
“Some people are just doing and saying things that they don’t even believe themselves, and they’re just putting it out there,” she said. “That’s a little sad because in a sense you’re no longer even promoting yourself, you’re promoting a caricature in order to keep up.”
She learned how contradictory an audience’s expectation could be when she started with Dwayne, and commenters complained she was either too quiet or too loud. That’s when she realized you shouldn’t change yourself to cater to a fickle online audience.
“Trends fade all the time,” she said. “If you’re just chasing trends, you will forever be chasing a version of you that does not exist instead of being the one that does.”
For Morrison, that means staying true to the connections he’s built with other creators and the online communities that turn out to support them.
“It was hard pitching the show at first because no one understood the vision, and believe it or not, the creator space is still widely misunderstood,” he said.
His anxieties finally eased when his wife Sheera walked the grounds with an artist’s manager, greeted with hundreds of happy fans and other creators who couldn’t believe this was a festival made by first-time planners.
“We wanted to create an event around community, and I think we succeeded,” he said.
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