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zero people asked for this but i’m going to write this out anyway
I know people are waiting on hs!dave chapter 3 and I promise it’s coming very soon, but this has been sticking at the front of my mind for a really long time - I've touched on this a little bit before if you’ve been following my blog for a while, but I’ve never really fully gone into detail about how much, not the Vlog Squad, but David has changed me.
Take away the money, take away the views, take away the sponsorships, take away Los Angeles...where was David at in, like, 2014? He was 17, graduated from high school, no idea what he wanted to do, in his hometown, making money off of Vines. 5 years ago.
I’ve been watching YouTube and keeping an eye on the community, I guess you could say, since...2012? I went to Playlist Live 2014 when the biggest names there were Dan & Phil, Jenna Marbles, Troye Sivan, Kingsley, Tyler Oakley, & Jon Cozart. Things have changed so much within the YouTube social spheres; that odd group of UK influencers (Zoella, Alfie Deyes, Marcus Butler, Jack & Finn Harries, outlier Caspar Lee, etc. etc.) has somehow essentially diminished.
That group was defined as “vloggers” - even though all of them did different things on their channels and didn’t...really...vlog at all? That’s the term that was used, though - the term “creator” hadn’t stuck yet. Over the years, through OG YouTubers having a tumbling SocialBlade profile and new, younger YouTubers hitting the platform running, things changed so drastically. Of course, there were smaller groups that seemed to have the same essence or similarities to what would eventually influence the VS (knowingly or not): O2L & whatever the UK group was. Both constantly collaborated with each other & made SO many videos together, it’s impossible to count.
Juggernauts of 2014 YouTube were Charlie McDonnell (Charlieissocoollike), the Vlog Brothers, obviously Jenna Marbles, Shane Dawson, Tyler Oakley, LedaMonsterBunny, the list seems to go on and on. Charlie & the Vlog Brothers stick out to me especially because although they were SO huge and had such a colossal impact on the platform...at the time, they only had ~1.5m subscribers each? Still respectable, of course, still a lot of people they reached, but it doesn’t even begin to compare to the scale of things now.
Vine was its own animal compared to YouTube, and again, there were groups that seem to resemble what would eventually become the VS: Magcon boys, whatever the hell DigiTour was...like, SO many similarities between them. Vine wasn’t even on my radar for a really long time, I knew of Nash Grier & of Brendon Urie’s presence on it and that was it.
Tana Mongeau is the first that comes to mind when I think of the transition of 2014/2015 YouTube to at least a resemblance of what the platform is today. She wasn't a Viner, she just...came out of nowhere, and it worked for her. Viners began to switch to YouTube before it even died, like, David literally started uploading on YouTube in February 2015.
Coming back to David, it’s impossible to adequately describe how much he’s changed the platform, whether he gets the credit for it or not. I fully believe that David & Casey Neistat changed the definition of what “vlogging” meant. There was a loose definition of it not really sticking, same thing with the term “creator”, but David & Casey effectively glued the genre together - their videos being at the forefront of people’s minds when they hear the word “vlog.” David did this by like, age 19?
Of course, as things pile up for David: the sponsorships, the merch, the cars, new people in his friend group, the vlog numbers, his subscriber count, whatever else you can think of, his resume only gets more & more impressive.
I’ve said this before, but, although this by no means measures people’s success 100%, materialism is a huge reference for people when determining how well people are doing. So, let’s go by that alone: he’s 23, owns a Tesla & a Ferrari ($400K together), a $3M house in Studio City, bought ~10 people cars, 13 million subscribers, and almost 9M followers on Instagram.
David did it WELL and did it damn near perfectly, and he’s only going up from here. He acts like he’s a dumbass, but he’s not: he knows how to market himself (regardless of who’s on his “team” - he started in Vernon Hills, Illinois with nothing but himself), he knows what his audience likes and runs with it, he KNOWS his audience very well & caters to it without doing something he doesn’t like. There’s something very admirable about David and how far he’s come and his willingness to share that. He worked to get to LA and to get the colossal platform and support he has, but he loves where he came from and he respects it and he's still humble. It’s very hard to find a “creator” like him.
I’m 16, graduating at 17 in 9 months, and I have no clue what I want to do. Before I started watching David and realizing the full extent of his impact on YouTube as a whole, I was even more lost. I want to create, I want to get better at it, I want to make things that people appreciate and love (which is also why I write) and I have full, genuine faith in the process, but thinking of David’s age and what he’s already accomplished has put a timer over my head. A timer that I’m sure will be good for me and will push me, but he has done SO much already. Seeing how much he’s done only gives me hope for my future and what’s waiting for me - and I could never thank him enough for opening my eyes to that through his success.
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