We’re a decade into online video emerging as the most powerful and popular form of mass media, and yet almost none of its stars have truly “crossed over” into mainstream success
In 1998, 76 million people tuned in to watch the final episode of Seinfeld, an event often cited as television’s last mass culture moment. Twenty five years later, its actors Jerry Seinfeld and Jason Alexander have all retained their super-stardom, and Larry David and Julia Louis-Dreyfus have only become more famous thanks to their subsequent solo projects.
In 2020, there were more than a half-billion views of Bella Poarch’s “M to the B” lip-synching clip — making it the most watched video of that year. Today she is the third most-followed individual on TikTok with 92.7 million followers, and this success landed her a recording contract with Warner Records. Bella Poarch shows us what success looks like on social media.
But would anyone say that Bella Poarch is “famous” the way that the Seinfeld gang are famous? And this is not a problem unique to Poarch. Familiarity with “The Best YouTubers Of All Time” is not ambient knowledge but requires being extremely online. Some of this stems from the 21st century’s massive generational split in media consumption, where adults have no idea what kids are watching or listening to. But by many objective measures, the most watched stars of internet platforms have yet to achieve the markers and profits of “mainstream stardom” — while a batch of non-online stars continue to do so. Zendaya and Naomi Osaka came up offline in the internet era, and this year they appeared in advertisements for Louis Vuitton. By comparison, online video stars haven’t broken into the global status hierarchy. Yes, TikTokers get invites to the Met Gala, but once they’re through the doors, they’re clearly at the bottom of that social ladder.
We could easily attribute this phenomenon to hysteresis — a lingering respect for Hollywood movie stars and pop musicians despite the waning cultural influence of those industries. But we’re now at least 15 years into the dominance of online video within youth culture. In the early 2010s, surveys started to find that teenagers were much more interested in YouTube creators than legacy media stars. At the time, it seemed plausible that youth would carry these preferences into their 20s and elevate their favorite creators. Tha
