A YouTube OG rebrands her videos for the TikTok era
A YouTube OG rebrands her videos for the TikTok era
How 'l'espace d'un instant' turned into '📭 living alone in Los Angeles at 19'
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TikTok may be overtaking YouTube, but YouTubers aren’t going down without a fight. —Kate
I had a handful of YouTube channels throughout my teenage years (no I'm not linking to them), shutting one down and starting another whenever I decided that I was a totally different person, which was every few months. My gateway drug was mememolly (Molly Templeton), a creator from the 2000s whose videos were art projects and diary entries and skits that pretty much everyone else on YouTube at the time wanted, and attempted, to replicate.
“The idea that you could come up with a format or a joke or a concept and then build the parameters around it so that other people could make it their own, I thought was the most interesting thing,” Templeton told me in 2019 for a Refinery29 piece.
I still follow all the creators who got me into YouTube 15 years ago, like Natalie Tran and Vlogbrothers and Zoe Sugg, even as YouTube changed around them. Videos became more polished, thumbnails were Photoshopped and designed, titles started sprouting clickbait keywords.
I still go back to these OG channels from time to time to reminisce—which is how I realized another creator I once loved, Marion Honey, wasn’t as long gone as I thought. Her most recent video is four years old and frozen in time, but many of her other videos, I was surprised to discover, now look totally different.
For example, a popular room tour of her's from seven years ago has a brand new title. Originally called “Reside & Hide: A Room Tour,” as I confirmed with an October 2020 Wayback Machine capture, it's now “East London ROOM TOUR 👀 what £435 a month gets you.” There's more: “l'espace d'un instant” is now “📭 living alone in Los Angeles at 19”; “This May Not End Well” has become “🚘 driving to a boy I met on YouTube 🥴”; “Nederland Scraps,” “things to do when you meet your internet friend 👭.”
The videos themselves haven’t changed—just the titles and thumbnails. They’ve been repackaged, and that new gloss captures something about YouTube that I’ve been trying to put my finger on for a year. While I was unable to reach Marion and ask what motivated her to make the changes, to me it seems clear that the aim was to make her videos relevant to, for lack of a better term, YouTube’s TikTok era.
The relationship between YouTube creator and viewer has always been spectacle—a prominent personality—and observer. On TikTok, creators don’t have to seem special. The app spawns celebrities, of course, but users are just as interested in tuning into types of people as they are a specific person. Captions are like, “A day in the life of a 24-year-old social media manager in New York City” or “Come with me to my job as a lighthouse keeper” or “POV you’re watching me pack orders for my small business.” In other words: I’m this kind of person doing that specific thing, and you can pretend that you’re here, too.
These are now hallmarks on YouTube. Titles are long, lowercase, emoji-ridden, and, echoing a similar Spotify playlist trend, often super specific. “more snl moments that i think about instead of doing my biology homework,” for the title of a Saturday Night Live clip compilation. “how i make money as a college student // not a scam, not passive, not ‘easy money’” another video declares. “COME THRIFT WITH ME + try-on haul!” another reads, as if straight from the TikTok playbook.
TikTok recently took YouTube’s crown as the title sponsor of VidCon, and that influence is apparently feeding back into the culture of YouTube. But that's not the only reason I find what Marion did so interesting—it’s not that her content was no longer relevant, it just needed a new way to get people to click. While I couldn’t get any data on how much the title changes affected Marion’s views, it had me thinking about how many OG YouTubers have the potential to reenter the zeitgeist with a few keywords. Could mememolly, for instance, get people making “Dear Body” videos again with some emojis and a hashtag? After all, on TikTok, creators use basic parameters like trends and packaging as jumping-off points for their own inventions. Then again, as my early videos lip-syncing to Jay Sean would confirm if I ever shared them, some things are better lost to time.