Internet drama, live and in person

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Welcome back to Spitfire News!

Today’s members-only edition is a diary of what I’ve been up to for the past two weeks. I got engaged (yippee!), launched this newsletter (with this story and this one), and flew in five planes, slept in four hotels, and spoke to hundreds of people across the U.S. who came to see “The Chronically Online Tour.”

The tour, a stage show created by and starring YouTuber Adam McIntyre, is incomparable. It’s funny, but it’s not stand-up comedy. It isn’t a live podcast. There is no singing or choreography. It’s just Adam, a pink mic, a Powerpoint with viral videos of influencers, a vodka cranberry, and deafening crowd reactions for around ninety minutes. 

For ten of those minutes, I went onstage and talked about what it was like to report, publish, and weather the response to a story I wrote for Business Insider in March 2021. The article investigated a rape allegation against a member of the Vlog Squad, a YouTube-famous posse led by celebrity influencer David Dobrik. In the fallout, Dobrik’s buzzy VC-backed camera app startup collapsed, his YouTube channels were demonetized, and his popularity plummeted.

I might be the first journalist to tell the story behind their most viral work onstage to hundreds of cheering YouTube fans. But that was the essence of “The Chronically Online Tour.” Internet culture emerged from the screen into screaming 4D.

Adam, who is one of my best friends, had a nontraditional path to building a fandom around himself. I was introduced to him the way millions of other people were. I watched his viral YouTube video in April 2020, when he accused Colleen Ballinger, an A-lister on the platform, of befriending him as a child, exploiting him for free labor, and smearing him when their relationship soured. The ensuing controversy stretched out for years, with Ballinger eventually strumming a ukulele in one of the most-mocked YouTube apology videos of all time.

I first spoke to Adam, who is from Derry, Ireland, over FaceTime. With his newfound YouTube notoriety, Adam leaned into becoming what is known as a “drama channel.” In the late 2010s, dozens of YouTubers grew modest followings and made full-time jobs out of covering the nearly daily controversies involving bigger YouTubers. When I graduated college and started working at Business Insider, I reported on drama channels and the influencers and narratives they were talking about. Adam and I became fast friends.

Over the past four years, this niche YouTube news cottage industry grew into an arm of the media covering topics well beyond influencers. It is now one of the most popular and influential sources of news and information for Americans.

The most passionate fans and consumers of YouTube drama I’ve encountered are the ones who hail from Adam’s era, back when beauty guru “Dramageddon” was the biggest YouTube news and Trump was on his way out of the Oval Office. Creators are already capitalizing on nostalgia for the late 2010s and early 2020s.

Adam’s fans, who are overwhelmingly young queer women, sold out multiple of his debut shows in venues that hold over a hundred people. For the influencer tour company that ran it, “The Chronically Online Tour” was an outlier in its success. Riding along for every second in Brooklyn, Chicago, Seattle, LA, and Dallas, I could see exactly why it worked.

Behind this paywall is my diary from each day of the first leg of “The Chronically Online Tour,” along with over 100 exclusive behind-the-scenes photos and a members-only chat. It’s $5 to access.

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