How Haley Pham Represents the Rise of Relatable YouTubers and Entitlement
Humans are inherently nosy. We want to know what other people are doing, and silently hate them for having their life (seemingly) so together. Once content creators caught on to this, the popularity of vlogs (video blogs; aka “a day in my life”) skyrocketed. Vlogs afforded almost everyone the chance to become popular. You didn’t need to be good at makeup, sports, or have meaningful commentary. The vloggers that thrived during this boom were people that the general population viewed as “relatable.” Relatable content creators come off as accessible — they go to a regular high school, perhaps they aren’t very good at one thing in particular, and they are not insanely rich and famous. Viewers are attracted to these people because they feel some sort of connection to the creator. However, YouTubers that started off creating “relatable” content are slowly losing their grasp on the market as they make more and more money and move on to bigger and better things. The most notable example is Emma Chamberlain, who went from a small account who loves iced coffee and thrift shopping, to now a YouTube giant who walked in Paris Fashion Week with Louis Vuitton and owns her own coffee company. Her content still technically is viewed as relatable, but many of her viewers believe that she has lost touch with her fan-base.
While many creators were benefiting from the YouTube algorithm and their subscriber counts skyrocketed, a few smaller YouTubers slowly were rising up in the ranks. Haley Pham, a 19-year-old from Texas, gained a small following by doing what people rarely do on YouTube — she casually spoke about her religion. Haley gained traction by posting vlogs with casual references to her Christian faith such as filming herself during Bible study, talking about prayer in her life, and explaining how the Lord has created miracles in her life. As she gained popularity, her religious content took a backseat to her relatable content. Her most popular videos include “Train With Me” videos for dance, testing different hair removal methods, the first day of school vlogs, and Q&As. As she gained more popularity and consequently more money, Haley began to post travel vlogs, which have a huge market on YouTube. However, her recap/review of her Greece trip caused her to lose subscribers, brand deals, and ultimately her relatability.
In September of 2019, Haley Pham uploaded a (now deleted) “story-time” video in which showed her true colors. In short, she explained how her one-year anniversary trip with her boyfriend (fellow content creator Ryan Trahan) to Italy and Greece went horribly wrong and truly lost her relatability with her ‘rich people problems.’ I’ll go into detail about the main issues, but here is a quick debrief on the situation:
The biggest issue many people had with her video is when she told her subscribers not to go to Greece. Her reasoning? They have a poor economy, the country is not as pretty as what she saw on Instagram, and she did not like their beaches. Not only did she base her trip off of pictures she found on Instagram, but a simple Yelp or TripAdvisor search would have revealed plenty of activities and famous beaches. The real issue with her video, though, is surprisingly not any of these examples. Some viewers took issue with her extremely entitled viewpoint and how she encouraged over 2 million people to not visit a country because it didn’t live up to her expectations. The journal The Response of Tourism to International Economic Conditions: Greece, Mexico and Spain explains why tourism is extremely important to help stimulate economies, but specifically Greece’s economy. “[…] international tourism receipts have become an increasingly important source of foreign exchange for Greece and international tourism a more significant generator of domestic employment and output.”¹ As this quote outlines, the only way that Greece’s economy can recover from the damage it has been through is by tourists visiting their country. While of course not every single one of her two million viewers is going to heed her ‘warning,’ her reach has the capability to inflict significant damage on the Greek economy and tourism industry.
She also spent a portion of the video crying over how disappointing the trip was and that it felt like a waste of time and money. The Journal The Intermediality of Emotion: Representations of Emotionality and Fear in YouTube Vlogs and Beyond discusses how YouTubers and other social media personnel are able to commercialize their emotions. “Even though bursts of emotion are often produced in a spontaneous and unintentional fashion, sometimes defying efforts of expression control or emotion regulations, they can be produced intentionally and strategically, often with bestowing greater authenticity or naturalness to one’s emotional display.”² Haley attempted to employ these same tactics to draw support and pity from her viewers. She over-emphasized her emotions in order to make the situation seem worse than it is, but this ended up backfiring as people called her out for seeming “fake.”
Haley, like Emma Chamberlain, skyrocketed to YouTube fame practically overnight.
But once the dust settled and the checks cleared, she was unable to keep the relatability train going.
People started to dislike her when she dropped out of high school because she “didn’t like it” (which is not an option for most people), but her subscriber count took the biggest hit after her trip recap. She lost a little over 400,000 subscribers during the fallout of this video, and she is seemingly unable to stay grounded.
She recently posted a house tour of the mansion she bought with her boyfriend. Most 19-year-olds wouldn’t dream of even renting a house at this age, let alone purchasing a mansion in Los Angeles. Similarly, most people would agree that moving in comes before buying a house together, and even then being together for a little over a year does not necessarily warrant any of this. Here is just a portion of the comments from her house tour video (these were not cherry-picked, this screenshot is completely unedited and these are the most liked comments):
Haley Pham is just one example of how some people struggle to stay grounded once they stumble into money. As brands and corporations realize that YouTube and other social media platforms are the future of advertising, many people are able to make money just from sharing what they love. Unfortunately, sometimes the money causes creators to change completely. Many YouTube viewers, myself included, are finding it increasingly difficult to find a creator that is genuine. Trends dictate many online industries and therefore can completely take over a platform. One long-term trend is relatable and ‘raw’ content, but due to how lucrative these videos are, creators continually attempt to game this system. Haley is no exception to this trend but it certainly ended up hurting her in the long run. Attempting to tug at viewers’ heartstrings can either gain you the support of many people or can paint you as a villain. In this instance, Haley’s tears were met with backlash and hate even from her fans. While I do not believe that the culture around vlogging, relatability, and ‘casual’ content will ever change, I do think that viewers need to understand that their views matter. Some creators end up gaining subscribers and making lots of ad-sense money from even the worst videos because clicks pay. If you are sick and tired of watching people with millions of dollars complain about their luxury vacations, or corporate powerhouses pumping out videos on an hourly basis sometimes by stealing from smaller creators, then the fix is simple — DON’T CLICK. Watching the video, even if it’s just to give it a dislike, is just giving these people more money. The less engagement these videos get, the less prevalent they will become. Your view is your voice. Use it wisely.
Scholarly Article Source:
[1]Truett, D., & Truett, L. (1987). The Response of Tourism to International Economic Conditions: Greece, Mexico, and Spain. The Journal of Developing Areas, 21(2), 177–190. Retrieved February 25, 2020, from www.jstor.org/stable/4191539
[2]Jandl, S. (2017). The Intermediality of Emotion: Representations of Emotionality and Fear in YouTube Vlogs and Beyond. In Jandl I., Knaller S., Schönfellner S., & Tockner G. (Eds.), Writing Emotions: Theoretical Concepts and Selected Case Studies in Literature (pp. 175–194). Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. doi:10.2307/j.ctv1wxt3t.12
