Hype House: The death of content as we know it
These TikTok creators are killing your content, and they’re only 15 years old
There’s a Spanish-style mansion perched on top of a hill in old Los Angeles. It sits behind a gate, buried in jacaranda. Around back is a huge, tiled pool — the kind wise-cracking PI Phillip Marlowe fished rich, dead clients out of once upon a time.
But this isn’t the scene of a sordid Hollywood murder. There’s no old money or lonesome, wide-hipped blondes peering out at you from behind the curtains here.
This is Hype House, a TikTok incubator where the amateur video social network’s rising stars come to shield themselves from their millions of teenage fans and create content that will sustain their influence.
Think Silicon Valley (the sitcom) meets Justin Bieber meets Honey Boo Boo meets Psy (Gangnam style).
Or just watch a Hype House video yourself.
No one can say for sure just what makes the perfect TikTok incubator. But as Taylor Lorenz observed in the New York Times, “A good collab house has lots of natural light, open space and is far from prying neighbors.”
Oddly, it also has “plenty of giant mirrors and a bathroom the size of a small apartment to film in.”
It was in just such a jumbo bathroom that, on a quiet December morning not long ago, the Hype House crew — Chase Hudson, Charli D’Amelio, Dixie D’Amelio, Daisy Keech, Rayland Storms and Thomas Petrou — took turns “doing back flips in front of a phone propped up on a roll of toilet paper supported by a Smartwater bottle.”
And then got over 15 million combined likes from the 8-second videos they each shot. (All figures quoted in this article may be off by a few million.)
Which may mean to some of you that the apocalypse is finally nigh. Without the four horsemen or a swarm of divine locusts even, but with 19 unsustainably popular, prematurely market savvy white teenagers being doted on in droves for doing back flips in front of toilet paper in a bathroom bigger than a McDonald’s parking lot.
Others of you with shabbier bathrooms and a way with words may recognize the Hype House as the Dostoyesvkian harbinger of a much more dire event: the death of content as we know it.
Obviously, you have questions.
How could such a lavish infusion of brightly burning content actually spell the end of all content? Aren’t these young folks and their painfully lame videos refreshingly offbeat and vulnerable? And aren’t they learning valuable marketing skills for free that will stand them well later in life when, closing in on retirement age, they apply for positions at Slack, Canva, and YouTube?
Plus, they said the same thing about Twitter, didn’t they?
They did, and content didn’t die then and it’s not dead now. It’s just gotten a temporary facelift à la Donatella Versace.
A new age of brutal, user-generated content is spewing onto our mobile devices. It could spell the revival of the Weird Web or it could be one tectonic shift closer to Mike Judge’s Idiocracy. Only time will tell. So start your stopwatch. Set it for 15 seconds.
If you grew up in the 80s and 90s, and lived through the birth of VHS home videos, TikTok is like falling into a time warp (from the comfort of your toilet bowl). Any TikTok video you land on will instantly transport you back to every cringey moment your parents ever captured of you doing karate in the backyard in your pajamas.
Stick around long enough — and you will because TikTok is as alluring as a string of fantastic highway accidents — and you will reach the outer limits of your content universe and sail off, with much booty shaking, into uncharted tracts of content space time.
Einstein would probably have loved TikTok.
TikTok’s guerrilla selfie videos aren’t just a nostalgia trip. They also deliver a Paris Hilton-style birdie to the super slick content experiences we’ve come to aspire to as content creators. All of a sudden, a Kardashian Instagram story feels like a boring, institutional, high-budget production, which it is.
I mean, if Bunny Gurl* can sweep up 23,000 likes double-fisting carrots behind a cardboard box, why are the rest of us struggling so hard to connect with a handful of potential clients using démodé approaches like websites and digital analytics we don’t really understand anyway? Shouldn’t we all just be shooting #sleepyday videos and hoping for the best?
Admittedly, TikTok is a teen thing. Even Hype House’s chief wrangler, Thomas Petrou, is over the hill at 20.
And the truth is actually (slightly) more complicated.
Hype House has a marketing strategy, even if its content, content creators and content viewers are swinging dangerously closer to Idiocracy than to the Weird Web. They do know how to use analytics at Hype House. God knows if you could run A/B tests on TikTok videos, these kids and their managers would be on top of that too.
And, like any creators of market-driven content, Hype House has a shelf life. Most of the Hype Housers won’t be around by the time Justin Bieber releases his next album. Those that do outlive their internet life expectancy will probably do what the Biebs himself did to drive sales for his latest release, Yummy: shamelessly leverage whatever comes after TikTok to keep being loved en masse.
So, no, content isn’t dead, and staying relevant and connecting with audiences is still the name of the game.
If we can learn anything from Hype House, besides the fact that when you’re not looking they’re filming themselves doing back flips in front of toilet paper, it’s that there’s actually a market for that.
*Already gone.
