It’s hard to believe that it’s been barely more than a decade since a little known video-sharing website called YouTube hit the world wide web.
In its humble beginnings, it was a hub for funny cat videos and other equally stupid/incredible things, like how could you go through life without watching the likes of Dramatic Chipmunk, Chocolate Rain, and Charlie the Unicorn?
But now in 2016, it’s evolved into a serious money-making machine with a whole new generation of vloggers wanting their slice of the pie and the fame and fortune that comes with it.
The whole concept of fame is such a dubious subject now, especially when you have the likes of the Kardashians reaping the rewards of Kim’s ‘leaked’ sex tape, so why can’t someone chatting shit into a webcam for 15 minutes be equally as lucrative?
If you can get a devout contingent of fans to hang on your every word like it’s gospel and invest in your personality, you can bridge the gap between mere mortal to celebrity stardom.
The guys over at The Daily Dot brought our attention to DramaAlert, introducing us to the weird and definitely not wonderful world of YouTuber ‘celebrity’ feuds.
DramaAlert in a nutshell is an insanely popular YouTube channel run by a chap called Daniel ‘Keemstar’ Keem, amassing roughly 1.5m subscribers.
You might remember Keemstar from a few months back, when he sparked massive controversy over encouraging an Internet witch-hint after falsely identifying an innocent 62-year-old Twitch streamer as a paedophile.
But usually when he’s not outing innocent people, the program acts as a tabloid for these stupidly bitter rivalries.
Yeah, this is a thing that actually exists in the world.
Beef, throwing shade and so on, and so forth, gets his viewers (who should probably find something better to do) really riled up and he’s happy to collect those millions of views as a result.
For any of you out there who are grown-ups, you probably don’t give a flying fuck about some vlogger chatting shit about another, but a devoted crowd out there really do. Because what could be better than seeing your fave YouTuber chatting shit about some other guy?
We see this between actual celebs all the time, with the likes of Biebs and Kanye not afraid to use their massive platform to say what they really think about fellow artists and their fans.
And our generation laps up this gossip as overblown Internet egos ping out hate tweets, something that DramaAlert isn’t unaware of either.
Keemstar utilises this breeding ground of hate and does his own segment on it, where he reads out the best ‘mean tweets’ from rival YouTubers locking horns.
Occasionally, DramaAlert even invites two feuding vloggers on the show and lets them shout and scream at each other in real-time, which, if anything, makes you even more angry about the state of humanity and this fucked up society we now live in.
In the videos, which are even more painful than pulling out your own teeth without anaesthetic, two rivals get caught up in a dick-swinging back and forth, in a contest where they’re all ultimately winners once those millions of views (and cash) come flooding in.
But it pains me to say it, you’ve got to give them credit, the amount of money these people make is utterly ludicrous and has inspired a whole new generation of kids to think being a prominent YouTuber is a much more viable career option than a nurse or a teacher.
And with the money involved, who can really blame them?
If anything, this channel may only be the beginning of a whole new YouTube era, where these pseudo-celebrities and their dirty laundry are thrust into the spotlight more than ever before by trashy gossip vloggers dedicated to making this actual news.
What a time to be alive, hey?
