The Evolution of Gabbie Hanna and Her Content.

[Music] hi friends hello hi how are you i hope you guys are having an amazing day today hello so today's video i'm going to keep the intro very short because this is quite possibly going to be the longest video i've ever made i started a bit of a series it was a one-time series earlier this year called the evolution of blank and basically i started the series out by doing the evolution of david dobrik and his content in which i kind of analyzed his content analyzed his career his trajectory um and it was a really fun video to make i really enjoyed doing it and there's been a particular person on youtube you can tell by the title i thought uh would be really cool to analyze for this series and talk about so if you guys are interested in that uh keep watching i have a lot of notes i am a college student so when i write notes i take it very seriously so this might be a bit of a long video i am going to be giving my opinion so keep note of that too this is definitely still like a commentary style video but i feel like i want to kind of discuss everything that's been going on that got us to the point we are now with gabby hannah and her career so if you're interested in that uh keep watching so gabby hannah actually started her career on vine similarly to a lot of youtubers who became pretty popular like liza koshy david dobrik they all kind of got their start on vine which was a six second video platform where you basically made videos in six seconds and a lot of people really blew up on the app vine actually died quote unquote after a couple of years because it just didn't have the longevity um and it's kind of been replaced by things like musically and tick-tock so this was kind of like the millennial version of tick-tock if you will that's kind of how i would describe it so gabby started there and she actually became really really popular at vine she started posting in about 2013 and gained about 5 million subscribers before the app actually shut down which was pretty substantial especially for the time a lot of her vines specifically went viral on facebook especially ones that there was one that she did where she was like a camp counselor there was one that she did where she was like a mother talking to her daughter she did kind of character vines and those were the ones that typically did really well i would say that her vine career was a pretty good starting point for her and i gave her the diving board that she needed to start her youtube channel which she did as most viners did gabby's first youtube video was posted september 10 2014 and it was basically a q a style video i will say if you're kind of curious to see how gabby has evolved not just as a content creator but just as a person it's pretty interesting to watch this first video because in it she's definitely a lot more calm kind of shy a little bit more reserved and she talks about just basic things it was a q a style video so she discussed having a bachelor's degree where she got it and you can see that she's visibly like a little bit more nervous you can tell that switching to this long form style of content is definitely a jump and a leap for her and something that's a little bit different it's also important to note that gabby hannah didn't start out on youtube as gabby hannah when she first started her channel and her vine account she was known as the gabby show which i think is how a lot of people found her who was via being the gabby show and she talked about in this video actually why she picked that name originally had her whole name and then she decided she would like to be employable and so she decided to change it to the gabby show so her full name was not in connection with any of her social media interestingly is why i have the name smokey glow when gabby started her youtube channel she was 23 and she posted pretty consistently throughout 2014. i would say her content is pretty reflective of the general type of popular youtube content specifically with vine stars for the time she had those kind of click baby thumbnails and click baby titles like hiking with justin bieber or beef with rebecca black like all of these kind of things but they were just kind of light-hearted fun click-bait titles she had kind of click baby thumbnails this was again pretty standard for the time but i would say that her content at that point in time was pretty standard generic youtube it's what a lot of youtubers were making they were doing these more kind of funny story times reading mean hate comments things like that were very popular on that now going into 2015 from 2014 she was posting pretty consistently on the app still you could tell that her follower base had definitely followed her in from vine she definitely had people a kind of built-in audience somewhat while she wasn't getting like five million views of video she was getting really decent views for a youtuber at that time especially you could tell that her vine platform followed her to youtube i also think what's interesting to note is some youtubers who transferred from vine struggled with the long form content where i don't think gabby really struggled with that a lot of like logan and jake paul's first videos were really just a bunch of vines mixed together same thing with david they were still making vines they were just making a whole bunch of them combining them together to be vlogs whereas gabby's videos she didn't really struggle with that in the same way that others did she pretty much just started talking and once she started talking she could talk for like 20 minutes so i think that also made her a little bit unique for the time given what everyone else was kind of doing who would come off of vine now the first video for her that really really blew up was uploaded in june of 2015 and was called my psycho roommate this video now has over seven million views but at the time you can definitely see the spike in her numbers where this video was a really big one for her just based on analytics i think this was probably the video that opened her up to a bit of a wider audience that wasn't just people following her over from vine in the video gabby was ranting about an experience with her la roommate and just kind of going off kind of the typical story time i think what kind of set this video apart too from the other story time she'd been making up until this point because she had made story times that just didn't get as many views as this one i think the difference was her anger her rantiness she was not afraid to go off on this girl she was not afraid to be like real and upfront and pissed and i think that was something that was really interesting and attractive to a lot of viewers it was funny to watch this girl be very bold and say like hey my roommates it was cool people really enjoyed it so after the success of this video gabby continued to make more content like this through 2015 she did kind of this standard youtube thing where she like had a stalker her uber driver tried to kill her we got an update on the psycho roommate so there was a lot of these more like click baity story time things that we were seeing from a lot of story time youtubers in 2015 but they were mixed in with collabs which i think collabs in 2015 especially were just starting to become a really big opportunity for a lot of youtubers this is kind of when a lot of youtubers started moving to la so they were all in one central place they could cross-promote each other's channels so she has a ton of collaborations and also just like random diy videos like i said pretty standard content for the time on youtube and her channel was steadily growing and steadily getting more views as time went up so now we kind of get into the vlog squad phase and i would say that the vlog squad was a pretty poppin time for gabby i would say this was like a really good time for her because between 2015 and 2016 david dobrik's content absolutely blew up and with that all of his friends and the people who were associated with him who also started vlogging also blew up gabby happened to be in that group of people it was basically a large group of people who used to be vine stars and david would just film their life and gabby was in all of these videos so if you're talking about collabs becoming popular because you're all cross-promoting on your channel think about every single day new people are finding david dobrik and in turn new people every single day are finding someone like gabby hanna through his videos and the way she portrayed herself in his vlogs were definitely very similar to how she portrayed herself on her channel she was very like loud it was very outgoing she was very like out there like ah the gabby show like that was kind of her whole thing so it wasn't like she was putting on a persona for the vlogs to the outside perspective because it was similar to how she would act in her main channel videos i also think 2016 was an interesting year because there was definitely a shift for a lot of these vine stars where vine was kind of starting to die in 2015 late 2015 and then by 2016 it was really starting to die so i think you can see a definite content shift and not just gabby's content but pretty much all vine stars were suddenly they really started to take youtube a lot more seriously they really put a lot of focus into growing their platform on youtube and putting a lot of work into their youtube content and that was because vine was dying there wasn't as much money in it there wasn't as much you know fame there was more money and opportunity in youtube so they put their shift in youtube and vine actually ended up completely like going to put in december of 2016. so that was probably a smart move on their part but you can definitely see her content become a lot more youtube focused where she was working at it but you could tell she wasn't putting like a hundred percent whereas now it was like a 100 full steam ahead youtube train in 2016 gabby also had her first sort of scandal um you could call it which was actually a joke stealing scandal so basically a youtuber made a video about her in which they accused her of stealing some tweets and also stealing a bit from louis c.k which that does not age well gabby does address this and she does talk about it and i think looking back on this initial kind of apology video it's called let's talk about joke stealing it's still live on her channel i think this is kind of an interesting thing to look at and kind of see starting a pattern of behavior with certain things only because in this video she did apologize and own up to stealing one of the jokes she didn't apologize and own up to other things because she said you know like logically she didn't steal them it was just more likely that they had the same thought she said the tweets were just a coincidence she did acknowledge that she unintentionally stole a joke from louis ck she said she just must have heard it before and then thought it was her own thing and then said the joke which okay i'm not here to like nitpick if that's true or not like i don't know her intentions i don't know if she purposely took the joke or not it's hard to say however i think the way that she addressed this scandal was a little bit interesting in the sense that she definitely says some things that she still says today about constructive criticism she basically wished that the person who initially called her out for these things the person who made the video about the joke stealing hadn't done it so publicly she kind of criticized that person for not being so nice about it in their video and how they should have reached out to her privately to address the situation in my opinion defeats the point of saying something because if this person had called her out privately what were the odds that she would publicly come forward and talk about it probably pretty slim so while she does apologize and owns up to where she made a mistake she kind of also turns around and is criticizing the person for calling her out which again just looking back on everything that's happened since then it does seem to be kind of a pattern of behavior with her where she does apologize but she also gets angry at the people calling her out i also would like to note that 2016 brought about a bit of a change to gabby's just overall appearance which i'm not going to focus on too too much just because i don't think it's really that pertinent but i will say it definitely changed up her content a little bit her change in her physical appearance definitely changed up the style of content she was making because she did start doing a lot of content that was focused around this physical change whether it was videos talking about her hair a bunch or videos talking about her weight loss she def that definitely did also evolve her content so by 2017 gabby was sitting at about four million subscribers and was one of the biggest youtubers on the platform at the time she was pretty well loved she was at all the vidcons at this point she was still kind of in david's vlog and her content was kind of a mix of random story times challenges and kind of also just random aesthetic things like she did this series where she remade her sister's cringy music leaves which was not something a lot of people were doing she did these um pool karaoke but it was like scene kid edition so stuff that definitely played into her vibe and her aesthetic that she kind of put forward also stuff that was still again pretty standard for the time pretty standard popular content so 2017 was also when another sort of i don't want to call this what a scandal and i'll tell you why i think that this situation also definitely played a role in why what's happening now happened but basically this was the rice gum situation so gabby and another youtuber named ricegum who arguably is probably one of my least favorite people on the platform so him and gabby got into a bit of an altercation at a party basically gabby went up to him with her snapchat out and was like hey i guess they had some previous beef he said her nose was big or something and so uh gabby went up to him with her snapchat out and was like hey rice like let's do a rap battle and at first he kind of seemed to play along um and then she made a joke about him having a ghost writer which when you watch the video back you can tell really pissed him off i guess he went to grab her phone and there was some tugging back and forth of her phone and he ripped her phone out of her hand he smashed the phone on the ground and then he left the party and gabby kind of made a snapchat story pretty instantly saying ricegum just hit me and smash my phone and what the real focus became of this story uh as far as like how the news it was keemstar as far as how like keemstar like philip defranco covered it in drama channels the real focus of the story was like did he hit her and in my opinion looking back the way that i think the youtube community really allowed ricegum to mock and attack her when regardless of the situation he couldn't have ripped her phone out of her hands without physically at least touching her in some way so regardless of that the way that the youtube community let him mock her and then he made this diss track titled i didn't hit her where he again just mocks her he made mocking snapchats about her looking back and doing the research into this i was a little bit grossed out at how the youtube community reacted and i think that this also again played a part into gabby's sort of distrust of drama channels and commentary channels it's weird to look back on that situation and see people defending rice gum for physically taking away someone's property and smashing it like everybody's focus was on like oh gabby's too dramatic even if she was being a little bit dramatic he is the one in the wrong so it's very interesting how that perspective got twisted and i think it set a weird precedent of people really especially like ricegum you know fans and people on that side of the internet it's that a weird precedent of people really almost liking to pick on gabby look knowing what's like about to happen and looking back on this situation it does almost feel like somewhat of a pivotal moment because in reality she really didn't do anything to deserve that happening to her and she still didn't really get a lot of support and got like a ton of hate from people around the youtube community i think the situation kind of made gabby a little bit more defensive in general because while the joke stealing thing was kind of a big deal this was like a big deal like two major youtubers gotten a possible physical altercation this was a massive deal and she didn't get the support that even i feel she probably deserved so looking back i can kind of see this as a pivotal moment where it made her a little bit more defensive of things because in this situation i really can't see what she did wrong other than possibly exaggerate but i i am inclined to believe her and when she explained it it made perfect sense like in her multiple videos explaining it everything she said added up and made perfect sense so i think in the future this did make her on the defense when she was called out for things and i don't think that's an excuse for a lot of what's to come but i do think it's very interesting to look at in 2017 gabby also announced that she was going to be starting to put out music and this was kind of a time when a lot of other youtubers were putting out music a lot of youtubers were putting out like rap music a lot of diss tracks were being made um it was kind of a time when youtube music getting you know made fun of a little bit it was a little bit cringy for youtubers to be posting this type of content but gabby announced that she was going to be uh doing like singing it wasn't going to be rapping like a lot of other youtubers and she promoted her first song she did this by using her very famous group of friends um and in a way that was a genius marketing tactic the way that she announced the song was incredibly smart because she had liza koshy in the thumbnail who's like one of the biggest freaking youtubers ever she's literally transcended youtube i'd love to make a video about her whole thing because it's nuts but she had a video of liza koshy in the thumbnail it got like tons and tons of views and everybody heard little snippets of this song and all of her friends were hyping it up her very famous friends who also had very large followings so and that was a genius way to promote it so her first video out loud i think it got the music video got about 15 million views which is really really good i will say that as far as gabby's music goes the first song out loud it was a fine song i think gabby does get a lot of hate on her music and i understand why i understand that her style of music and her writing is not for everybody i i would say objectively it's not bad music just in general like this is a based on all of the music she's put out i don't think her music is bad i actually like some of her songs i don't think she's a bad you know singer i will say i think her and i've said this in other videos i think her live singing just needs a lot of work and i think that's where people don't always take her music as seriously is because yes her perfected you know audio tracks and her music sounds great but if you can't sing as a live singer i think that does discredit the music a little bit because people tend to think that a lot of the perfecting of that was in editing and i think the problem with that is when you're a youtuber trying to also be a musician that's already a bit of an uphill battle that you're trying to climb you're trying to be legitimate because tana mojo has a music career like there's tons of other youtubers lauren gray dixie demilio like there's tons of these internet people who are trying to also bridge into music and it's fairly obvious that they are not necessarily the most musically inclined people so when you are trying to do that uphill battle into becoming a legitimate musician from an internet personality there isn't a lot of room for error and i think where gabby messed up was she did live performances before she was ready she didn't do the proper vocal training before doing a lot of these live performances and i think that really really screwed her long term but that's you know just a side note about the music the other thing that i think is interesting to note is when this first song came out out loud she had a lot of connections within the youtube community she was friends with the vlog squad she had a ton of famous friends who had other famous friends so her video and her music was pretty widely supported in the youtube community because she had so many connections during this time she also rebranded to the name gabby hannah which is who she is now so she dropped the gabby show and kind of made something a little bit more professional sounding i think it was probably for her music um to gabby hannah looking back i think 2017 was kind of the peak for gabby in her career so far i'm very hesitant to say anybody's peak has already happened because i don't know what her career is going to bring for her she could 2021 could be like the best year of her entire life she could gain 10 million subs like who knows but i will say as far as what her career is up until this point i do think 2017 was kind of the peak and the highlight for everything and was realistically one of her biggest years on the platform and most successful years on the platform and i think a lot of that was because she was friends with the right people she made content that was attractive to the youtube algorithm just pretty family friendly in general of like sponsorships so she was probably making a ton of money was really attractive to youtube as a company and they were probably really pushing and promoting her stuff as well as i mentioned before 2018 her content definitely shifted and i again i don't want to focus too much on her appearance because i think she's beautiful at any stage in this whole thing but i will say i think her content shifted to transforming her hair getting her ears pierced um getting plastic surgery which was just like a nose thing a lot of focus on her weight loss because she did lose a really substantial amount of weight and in 2018 also we saw the disappearance of gabby from david's vlog she wasn't really in the vlogs anymore she wasn't really hanging out with the vlog squad as far as the public was seeing and she was also kind of finding a new group of friends that weren't necessarily youtubers i have to say before i continue as well i think that i can understand why gabby wanted to not be a part of the vlog squad anymore i can understand that point i know that she claims there was no beef but other people in the blog squad tend to say there was some kind of beef it's really not clear what exactly happened between all of their friendships but i will say i can understand why she wouldn't want to be a part of that environment anymore i can understand why she wouldn't want to constantly be being pranked wouldn't want to constantly be being filmed every time you hang out you're filming everything is about content and churning out content making content it does work for the people who appear to be in the squad still they seem to be fine with it but i can understand why that dynamic would not be for everyone so i can respect the decision she made or whatever happened whatever beef happened whatever i can respect that decision to kind of bow out of that but i do think career-wise it definitely kind of had made a hit for her career i also think that the fans of david dobrik and the vlog squad i feel like the fans of them because they think something shady happened with gabby it kind of turned them off to her as a person i don't know that's just a theory but i can definitely see that happening where if they think something shady happened they're like well we're not gonna subscribe to this girl anyway she also started posting more music she had a song called honestly actually is my favorite song by her i think that was like one of her best music video everything was super good and while that music was well received like it wasn't made fun of by any means she definitely was not getting the same amount of hype that she had gotten on her first release of out loud which it's kind of sad like the honestly era was actually better music wise than out loud but it definitely did not get the same amount of views or the same amount of hype that out loud gabby also during 2018 came out with this roast yourself harder self diss track where a lot of people i think it was a long time ago it was like a youtube trend jenna marbles made one that's fantastic where it's called roast yourself and you basically just roasted yourself you did like a diss track against yourself and gabby kind of revisited this trend but it had a bit of a more serious twist to it and while i think that this diss track was well received by other youtubers or people in the youtube community and even you know people who are really big fans of youtubers and super into youtube culture and understand like all of that i think that this was the start of gabby writing music that was almost a little i don't want to say too personal but she started writing about things and making you know music and art about things that were solely pertaining to her and i do think that that is a bit of a disadvantage in the current musical climate like as far as that roast yourself harder diss track it's now sort of turned into a bit of a meme especially on tick tock people kind of make fun of it and well i personally didn't really see an issue with it i can understand why she's in the song she's like you know people starving and i get gold for this that was one of the quotes she goes really fast then she's like whoa and people always mock that on tick tock too i do think that this was kind of the start of the disconnect between her and her fans because before her content kind of centered around you know stuff that was relatable we've all had like a pathologically lying ex or a guy that like lied to us there are relatable stories her songs were relatable they were things everyone could relate to and i feel like she started kind of twisting her content and her writing into this more hyper-specific to herself language and i think that started to create a bit of a disconnect between her and some of her fans other thing that i think is really important to note during 2018 is that frankly when she started in 2014 a lot of her fans were younger kids at this point in time fans who were maybe 13 14 when she first started making content were now 17 18 years old and probably had different preferences and content that's one of the hard parts about having a younger fan base is they're going to age out of you eventually and i think that's what kind of started happening to gabby in 2018 was a lot of the people who had been there since the very beginning definitely did start to age out of her content a little bit and while gabby was still doing well in views like by no means were her views bad she was still getting like one to two million views of video which is really great sure views had definitely dropped from 2016 2017 when she was getting like three to five million views of video she was definitely going down a little bit the end of 2018 was kind of a mess for gabby a couple of things that happened that really i feel defined a lot of things to go forward in the next two years so the first thing was the monster meme which at the time literally i did not think that was a big deal but looking back into her content this was a really big deal for her like this monster meme was a big deal so basically gabby had a song called monster and she did a genius interview which if you don't know is where you go and you like explain the meaning behind your song and you sing the song live during the live performance of monster for genius gabby had this note in the song and while she did it she blew out the mic so the sound went to a secondary mic and it sounded awful if i'm the monster that's been here all along and so this very quickly got turned into a meme as a lot of genius interviews do a lot of genius interviews get sort of joked on because they're kind of cringy i'm sorry the most of them are pretty cringey basically this got kind of memed and somebody ended up making a like short form video where it was gaby singing that really high note but they use that snapchat face filter where your face gets really long being a meme is not necessarily the worst thing to happen to a person i'm sure it's kind of crappy to have people using your you know whatever your song is a joke but at the same time they usually have a life expectancy of a few weeks and then it blows over and then you move on the way that gabby handled this meme was definitely not great i think gabby wanted to almost like reclaim the meme i think she wanted to reclaim it for herself i think she wanted to feel like she was part of the joke even though it was very obvious that she was not laughing along with the joke instead of just like joking at all gabby made her twitter profile picture a like cartoonized version of herself with her face super huge that was making fun of the meme she made her twitter name something along the lines of being the monster she made merch which got her in a whole other debacle which i don't even know if we can get into right now about artists and who owns the rights to things but that got her in a whole bunch of trouble and she made like multiple videos addressing and talking about the monster meme and even if you watch her recent videos where she's talking about you know her channel and her life she brings this up quite a bit so to a lot of people i think this seemed very inconsequential it's like oh you just got you know goofed like whatever but to her i think this was kind of serious i think gabby up until this point hadn't been in any massive dramas really because people didn't necessarily know her outside of like her community whereas the monster meme whenever you get me it definitely turns you out to a wider audience of people and it honestly i kind of feel bad for her because it's almost like high school like you know if somebody's bullying you if you feed into that bullying they're gonna do it more because they're like oh i'm gonna get a reaction out of her she did the exact thing you're kind of not supposed to do where it's you give a and i i think all content creators are guilty of this but i think it was such a big scale that this is where it really screwed her up was she fed into the the bullying she let it affect her she let it show that it affected her she tried overly hard to pretend like it didn't when it was obvious that it did it made it really clear that gabby struggled to take jokes at her own expense and i think looking at it from gabby's perspective she just didn't appreciate that her art was being taken as a joke she didn't appreciate that her singing was being joked about but in the defense of everyone else on the internet i mean that's kind of the risk you run when you post your art and your content not everyone is going to be receptive to it and think that it's good and i think what this whole meme situation showed was that she wasn't receptive to criticism even like even just joking criticism because it's really obvious that gabby takes her music and her writing very very seriously regardless of if you think it's good or not she herself takes this stuff really seriously so she talks at length about how she wants to be known as gabby hannah the musician and not gabby hannah the youtuber this is what she wants for her life and her career so in a sense i can understand being more defensive about your artwork and her being defensive about the genius interview but from an internet perspective from purely a social media perspective that was probably one of the worst ways she could have handled that entire situation had she just made like one tweet joking about it joking it off nobody literally would have cared it would have been a meme for a few weeks and then it would have gone away but because she made such a big deal about it and because she fed into it it kind of fed the trolls and people who were using the meme even more and kind of prolonged the entire experience i also think that because of the monster meme and because of her reaction to it it led people to dig a little bit deeper into her live performances which as i've seen before definitely did need work and still probably do need work it was like oh you're just gonna blame this on a mic okay let's show this live performance where you're completely off key the entire time and that's what people did because i think in a way people were kind of pissed that she was trying to blame a microphone on the audio being so bad when it's very obvious she's not the strongest live singer she actually did do a series with there's a guy here who on youtube who does he does like vocal coaching and she actually did a series where she worked with him and her voice did improve but i know she doesn't work with him anymore so i don't know what happened with that and i think because all of these live videos were coming out again it just continued to discredit her music and i think it's really important to note that here was that in the beginning nobody had heard her sing live so that first song sounded pretty good because she wasn't you know off-key her vocals sounded good the song was okay it had a catchy hook but as she started performing live and as more music started coming out and as the genius interview and all these live shows i do think in a way it started to discredit her music a little bit and you can see that in the views of her music video the views on them were slowly declining every time she put out another one none of them really reached the hype that the very first one did because over time as she was singing live more her music was getting more discredited the end of 2018 also brought up the kenza cosmetics scandal which i'm not going to get too much into but gaby did address this and i think this was also again really where the downfall started to happen because gabby was involved in a brush scam basically it was this brush company that said the brushes were worth 78 but you could actually just get them for free if you just paid shipping and handling which was i believe 10 gabby promoted this along with a few other influencers and it turned out that that brush company wasn't really sending out the brushes it was kind of a deal of these obviously aren't 70 brushes they're you know 10 brushes that you're paying 10 for the the cost of the brushes is hidden in the shipping fees and a lot of people felt it was really disingenuous for a youtuber especially of her caliber to be posting this to her young audience in this video addressing the brushes gabby famously said the words i think that you need to manage your expectations which really became an ongoing the phrase that gets thrown back at her a lot if you look at most of her videos where she's complaining about something notably somebody will say manage your expectations and i think again this really just shows the pattern of behavior of gabby was willing to be like hey i'm sorry but she wanted to place the blame on the people who were upset with her this is kind of time and time again what we've seen from her different scandals was her apologizing but still placing blame on others now 2019 gabby put out more music again the views were still just kind of pretty steadily declining the interest in her music was obviously declining a little bit they were by no means performing poorly i'm just saying compared 15 million views to 5 million views that's a decline over time during 2019 gabby also started a pretty extensive like cleaning a whole cleaning thing on her channel where she basically just cleaned her apartment that was the whole gig she just cleaned her apartment and those videos actually did do decently well on her channel but again they were getting one to two million views and compared to her 2017-2018 videos they weren't pulling in the same numbers during this time gabby also made a couple of weird videos where she talked about the fact that she didn't even really want to be a youtuber anymore that she didn't like find joy in creating youtube content she found joy in singing but she just did youtube to pay the bills and honestly as a subscriber like if i had been a subscriber and like a fan of hers i can imagine being kind of upset by hearing that but kind of like why am i watching this content if you don't even really want to be making it you're just making it to make money i think that's one of the fastest ways to turn people off to you as a creator is by saying that you're only doing something for the money so i think it's important to note that this is when her videos started going for more long-form storytelling like she would sit in one spot and have a conversation kind of like what i'm doing to more vlog like content more follow me around while i you know get my ears pierced follow me around while i change out my air conditioning filter that was what the content was turning into you know behind the scenes of my music video it wasn't as much sit down and tell a story or challenge videos which is what people subscribed for in the very beginning so it's not incredibly shocking that she started kind of losing subscriber momentum losing view momentum because her content had really changed during this time gabby also bought a house so there was also these decorating vlogs and i think another sort of big scandal that happened in 2019 was there was a situation this is kind of a more delicate topic so i'm going to tread lightly here but there was a situation where gabby was trying to turn herself into an e-girl with her friend irene and they googled pictures of e-girls and one picture in an article popped up of a girl who had tragically passed away next to the picture in the article it did describe that but gabby kind of just scrolled past that picture commented about liking her t-shirt and then scrolled past it basically the some of the girls friends felt that gabby had exploited um the girl and exploited her image and was using it for views and they didn't feel comfortable with that and i think the real way that gabby messed up here was just the fact that she didn't just immediately delete the video as soon as somebody pointed it out the video stayed up for about a week before she finally deleted it to me i think that was the only real mistake she made i don't think i know this might be unpopular because a lot of people commentated on the situation at the time and were very very upset with her for doing this i don't think there was looking back on that situation and even at the time i've never thought that there was any malice to that situation she didn't like put the girl in the thumbnail the title had nothing to do with the girl it was very obviously just a mistake on her end where she just didn't read the article right and just edited it together quickly i do think where she made the mistake was not just immediately deleting the video she did later make a response video to this where she said she reached out to the mother of the girl and that the mother was not upset with her and to me that's enough like okay the reason this kind of also made people a little bit angry was because of a situation in 2017 basically gabby made a video it was a story time video talking about a girl who had her high school um and the moral of the video i do think was to talk about why you know don't do tricks that was obviously the moral of the video however first of all there's a couple of concerning things about this for me number one the original story time is still up on her channel right now like you can go watch that video right now where she discusses the of a classmate thing that bothers me about that is the next week she had to make a retraction video to that because the family of the victim was so incredibly hurt by that video and her whole hometown was really really hurt and upset her usage of you know this girl's story to make a story time video she talked about how the mother was upset at the representing the way that gabby represented the young girl it was really hurtful and i think that that's why this whole situation with this now in 2019 became a big deal because at the time gabby did address that but those videos are still live she's still you know profiting off of those videos that are talking about something that's really really serious that she frankly didn't know that much about that she also frankly didn't have the right to speak on and so i think that's why when this all happened in 2019 all of that got dragged back up and it's just this kind of never-ending cycle but i will say as far as the most recent issue don't agree that she did anything malicious or horrific um to this young girl her mother was obviously you know so upset about everything getting dragged back up and i agree with gabby that even talking about it to that extent and putting this girl's picture in thumbnails probably caused more pain than gabby did by just having her picture in the video and not knowing the situation i actually agree with her on that so the end of 2019 also brought about a ton of drama if you're noticing a theme here it's that every year something major happened with her and i think that is something important to note because i think the accumulation of all of this and the gradual escalation of more and more drama coming out definitely played a part in the disinterest in gabby i think people were over the drama i'm not going to go too much into the jessie and trisha drama just because i think it's really been talked about at length including by myself but basically trisha paytas made a video talking about gabby hannah just kind of discussing that gabby hannah had spread a rumor about her having an sti and how she was a really manipulative person um and then jessie smiles also made a video talking about how gabby hannah had not been supportive of her when she was had done some things that were really shady as a friend and that gabby hannah had been dming with a fan a mutual fan of both of theirs kind of disclosing pretty private information about jessie like the fact that she was on medication was sending screenshots um that jesse and gabby had had with this fan it was really really messy and it did not make gabby look good at all none of it made gabby look good and i think a bigger part of this whole thing was that gabby really didn't address this she maybe said a couple of things on like twitter but she didn't make a video she didn't address this and for the most part she just ignored everything that was said about her at least at the time in 2019 she ignored it at the time gabby came out with a music video for her song broken girls um which also again the views just kind of kept declining but after this you can definitely see that there was a definite decline in her views this is when her views started going from like one million views a video to like 700 000 a video to like 500 000 a video which for a channel of her size is low now in future videos gabby said that the reason she ignored this for so long and ignored this situation was because she didn't want to feed into cancer culture and i mean say what you will about that i don't know but that was the reason she gave for not discussing it at the time when it happened i don't think she fully anticipated the effect that this would have on her channel the effect it would have on her views the effect it would have on her music the effect it would have on everything so this kind of brings us to the present and gabby did start slowly addressing things that have been said about her what a big trend on youtube a while back was to talk about gabby hannah's poetry book because she did come out with a poetry book this that i swear there's so much to unpack here but she did come out with a poetry book called adult lessons around 2019 2020 this book started getting a lot of hate and really that was just because it was kind of obviously a little bit half rachel oates has a really fantastic video analyzing that book that i think is really great so gabby made a video addressing the criticism um of her book and in that video she also announced her brand new book which was coming out which i thought was an interesting time to plug your new book but she did address the you know criticism of her old book and i think what was really telling a video was again a same pattern that i've been trying to show with this video and that i'm seeing in this video is she was like i am receptive to criticism i understand the criticism but she talks at length about how that criticism should have been constructive and how that criticism should have been you know not as mean basically to that i really just have to say i think gabby is even from you know the joke stealing thing all the way back in 2016. i think gabby is really under a false assumption that all criticism has to be constructive or positive when that is just not the case criticism doesn't have to be constructive or helpful to you or beneficial is it a bonus when it's constructive sure but it doesn't have to be because a criticism is negative or mean doesn't mean that it's not constructive i would argue that rachel's video which was about you know gabby hannah's poetry is bad backed up why she thought it was bad she explained at great detail how she could back up the thesis of her video which was that your poetry was not great if the only criticism that you are taking as a person is criticism that is wrapped up in like a nice little present and handed to you in a nice way i don't know if that necessarily benefits you as a person in the long run and i think what this kind of shows for the past four years of content and having her criticism obviously behind the scenes being wrapped up in a bow and presented to her i don't think it really benefited her too much because it's been shown time and time again from everything we just talked about that she does not take this criticism well whether you like it or not criticism whether it be warranted or unwarranted is absolutely a major part of being an influencer she also made a video talking about the trisha and jessie smiles situation and a couple of other things that had happened this was a very lengthy video and i also did a response to this video and i don't think this video was inherently bad i think she did address some things and shed light on some things that were great but i also think in the same breath she again similarly to the past like 10 apology videos i think she showed kind of an inability to admit where she went wrong with things i think she showed an inability to take that criticism i think a big problem with this was gabby painted her version of events with this story um when it came to the jessie smiles and trisha situation she painted her version of events as the facts this was the facts it's literally what she says when she doesn't really have any more evidence than jessie or trisha did it's just her side of the story it's her version of event for the term two sides to every story comes from you know jessie gave hers you can give yours people can believe what they want based on those two things but the way that she presents hers is not this is my side of the story here's how it goes it's these are the facts and this is where i was wronged and everybody wronged me and i did nothing to deserve that and i think that attitude not willing to take accountability and not willing to fully hold herself accountable for what happened and acting like she was the victim i think that that turned a lot of people off to her and this all came to a really big head when gabby posted her music video for her new song special and i hate to keep hammering away at analytics but if you look at the analytics purely for her music video based on the trajectory they had been going since out loud which was down it makes sense that her music videos were getting less views her past two music videos before that only hit about 1.3 million views and while i'm sure that was disappointing the way that gabby handled this was really interesting abby basically said that she was upset with youtube because she felt that they were suppressing views not putting her video on trending and not supporting her as a creator i don't know the validity of them like deleting views and stuff but as far as not putting her on trending and not putting her music videos on trending i will say i think this came across pretty poorly and was received really poorly not only is it just a little bit entitled to like a demand to be on the trending page not only does that just come off kind of weird she also made the point that she's like a self-funded artist and these music videos cost her a lot of money so she should be you know she needs to recoup that and all of those things and it's like there are you know thousands of self-funded artists who are trying to make it on youtube who don't have nearly as many advantages as you do by having such a built-in you know audience of people even if that audience has shrunk over the years this is still a built-in audience that you have even the fact that any of your music videos have been trending is pretty phenomenal and fantastic so from everyone else's perspective i think it did feel except her like fans you know who want to support her i think it did feel a little bit you know weird to be complaining about not trending this also spawned into gabby being upset with youtube for pushing drama content over her own content um she showed how the algorithm favors more dramatic content and how that was a negative for her i actually kind of understand where she's coming from with this and i don't necessarily agree but i understand where she's coming from i think from gabby's perspective everything that drama channels or commentary channels say about her to her is not true she does not agree with the side of events that other people have put forward so everything they say about her is untrue and yet those videos are getting pushed to millions of people some of those videos have more views than her music videos so obviously she's upset by that and offended by that this is another example of i get where gabby's coming from i get why that would be frustrating but i don't understand why she handled it the way that she did gabby basically went on twitter for about 73 hours straight and was just purely responding to everything that got put in front of her i really can't even describe everything that happened on twitter but i'll focus on what happened on her channel gabby did multiple live streams on her vlog channels where she discussed youtube shadow banning her purposefully and how they purposefully were suppressing her content how they purposefully were not really giving her the views that she deserved and i think where a lot of this didn't add up for a lot of people was if you purely look at gabby's analytics it shows a gradual decline over time and i think this combined with all of the drama she had been in started to show this decline gabby claims that after the jessie video her channel was shadow banned by youtube and she said youtube would not trend her youtube videos or her music videos unless she would specifically like mention it and then magically they would trend personally looking at purely the analytics i think the decline was a lot more of people just kind of losing interest and being over the drama rather than a shadow ban looking at our analytics you can see that her views have gradually been declining since 2018 which is arguably when she started posting more music content and distancing herself from the blog squad and her subscribers have also steadily been not growing as much since 2018 the only massive jump down in subscriber losses was when jessie posted her video which again is to kind of be expected when any youtuber gets in any sort of drama like that gabby's channel analytics frankly kind of look like any other youtuber who peaked and then had their channel sort of fall off the radar like tyler oakley or hannah hart it doesn't show actual proof of shadow banning where there's this all of a sudden massive decline massive downward spiral the analytics just don't support that gabby does claim that she has proof that youtube is shadow banning her and that she has actual evidence that shows that youtube did this and so if she comes out with that and she shows it like i will happily take that into consideration but based on the public analytics that we the public can see and based on all of that it doesn't support her claims of being shadow bit more likely what it supports is a change in content and a loss of interest and gabby also during this time really really talked about the fact that she wasn't just doing this for herself she was doing this for other channels because other channels had to deal with things like people being unsubscribed from them views suddenly being lower all these other things and she's not wrong i at my size of channel get comments all the time from people saying they were unsubscribed to me or people saying they didn't get a notification from a new video even though they had the bell turned on youtube has a lot of kinks and she's not wrong about that but i don't really i'm not gonna lie again as from like a creator perspective i did not feel like gabby was trying to like look out for the little guy here it seemed like she just wanted her stuff fixed and then once that was fixed everything would be fine again gaby has had a long journey from vine to youtube to where she is now and while she hasn't posted on her main channel or any of her other social medias in a while she has been starting to post on her podcast again which went from being called box of thoughts to unfollow your dream i don't really know how to say this without sounding mean because i do think there were certain times the community as a whole kind of ganged up on gabby too much but i will say it's very obvious that gabby has trouble taking accountability and also definitely self-admittedly struggles with criticism any influencer on this platform that would be an issue i also think a big fault of gabby is that she's almost like too honest about things we see a lot of influencers apologize even when we know it's like tana mojo jake paul they give these apologies and we know it's not real whereas gabby you know what would be refreshing if she was a little bit better at taking accountability won't just apologize for the sake of apologizing she's not just going to apologize to appease the masses if she doesn't think she did anything wrong she's going to tell you i do think that over time continually not taking that accountability has contributed to all of this at the end of the day i don't really know what gabby is going to do next um she sells a pretty large built-in audience despite it being smaller than what it was a few years ago she still has enough fan support and enough views consistently to make a very good amount of money on youtube and to maybe not you know self-fund a music career but to live in a nice house and live comfortably with her boyfriend and like live her life i think that the adjustment from being one of the largest influencers on the platform to just not being that anymore is hard for anyone and to add in all the dramas she had to go through to get to this point i can see why she's frustrated but at the same time i also understand why you know some of her longtime subscribers and the community in general are just kind of over it i genuinely hope that these last few months of her introspecting on herself and her channel have helped her that she's been able to surround herself with people who understand her a little bit better but at the same time based on everything that's happened i really don't know how this is going to go going forward i don't know where her channel is going to go it's all kind of a big question mark right now but i think having after having analyzed her content i don't think gabby is this like evil person i don't think she's horrible i think she was just ill-prepared for the criticism that she would receive on the internet and i think she does have a personality that maybe isn't best for being the most likable influencer when it comes to like apologizing and stuff like that i'm really interested to know what your guys's thoughts are that was kind of the whole timeline and everything um if you like this video please let me know this style of video this was definitely a lot more time consuming but i really enjoyed making it so if there's anyone else or anything else you would like me to do this style of video on please let me know make sure you i don't normally say like the video but i'd love to actually see if you guys liked the video so if you made it this far and you want to like the video i would love that um i love you guys so much i hope you like this video if you did please like and subscribe or just like or just subscribe or do neither honestly just so happy you're watching me thank you so much for being here my merch my social media and everything i'm wearing on my face will be linked down below along with very important link to register to vote please click on that link please register to vote and please become an active member in your democracy along with that link will also be my little social justice spotlight there's just some petitions some places to donate important links stuff like that um and yeah i love you guys so much and i will see you in the next one [Music] bye [Music]

Channel: Smokey Glow

Views: 1,416,664

Rating: 4.9413657 out of 5

Keywords: Gabbie Hanna, Gabbie Hanna Youtube, Smokey Glow, Smokey Glow Gabbie Hanna, David Dobrik, The Vlog squad, Jessie Smiles, Carly and Erin, angelika oles, The right Opinion, Tea spill, The evolution of Gabbie Hanna, Gabbie Hanna and her content, Box of thoughts, Unfollow your dreams, more Gabbie Hanna, Gabbie Hanna Vine, gabbie hanna return, gabbie hanna back, gabbie hanna shadowbanned, gabbie hanna return to youtube

Id: irVU6bD_s8k

Length: 51min 51sec (3111 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 14 2020