In 2012 Vine was founded by Dom Hofmann, Rus Yusupov and Colin Kroll. Vine was a platform where users could upload 6 second videos and share them with the rest of the community. Most of the clips contained comedy and content aimed at children and teenagers.
4 months after its release, Twitter bought Vine for $30 million. Vine was supposed to be Instagram's rival and Twitter's secret weapon. During its peak, vine had 2 users who were insanely popular and had millions of followers which watched them everyday. Those 2 users were the Paul brothers.
These 2 made the most out of Vine. Their constant and daily ''grinding'' was always appreciated by their fanbase. They dominated Vine and always had content which would appeal to their target audience.
In 2013, Instagram introduced videos. Users could record videos up to 15 seconds and share with not only the Instagram community but also with Facebook. Instagram provided the users with a number of filters and effects and it also allowed users to edit their videos. As Instagram grew more popular, advertisers were lining up to promote their products.
In 2016 Twitter officially announced that they will be shutting down Vine. Instagram's new features were overall better and well engineered. A major reason for Vine's shutdown could have been money. Since advertisers didn't pay that much attention to Vine and focused more on Instagram. After all, Instagram had over 100 million users while at the time Vine had over 13 million.
After hearing the news, the most famous ''viners'' including the Paul brothers moved to YouTube. That period was named ''The Viner Invasion''. In their last vines, most viners encouraged their audience to move to YouTube so that they can continue to watch their content. Little did they know that they would become even more successful and famous in YouTube.
As of now Logan Paul has over 16 million subrscibers and Jake Paul has over 13 million subscribers.
Both famous for their incredibly ridiculous behaviour, one being a ''Maverick'' and the other being...apparently something else and different?
The reason behind their success is YouTube's algorithm. From viners they became vloggers. They record what happens in their life, everyday. Since they do a good job of censoring curse words and manage to keep their content suitable for the whole family, (somehow, I don't know how that works) advertisers are ready to put as many ads as possible on their videos.
In the beginning of their YouTube careers they were both considered to be standard successful content creators. However a lot of that changed in the year 2017.
2017 was the year of the Diss Tracks. All of the famous youtubers would all of the sudden start hating each other and create diss tracks. Some beef would be fake (most of the time) while there would be some time when they actually mean what they say.
Of course, Jake and Logan were not exceptions. All of the sudden the brothers started hating each other for no reason and started making disstracks. This was one of the best strategies in order to gain a lot of revenue. Because you have a music video which is bound to get popular and you also have content which is aimed at teenagers and advertiser friendly, what more do you need?
The same year was also controversial for Jake Paul, since he started pranking his housemates. Jake Paul lives with multiple YouTubers, together they call each other ''Team 10''. All of them have pretty much the same behaviour and character. In 2017 Jake Paul managed to piss off a lot of his neighbours and that's why near the end of the year he had to move out of his house... to a mansion.
Jake Paul's pranks were absurd and follish, all the way from blindfolding a girl and having her kiss random people (one of the random people being Jake's father) to burning furniture at the backyard of their house and during the process wasting firefighters' time.
In 2018, to all the things mentioned above, Logan Paul said '''hold my beer''. Up until then, Logan was considered to be the older, therefore smarter brother.
During the year 2018, in his visit to Japan, Logan Paul decided to vlog... in the Japanese Suicide Forest. He stubmled upon the corpse of someone who obviously commited suicide and decided to film it and laugh about it.
What was more interesting about this video was the fact that Logan removed it himself after seeing the backlash. YouTube has been very strict with its uploaders ever since the Adpocalypse and has been removing any kind of videos which include violence, hate speech or talk about violence. However YouTube completely approved this video and it even allowed advertisers to put ads on it.
Logan Paul apologized about the video and returned to YouTube with an awareness video about suicide and depression. Some people forgave him, others didn't. But what caught my eye was his appearance on Good Morning America. There, he mentioned that the video happened ''for a reason'' and that it was supposed to be some sort of a ''sign'' of fate, that he had to go through all of this to find out how important is the fact that people commit suicide. At first it sounds nice of him saying that, but when you think about it, he edited the whole thing and decided to publish it. To add more damage to the wound, YouTube even monetized it.
Another thing which he reflected on in the interview was money and that he doesn't care about it. This is a completely false statement. If he didn't care about money, he wouldn't monetize his videos and he would give away his merchandise instead of selling it.
The problem with these youtubers is that, they are pretty much unstoppable. The more attention you give them, the higher they rise. The more you talk about it, the worse it gets. We all know that YouTube wouldn't do anything to the Paul brothers because they are YouTube's money machine. Since everything revolves around money and family friendly content, Logan Paul will easily return to YouTube and continue his career. It's a pretty much a win-win situation for them because they are controversial and they get into people's faces.
As long as YouTube continues to desire money, the Paul brothers will never be stopped. They have come up with the best money making strategy/scheme. They upload everyday, they upload utter stupidity which appeals to the younger generation, they bleep the curse words and keep everything PG.
I personally am not a fan of these 2 but I'm more concerned about the children who are ready to defend, recreate and do everything which their YouTube idols do, only and only to be called a ''maverick'' or ''jakepauler''.
Sources:
https://socialnewsdaily.com/49402/how-to-make-money-from-youtube/
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-08-02/youtube-takes-steps-censor-controversial-aka-conservative-content
http://www.digitalspy.com/tech/news/a847109/youtube-apologises-logan-paul-dead-body-video/
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dotcapx.diss
https://www.dailydot.com/upstream/youtube-vine-wattpad/
https://elderhsquill.org/11854/news/rip-vine/
https://techcrunch.com/2013/06/20/facebook-instagram-video/
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/logan-and-jake-paul-everything-you-need-to-know-w514886
https://www.sosyalsosyal.com/instagram-ve-vine-arasindaki-farklar
http://www.viralblog.com/social-media/why-twitters-new-video-app-vine-is-not-so-fine/
https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2016/10/twitter-is-killing-vine-here-are-the-5-reasons-why.html
https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2016/10/vine-the-short-form-video-app-is-dead.html
http://allthingsd.com/20121009/twitter-buys-vine-a-video-clip-company-that-never-launched/
https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/28/13456208/why-vine-died-twitter-shutdown
http://thesocialmediabuzz.com/65-did-instagram-just-kill-vine/
http://www.adweek.com/digital/twitter-just-shut-down-vine-4-years-after-buying-it-30-million-174301/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIayatCrx7U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zj4Fs4cSR90
