lonelygirl15

» see youtube.com/user/lonelygirl15 as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

i remember the youtube of '06 and '07 from ankara. comp eng student years, ttnet adsl had just become normal at home, youtube was the english-language video layer i'd flip to from msn conversations. lonelygirl15 was somewhere in that traffic without me consciously following it. honestly, the trending vlog about a homeschooled teen named bree was a sidebar item i'd glance at and skip past, the sort of thing other people on msn would link in chat.

anyway, the first lonelygirl15 video uploaded 16 june '06 to a youtube account "lonelygirl15", with a video diary titled "first blog / dorkiness prevails". the channel ran a few times a week through the summer with bree (the username's character) talking to camera about her homeschooled life, her crush daniel, her religious parents. the production looked exactly like a teenager's bedroom webcam vlog from the period, with low light and a single camera angle.

look, the story arc thickened. anyway, bree's parents were preparing her for "the ceremony" of an unspecified cult-like religious order. her friend daniel started cross-uploading concerned reaction videos. across july and august the channel passed 30,000 then 50,000 subscribers as the cult mystery built. the channel held the top-subscribed slot on youtube for 226 days running, the first creator account ever to cross the 50k threshold.

i pretty much was not paying attention. by september '06 the la times had pieced together that bree was not real. an ip address pulled from emails the lonelygirl15 team had sent to fans pointed to creative artists agency in beverly hills. journalist tom foremski independently identified actress jessica lee rose from a cached myspace profile. the la times story broke september 12 '06 with miles beckett and the goodfried producer team named.

~ the record ~

~ the funny part ~

the reveal did not kill the show. anyway, the subscriber base mostly stayed. the series formally rebranded as a scripted production with a writers' room and continuing storylines. eqal (a new media company formed by the producers) ran it as an early monetization experiment. the show continued for another two years on youtube under the new structure, ending august 1 '08 with the final episode of the planned arc.

to be honest, the reveal taught a thing about youtube that nobody had needed to learn yet. authenticity on the platform was a performance choice rather than a default state. the bedroom-webcam aesthetic could be staged. the talking-head vlog was a production format anyone with a script and an actress could replicate. every subsequent youtube scripted series operated post-lonelygirl15 in a landscape where viewers had already lost the assumption that webcam equaled real.

~ the legacy ~

lonelygirl15 is the first credit on the wikipedia list of youtube original web series. the eqal team kept making scripted youtube content into the late 2000s before the founders moved into separate production careers. jessica lee rose continued acting after the show ended. arg-style alternate reality narrative on social platforms (lonelygirl15 was halfway there) became a recognizable storytelling form by the early 2010s. the bree avery channel is still up on youtube as an archive.

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