FLASH INTO VIEWS
Lele Pons is hoping to ride the Youtube wave to mainstream success
LOS ANGELES “Lele, we might need you to sit up a little.”
It’s a weekday morning in late August, and Lele Pons is slouched in an armchair in her apartment; her attention deep in her phone. Her manager, Sam Shahidi, is trying to guide the 23-year-old social-media phenom through a taped interview with a journalist.
Her long blond hair has been blown into soft waves, and she is heavily made up.
The apartment, featured regularly in her video shoots, is decorated generically with neutral couches and several orchid plants. There’s a hole in the wall where a friend threw her in a staged fight during the filming of one of the videos that have made her a multimillionaire Youtube star with aspirations for greater fame.
She became the first to reach a billion loops on the micro-video site Vine in 2014 and is often credited with popularizing the phrase “Do it for the Vine,” an exhortation to live one’s life for the social media post that will result. She is so representative of a generic online personality that it is hard to tell what has exerted more influence: Youtube on Pons or Pons on Youtube?
She and her mother — who serves as an occasional extra playing herself in Pons’ videos — live in the apartment together.
There’s a golden crocodile displayed on a side table because Pons, who was born in Caracas and lived on a Venezuelan farm until she was five, loves crocodiles.
Shahidi has said that crocodiles are a favourite topic.
“I’m obsessed with them. It’s the only thing that gets me off my phone,” she says, as she looks at her phone.
She’s explaining distractedly that her father, who lives in Miami, arranges for small alligators to be delivered to his pool when Pons visits, so that she can swim with them as a form of therapy.
All of a sudden, she stops. “Wait, is this the interview?”
It is. Pons looks confused. “If you can tell me, like, ‘action?’” she asks. Action.
Pons sits up.
“Well,” she says brightly, with an uptick in energy. “I’m obsessed with them,” she says of the crocodiles and continues the story she told before, just more colourfully, as if the previous exchange had never happened.
The distance between her real self and her on-camera self has grown in recent years, as Pons has evolved from a 16-year-old high school student creating videos about how to skip class into one of the biggest entertainers on social media.
She has lasted — and outlasted other social media personalities — because she does nothing to subvert the expectations of her fans and nothing to offend. She has all the right fights at all the right times. She lives by the rules of social media and is in turn rewarded for it.
Her videos had 121 million views on Youtube in August, and she has created posts sponsored by Google, Tinder, the Dragon City video game and Budweiser. She appeared in a Jack in the Box commercial. She recently recorded a Spanish-language pop single that reached triple platinum status for Latin music on the American music charts. She plans to release a new music video this year that she wrote, directed and edited. She wants to be an entertainer and cringes when she’s called an influencer.
Among her fans are the platforms that monetize her: “She is vulnerable, hilarious and insanely creative,” says Jake O’leary, global head of artist marketing at Youtube, noting that her content connects with the platform’s global audience.
Soon after Eleonora Pons was born in Caracas, the family moved to the countryside to take over a family business that manufactured farm equipment.
“I didn’t talk until I was three,” Pons recalls.
Even after she could talk, “she was much better drawing or painting a story board, instead of having to tell her story with her own words,” says her father, Luis Pons, an architect and interior designer.
When Pons was five, she and her mother, who is Italian and a pediatrician, were kidnapped and ransomed, a common occurrence in some parts of Latin America. The experience spurred the family to move to Miami, though her parents would later divorce.
After she entered grade school in Miami, “immediately we figured out ... she had learning disabilities,” her father says.
Luis says she was diagnosed with dyslexia, attention-deficit disorder and Tourette syndrome. They hired tutors and therapists to help her.
During high school, she trained as a classical opera singer. Around the same time, a friend showed her a new app called Vine, where she could create a six-second video on her phone. In Vine videos, Pons found something she enjoyed, almost a passion. “And then it just, like, blew up.”
She was making at least one, sometimes two, Vines a day.
“No one even told me a schedule for posting. I just needed it,” she says. When she was out and people asked for selfies, she knew she was getting somewhere.
In 2016, Pons made Time magazine’s list of “The 30 Most Influential People on the internet,” joining Caitlyn Jenner, Kanye West and Donald Trump. In 2017, she walked the runway for Dolce & Gabbana; she was one of Forbes’ 30 under 30; she scored a role in Camila Cabello’s Havana video.
Choosing projects isn’t always easy. Pons has fans as young as nine and others who are in their 20s, and she doesn’t want to alienate any of them. It has made for a difficult mix of topics. One day, she’s twerking on a tree. The next, she’s making a video about Dora the Explorer. The span of topics has drawn criticism over exposing children to inappropriate content.
A few years ago, Pons signed on to be managed by Shots Studios, co-founded by Sam and John Shahidi and partially funded by their friend Justin Bieber. The production and management company also manages other Vine-turnedyoutube talent, such as Rudy Mancuso, Hannah Stocking and Anwar Jibawi.
Managing stars who were born online calls for a specific sensibility and guidance, says Sam Shahidi: “We have the stigma of influencers trying to be artists. The industry view is they aren’t talented: ‘Yeah they can build a fan base, but they can’t act or direct or sing or perform.’ We always have to work against that.”
Advertising revenue on Youtube for the biggest stars can range from $2 million to $5 million a year, one industry expert said, depending on the geographic breakdown of the audience. Individual sponsorship deals and other commercials can add onto that, not to mention Instagram, Facebook and other platforms.
Pons has been at this for seven years, which can feel like a long time. Few Youtube stars think they will stick with it forever. In five years, Pons hopes to have a family.
“I get tired ideas-wise,” she admits. But she doesn’t see a day when she’s not posting. She says she’ll stay interested if she can evolve, which means releasing more music, traditional acting and maybe directing.
“I didn’t come this far just to get this far,” she says. “I’m going to keep going.”
I get tired ideas-wise ... I didn’t come this far just to get this far. I’m going to keep going.