Joana Ceddia got famous on YouTube for being a normal teen, and she’s trying to stay that way
What happened to Joana Ceddia could happen to you — if you’re young and funny, and if you can edit in iMovie, and if you have the foresight to film yourself when you decide to chop off your own hair with crafting scissors, and if you can sew and paint, and if you are blessed with the divine intervention of YouTube’s algorithms.
The Canadian teenager, then 17, became suddenly famous last year, after YouTube recommended two of her videos, filmed months earlier, to a ton of viewers. In the first video, she gave herself a haircut. In the second, she attempted to re-create a famous YouTube personality’s clothing line.
Joana still doesn’t know why these videos catapulted her to fame. Maybe it was the fact that one of them mentioned popular YouTuber Emma Chamberlain in the title; or maybe it was because they felt like Old YouTube, the chaotic playground that existed before creators began performing “relatability” like dancers in a professional ballet. Joana was more like the kid waving her arms like a dork and dancing along to the music with her friends. Her adventures in DIY fashion were goofy but weirdly good. Viewers loved it.
“It was the most exciting thing that ever happened to me,” she said in an interview.
It happened 10 months and 2.4 million followers ago. Now, Joana was sitting in the lobby of the Hyatt Regency in Orange County, in a large, powder-blue booth, with her parents. They’d just landed in Los Angeles for VidCon, the annual gathering of famous online creators, their fans and the industries that court them. The convention, now in its 10th year, was both chaotic and tightly organized — a symbol for how online stardom is no longer quite what it once was. Whether millennials and Gen X and boomers are ready for it, getting famous online is something that could happen to their kids.
Generation Z has calibrated its aim accordingly, and so has the entertainment industry. Middle-schoolers who a generation ago might have said they wanted to be an actor or musician now want to become the next David Dobrik. In that sense, Joana Ceddia’s story was a dream come true.
There is a dark side of YouTube fame, though, and over the course of a decade, VidCon has attempted to catch up with that, too. There were
panels on burnout, harassment and mental-health struggles. YouTube fame is a gift that can become a burden.
Joana is glad YouTube catapulted her out of the oblivion of normal teen-dom, but she is determined not to become a casualty of her own good fortune.
The Hyatt was a secure zone, where famous YouTubers like her could stay without worrying about mobs of fans, where shuttles escorted them to and from the convention hall. At the time of last year’s VidCon, Joana hadn’t even started her YouTube channel.
It started as a way to keep from going insane from boredom after an injury stalled her competitive running career. Joana posted a painting video, a thrift store haul. Last July, she made a video thanking, and apologizing to, her first subscriber. (That person then unsubscribed.)
Later that month, while her mom was out, Joana sat in the bathroom and lopped off several inches of her hair using a dubious method she’d seen on YouTube tutorials. She finished the video by showing her new ’do to her mom, who wasn’t thrilled. That video was one of the two that YouTube eventually promoted, resulting in Joana’s sudden surge in viewers.
“I didn’t think it was going to last,” said Denilce Campos, Joana’s mom. “I told her, ‘When school starts, it’s over.’”
The opposite ended up coming true. When her senior year began, last September, Joana’s channel had 500 subscribers. That was the week things got crazy. By the end of the first week of classes, she had topped 100,000.
Joana kept making videos, and that October, her subscriber count passed the 1 million mark.
The algorithmic mechanism that launched her to idol status is a black box, but Joana’s appeal is no mystery: She has Relatable Girl Energy, the kind of natural charisma that makes other girls her age want to watch how she lives her life. Her earliest videos were the standard fare of the genre: funny slice-of-life videos, filled with quick-fire editing, emphatic face-zooms and lots of self-deprecation.
But as she gained subscribers, Joana started watching her early videos and wasn’t happy with them. “I’m relying on the editing to make me funny and not on my personality or my jokes,” she remembered thinking. “What’s going to happen when I go in public and I’m talking to someone?”
Eventually, Joana found her own style: a kind of narrative vlog, shaped by her daily life and grounded by her insistence on using cheap supplies and equipment as much as possible. She shared her strange favored breakfast of an avocado wrapped in a tortilla. She DIY’d a convincing version of Prince’s cloud suit — the one the singer wore in the music video for “Raspberry Beret” — using fabric-store felt. She posted a hairstyling “tutorial” in which she stacked hair ties on top of each other to make a ponytail stand straight up, the edges of her hair fanning out like palm leaves.
Her parents became secondary characters. Her mom is now known to her daughter’s fans as “Mother Goose.”
“To put yourself out on the internet takes a lot of courage,” Joana said. “You have to be careful with what you’re putting out there, because people can twist it.”
For instance: If she gets into a relationship, she says, she wouldn’t be comfortable putting it online. She’s seen what’s happened to other YouTubers, whose personal relationships are dissected, criticized and debated on drama channels and Twitter.
“When the fans get involved, they almost blame you for the choices you make,” she said. “If they disagree with you, they take personal offense to it. That can be really detrimental to your sanity.”
So far, Joana has managed to cultivate a relatively positive relationship with her fans. Her announcement that she was going to college rather than making YouTube her top priority went over surprisingly well. “I think I could count on one hand the amount of people who said, ‘Oh, I disagree with you, school is toxic,’ “she said. “The majority of people were like, ‘Thank God.’ “