21 minute read
They Really Like Me
Philip DeFranco and the power of news-influencers
by Clare Malone
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Most every weekday, Philip DeFranco sits down in front of a camera to face the internet. Behind him is what looks like a man cave: red walls; a black leather couch with red and silver throw pillows;
“industrial chic” knickknack shelves showcasing a globe shellacked in black paint—the aspirational style of a frat house president. Thirty-five, with a pomaded swoop of brown hair, DeFranco often wears hoodies, sometimes tie-dye ones with slogans like EMOTION-
ALLY EXHAUSTED or DON’T BE STUPID, STUPID.
He greets his audience with the same line he’s used for years: “Sup, you beautiful bastards?”
DeFranco is the host of an eponymous show on
YouTube that aims to deliver the news in about fifteen minutes. Episodes have covered Russian hacking, Donald Trump’s tweets, Tom Cruise’s on-set COVID-19 safety rant, YouTuber JoJo Siwa’s coming-out, Pornhub’s removal of underage content, and an apparently much anticipated but wildly glitchy video game called Cyberpunk 2077.
Each segment—helpfully labeled if you hover over the video progress bar—is usually around two or three minutes; some run longer depending on the complexity of the subject at hand. It’s news aggregation without the need to scroll, perfect for when you’re sipping a morning cup of coffee or hunching over a sad desk salad.
The Philip DeFranco Show is not prestige journalism. In an informal survey of New York Times–subscribing friends, none knew who he was; he has a not-that-impressive (as these things go) 1.2 million followers on Twitter. DeFranco is aware of this.
“There are people in the industry that see themselves as higher,” he once said. “You see it every time someone writes about a YouTuber in a very disrespectful light, like we’re nothing, like we’re this fad.
Even though this is the swing of the new normal.”
But if, years ago, onlookers expressed curiosity about how long it would be until YouTubers entered the media mainstream, it’s instead the mainstream media that has become more like YouTube: busted up into narrow verticals of interest. To his audience, DeFranco is, as the Orlando Sentinel put it, “Walter Cronkite for the YouTube generation,” serving more than 7 million YouTube-channel subscribers. That’s 1.7 million more than a recent week’s viewership of the CBS Evening News, and 4.5 million more than the February prime-time audience for Fox News. His videos have been seen more than a billion times.
To the uninitiated, DeFranco’s YouTube dialect and cadence can be jarring: lots of “Hit that like button or else I will punch you in the throat” mixed with jump cuts and hand-and-eyebrow emoting. (DeFranco, who also goes by PhillyD, has cited Dane Cook as one of his early influences.) By the end of an episode, his viewers have been “filled in.” (Get it? Phil, fill!) DeFranco also makes room in his lineup to cover YouTube stars’ myriad controversies— Jake Paul’s coronavirus denial, Gabi DeMartino’s OnlyFans dustup—in a way that both emphasizes the celebrity of his cohort and potentially alienates newcomers. (Get ready to Google.)
Still, as an elder millennial, DeFranco presents himself as a voice of reason in a chaotic world. Original reporting it is not, but his news sense is substantive, and he has a compelling way of talking through chewy politics stories and buzzy entertainment items by plucking intersecting threads of culture, business, and shifting norms. Take the January show in which he covered Trump’s deplatforming by various social media companies: DeFranco started with the news of Twitter’s ban, then quickly dived into the question of free speech, citing legal experts who said that pushing Trump out wasn’t a violation of the First Amendment; then he tacked on an open-ended riff on the disproportionate power that unelected tech executives hold over American life. Back in December, he posted a similarly deft segment: focusing on Olivia Jade’s appearance on Red Table Talk—she of “Operation Varsity Blues” fame, the red table belonging to Jada Pinkett Smith’s Facebook talk show juggernaut—DeFranco summarized what had been an
often uncomfortable dissection of wealth and race, inserting his own musings on redemption in the age of cancellation.
It’s not heavy-handed, think-y opinionating; the short-segment format saves DeFranco from polemic. For what he’s trying to do—digest the news, offer a point of view, and solicit audience feedback— it’s effective. And, evidently, he’s uniquely capable of bringing people back day after day. Geoff Weiss, a senior editor for TubeFilter, a publication that covers the entertainment industry, told me that the combination of DeFranco’s steady viewership—his daily videos regularly rack up more than a million views— and longevity on the platform is “kind of a stunning accomplishment.” Many of the early YouTube stars
have either burned out or been canceled, Weiss said. “He’s stood the test of time and remained relevant in a way that is pretty rare.”
DeFranco is, in that sense, a well-developed model for a recently emergent category: the journalist-influencer. His career path becomes instructive to the newsy YouTube shows, Substacks, Patreons, TikToks, and Twitches that continue to proliferate, as their proprietors must learn to balance coverage, business, and community—all while maintaining trust (a/k/a “influencing”). Ostensibly, he’s living the dream of the “mini media empire” that downtrodden, underpaid journalists envy; his hoodies, by the way, are for sale in his Emotionally Exhausted merchandise collection, as are a line of recently produced DON’T BE STUPID, STUPID masks “for all your favorite influencers who keep partying in the middle of a pandemic.” How he does it and who’s tuning in tell us quite a bit about who America wants its journalists to be.
The archetypal image of a journalist used to be pretty easy to conjure: dogged and supposedly objective in search of truth; soft waistline; passionately self-righteous about civic duty while remaining square in delivery. This is not, however, the contemporary conception of a journalist—who, depending on your outlook, might be an “enemy of the people,” some kind of elitist, alarmist culture-warrior, or a standard-bearer of an oppressive and overly nostalgic monoculture centered on white anchors and scribes. So it is perhaps no surprise that, despite or because of a lack of reporting experience, DeFranco, a white man, has both found success in the news realm and chosen to eschew the label “journalist.” His Twitter bio reads, “I talk about and try to make the news consumable for a living.”
Before becoming a YouTube star, DeFranco, who was born in the Bronx, was a college dropout who for a while lived out of his car, in Florida. His home life had been troubled; he held a series of odd jobs. In early blog posts (available now only through the Internet Archive), he revealed rough edges and more than a little youthful angst and vitriol. Since then he has become polished, though he’s made it plain to his audience that he wants to be seen as an individual first and foremost, not as a member of a profession that has witnessed tanking trust numbers over recent decades. Gallup has long tracked the American public’s lagging faith in the press, and in 2020 only around 40 percent had “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of trust in media; the Edelman Trust Barometer report for 2021 found an eight-point drop in trust in traditional media globally. Among Republicans, trust in the press is the lowest it’s ever been.
Young audiences maintain journalism-consumption habits that are radically different from their parents’; the Reuters Institute found that news consumers in Generation Z (ages eighteen to twentyfour) have a weak connection to mainstream media brands and are more than twice as likely as the rest of the adult population to seek out news from social platforms. Some of the most popular YouTube news channels are produced not by large media organizations, but by independent YouTube stars. (Otobong Udofia, age nineteen, has been watching DeFranco for years: “I think what I like about him is he’s informal,” he said. “Rather than your average news network, where everyone’s in suits and ties.” Udofia has stuck with DeFranco partially out of habit: “I guess it’s like the way Gen Xers probably see late-night.”)
DeFranco isn’t cosplaying the role of newsman; he understands that people come to him because he’s forthcoming with his takes. In a sense, he is of the classic commentator mold (Walter Winchell, Rachel Maddow), doing the news from a known perspective, but what makes him next-generation is that he spends a lot of time defining himself to his audience in intimate terms. During a segment about an internet controversy involving Lizzo and “diet culture,” for instance, he broke in and talked about his weight gain. “I’m actually two hundred and fifty-six pounds right now,” DeFranco said. “As a bigger person currently, I am still as deserving
Years ago, onlookers wondered how long it would be until YouTubers entered the media mainstream. Now the mainstream has become more like YouTube.
of love.” In another video, posted on his personal-life-focused spin-off channel “Defranco Does,” he discussed the toll that the pandemic has taken on his mental health. “I started developing an eating disorder where I would binge, and then I would binge and purge,” he said, noting that he’d just begun taking a low dose of Lexapro. He’s spoken of his mother hitting him when he was a child and of their recent reconciliation. Longtime viewers have seen lots of footage of his two young children, and you can watch DeFranco’s wedding, in 2015, to Lindsay Doty, a former YouTube influencer. (He’d proposed to her in front of a live audience of paying fans.)
When a knottier subject comes up, DeFranco applies the “Comment below” feedback system. His audience—his “community”—feels respected and heard; he offers them a stake and a sense that he’s responsive to their opinions. Sometimes he literally is: DeFranco has a text number where fans can reach him, and apparently he replies personally (though he declined to be interviewed for this story). His fan relationships run so deep that a member of his audience once gave DeFranco’s father a new kidney.
DeFranco has been honest with viewers about his shifts in thinking, too—political and otherwise. During the 2012 election, he endorsed Gary Johnson, a libertarian. He has made it abundantly clear that he dislikes Trump, though he expressed irritation in 2016 when YouTubers sent public pleas for their fellow stars to endorse Hillary Clinton. In a recent video about Morgan Wallen, a white country music star who used an anti-Black slur, DeFranco said, “Here’s the thing—saying it has always been wrong. I mean, way, way back in the day, I thought it was okay, like, if a Black person was saying it and I was quoting them, I could say it. No.”
In a 2017 interview with DeFranco, Dave Rubin, a fellow YouTuber, attributed DeFranco’s appeal in the midst of a whipped-up political climate to his fundamental “decency” and willingness to engage with everyone. “When you put someone in a corner, all you’re really doing is locking them down in their belief,” DeFranco said. “If the real intent is to hopefully provoke truth, hopefully promote the right thought, hopefully then you’re leaving the door open for them.” Fair enough. But that’s also what traditional news outlets strive to do, albeit while they speak to broad demographic swaths and work within established reporting norms, like developing sources. There’s a certain smugness that can come across in DeFranco’s self-assessments, as if he doesn’t realize it’s easier to build trust within a narrow slice of the population that identifies with you—his show’s audience is 66 percent male— especially when you’re never breaking news that might displease them.
Still, DeFranco’s personality-driven style offers a direct contrast with the impartial mode of traditional journalism, at once an indictment and a corrective. Other emergent stars have followed suit: Marcus DiPaola (2.6 million followers) reads the news on TikTok in seconds-long bites and has a section on his website announcing his personal biases; Hasan Piker (1.1 million followers) talks politics with a left-wing slant on Twitch. Lately, even mainstream outlets seem willing to humanize their contributors to build trust—and avoid losing ground—by becoming more transparent about their reporting process and narrative positioning. Many journalists engage with followers on Twitter (sometimes a good idea, often not) or show their work, like David Fahrenthold, of the Washington Post, who shares snapshots of his notepad as he ticks off calls and primary source documents. The New York Times has the Times Insider, which reveals the paper’s editorial decision-making. DeFranco’s take, when it comes to connecting with his audience, is frank: “I’ve made people angry, and that’s fine,” he’s said. “My hope is that I’ve formed a relationship with people where it’s okay to do that—that I’m your friend or that person you’re friendly with that you talk about stuff you don’t necessarily agree with.”
All that trust has allowed DeFranco to cash in. His sponsors—Squarespace, Get Roman, NordVPN—buy around a minute of DeFranco reading their ad copy in his videos. Marketing with DeFranco seems pretty effective: after he plugged BetterHelp, an online therapy service, a fan tweeted, “I just applied for online counseling through BetterHelp bc Philip Defranco recommends it and I trust that man with my life.” In addition to his show-related merch, DeFranco hawks a line of hair-care products called Beautiful Bastard. He has a Patreon, of course, offering five- and ten-dollara-month membership options. His exact net worth is unclear, but in 2019 DeFranco bought a $4.1 million home in the Encino neighborhood of Los Angeles: a palm-tree-lined estate, hidden from street view, that includes a guesthouse, pool, and tennis court—as well as a screening room that features, in the words of Variety, “recliner chairs upholstered in a particularly lurid red velvet and a fiberoptic ceiling treatment meant to mimic a starry night sky, something unheard of in Los Angeles.”
Of course, DeFranco’s wealth is far from representative of the financial situation of most or even many independent journalists. (That broad categorization contains multitudes: pundits, commentators, podcasters, people with Substacks, people with decent Twitter followings.) I asked Michael Socolow, a media historian at the University of Maine, if there was any precedent for the niche fame available on today’s platforms. Radio during its heyday, perhaps? Socolow was skeptical. “Broadcasting is a push medium, where you push your thing out to millions,”
he said. “But like cable TV, YouTube would be a pull medium, because people have to go to you.” In other words, if you want to make any kind of sustainable living while operating in today’s balkanized media market, building a loyal audience is key.
DeFranco spent years doing so. When he made his debut on YouTube, in September 2006, he’d gotten in on the ground floor, registering under the account name “sxephil,” with an interest in discussing “Newsie type stuff.” In those early days, he solicited donations from viewers, telling them that he was out of money and needed to pull enough together to drive to Florida. The following summer, seeking to expand his audience, he posted a video called “Big Boobs and You,” with a thumb-
nail image of a woman’s breasts. It was a hit, with 1.8 million views, and put DeFranco—“bawdy YouTube humorist,” per the Los Angeles Times—on the map. Over the years, DeFranco spun out a “vlog,” as well as “SourceFed,” a channel focused on news. By 2012, with funding from Google, he was covering the Democratic and Republican Party conventions. The following year, Revision3, a part of Discovery Digital Networks, acquired the rights to his full portfolio of channels and merchandise. DeFranco stayed ensconced in the corporate structure until 2017, when, as he put it in a video, “For the first time in four years I am an independent creator again.” In the same breath, he introduced his Patreon, “to make sure no corporate interests can manipulate and control how the news is presented.”
Absent a viral gambit like “Big Boobs,” newcomers to personal-brand journalism, or the not-quite-journalistic-influencer business, seem more likely to make it if they have preexisting clout— often acquired through traditional institutions, with all their attendant blind spots. Substack, for instance, has approached established writers such as Matthew Yglesias, Anne Helen Petersen, and Andrew Sullivan, who, with their loyal fan bases, seemed sure bets to make money. (Yglesias, a cofounder of Vox, came through: Substack paid him an advance of $250,000, and it turned out that, thanks to his 9,800 subscribers, he’s due to make more than $800,000 a year.) “It’s the influencer economy,” Socolow said. He was dubious that many unknowns could become high-earning breakout stars.
And say you’ve made it to a new platform. Building an enduringly monetizable brand requires dedicated audience engagement, which takes up a whole lot of time. Jessica Yellin, a former CNN White House correspondent, now streams TV-news-esque rundowns and daily interviews on Instagram; if you sign up for her Patreon, she offers additional behindthe-scenes content and Zoom Q&As. Yellin, who works fifteen-to-eighteen-hour days, also engages with her viewers in DMs and in the comments section: “It’s the downtime activity of every day,” as she wrote to me. Emily Atkin, who runs Heated, a climate news Substack, set up her email with an “auto reply from a busy lady” message; her workload is immense, she told me, but she aims to send at least five substantive notes to readers per day and to reply to Twitter DMs. “I definitely try to read the comments on the articles every day because only paid subscribers can comment,” she said. “And I try to either like them or interact with them, since it means a lot to people to be able to pick my brain.”
Jay Caspian Kang, who along with E. Tammy Kim and Andy Liu runs It’s Time to Say Goodbye, a Substack newsletter and Patreon podcast, makes a habit of replying to readers’ emails. “Reacting to people you haven’t met feels a little bit like the early days of the internet,” he said. “It allows you to have a connection with people that’s deeper than the sort of processing through ‘the take’ filters on Twitter.” As Goodbye evolves, that might leave fewer hours for feature writing—Kang is a writer-at-large for the New York Times Magazine—but he figures his new venture is a worthwhile investment. “I looked around, and I was like, Well, I can’t just write magazine stories for the next ten years,” he said. “I just don’t get paid enough doing it to support a family, and I don’t get health insurance; I don’t get any benefits or anything like that.” Maybe, he hopes, the podcast will “grow to a point where it helps pay for some portion of our lives.”
The rest depends on the consistency of the product. “I will not talk shit on money, but for me it’s really what we’re putting out there,” DeFranco has said. “Every move that I’ve done, while money might have been a part of it, it’s always about: What is the end result of the content we could make or that we want to make?” Of course, doing work you’re proud of is hard enough, and when you’re juggling so many facets of production, from community management to ad sales, it can be easy to screw up. In 2018, for example, BetterHelp was accused of misleading users about the quality of its online therapists; in a video, DeFranco scrambled to address “ridiculous accusations” that he was scamming viewers. Later, he dropped BetterHelp as a sponsor. By this past January, when the investment firm RobinHood
ran afoul of pretty much the entire internet for suspending trades of GameStop stock, DeFranco was out ahead of the pitch: he opened his video the following day with a strong condemnation of the company’s actions and an assurance that he would pull its future sponsorship of his channel. “Burning some bridges with this new Thursday show,” he tweeted. It may be that DeFranco’s greatest value proposition is a keen awareness of his audience’s mindset—and a willingness to adjust to suit.
Striking out from the irksome constraints of corporate overlords has an obvious appeal, but scaling up is hard to do. To make things work, you might just need to fall back on an institution—or form one of your own. As it happened, DeFranco, the independent new-media success story, did not generate his huge fan base all on his lonesome. By 2012, when he was hosting SourceFed, he had nine people working for him, supported by funding from Google; there are now as many as thirteen people included in the credits for The Philip DeFranco Show. A spokesperson confirmed that, pre-pandemic, there were thirty on staff across the DeFranco enterprise, which now includes Rogue Rocket, a production company DeFranco founded in 2017.
That’s not exactly a secret to his fans: “I know that he’s got a team of researchers, and he provides the links, all the original sources,” Allison De Jong, a twenty-five-year-old who watches DeFranco over dinner, said. But even so, the fact that he has a team at all punctures any illusion that YouTube— or any other platform—is a means by which an obscure solo operator can rise to prominence. The news-influencer business belongs, at this point, to professionals—those with the means to operate at high capacity and the ability to navigate complex relationships with powerful tech companies. Weiss said, of DeFranco, “He’s done a lot of different things, a lot of different businesses, a lot of different formats.”
DeFranco has also been outspoken about why YouTube might not be his creative home forever. In 2016, at the behest of advertisers, YouTube cracked down on the monetization of videos, disabling ads on those deemed not to be “advertiser friendly” or to contain “graphic content” or “excessive strong language.” The dragnet, executed by artificial intelligence, was ostensibly targeted at right-wing hate speech and sexually explicit material, but creators like DeFranco, who swears in his videos and talks about controversial subjects, got caught up. Traditional news outlets with YouTube channels were not similarly affected. “I’ve seen channels dinged now for talking about depression and anti-bullying,” he complained to Vox. “And I’ve also seen channels like CNN include footage of a Syrian boy covered in blood, after his house was reportedly bombed, and right next to the video is a nice little ad for sneakers. So you get the question, ‘Why me and not them?’ ” DeFranco claimed, too, that some of his posts no longer appear on viewers’ personalized YouTube homepages and called YouTube’s actions “a form of censorship.” In the first month of YouTube’s disciplinary spree, DeFranco’s ad revenue dropped by 30 percent. In a company comment at the time, YouTube said that it hadn’t changed its policy or methods of enforcement but acknowledged there had been “some confusion.” In late 2017, Susan Wojcicki, the CEO of YouTube, addressed the ongoing controversy in a lengthy statement, promising that the company would try to “conduct more manual curation.” (YouTube did not comment for this article.)
The nature of the sweep seemed to be a sign that YouTube had ambitions to moderate videos but found it expedient to waive editorial judgment by ceding the matter to advertisers. “YouTube would love to regenerate the broadcast model—in other words, to figure out a way to channel huge audiences to a few select videos in order to maximize their profits,” Socolow said. “One of the biggest problems that YouTube confronts is the diffusion of so many videos.” Major news outlets seem to have an easier time monetizing their content, Socolow said, because “YouTube makes a lot more money by exploiting the CNN brand identity for news value than any random user.” By 2018, YouTube’s upfronts featured not homegrown stars but celebrities such as Ariana Grande and Demi Lovato. “YouTube is inevitably heading towards being like television, but they never told their creators this,” Jamie Cohen, a professor of new media at Molloy College, told USA Today. When The Verge covered this trend, YouTube provided a post-publication statement: “Our core content strategy and investment remains centered on our endemic creators.” But the Verge thesis held: the “community” felt forgotten.
That DeFranco is still considered a “random user,” despite his millions of subscribers, has given him motivation to break away from the platform that first conferred on him the status of star. “I am tired of trying to work with the alcoholic, negligent stepfather that is YouTube,” DeFranco said in 2018, announcing a Rogue Rocket expansion. “At this point it really doesn’t matter if you’re swerving this car into a tree on purpose or you’re just asleep at the wheel.” Early the next year, he debuted a Rogue Rocket site, completely separate from YouTube and fully staffed, with verticals on domestic, international, business, and entertainment news. He also began building out his Rogue Rocket channel, through which he planned to introduce hosts who could share their own news takes: on misogyny at Victoria’s Secret, the Lizzie McGuire reboot controversy. COVID put a stop to the protégé videos, at least for now—in
May of 2020, fifteen DeFranco employees were laid off—but the site continues to be updated on topics as wide-ranging as the stimulus package, a woman who mistakenly coated her hair in Gorilla Glue, and protests in Myanmar, written with Axios-style bullets and the earnest tone of a Vox explainer.
Whether DeFranco can thrive without the platform that YouTube provides remains to be seen. Will his audience move with him? Or have they stuck with him simply because he’s the name that pops up when they open their YouTube homepage? DeFranco may also run up against challenges of scale: a more sprawling operation, with staffwritten and -hosted stories, could dilute the individual credibility upon which he built his core business. There may be such a thing as growing too big and misreading what the audience actually wants—which is, in the end, nothing fancy: “It feels something like, ‘Oh, this is a nice way to just bolster what I’m getting from other news sources,’ ” as De Jong put it. “In a way that’s entertaining.” cjr
