- YouTube beauty drama became a cottage industry in the late aughts as creators traded jabs.
- As drama has waned, tea channels have seen significant dips in their views and revenue.
In 2018, when YouTube's beauty community self-imploded in what became known as "Dramageddon" — a long-simmering friendship dissolution sparked by a photo of rival beauty vloggers flipping Jeffree Star the bird — the YouTube commentary creator Peter Monn was in Las Vegas celebrating his wedding anniversary.
But he promptly got to work.
Beloved for his motormouthed commentary and fan snaps, Monn recalls an insatiable appetite for videos at the time. He chronicled how the feud resulted in resurfaced racist tweets, with the vlogger Laura Lee apologizing in a weepy video that appeared short on actual tears — all while Star cackled about the karmic downfall of his enemies.
"Every video I posted was getting 100,000-plus views," Monn said, "which was crazy because it was literally the same story over and over and over again."
The next year, when Tati Westbrook's infamous "Bye Sister" video garnered national headlines, a seasoned community of tea channels — accounts dedicated to recapping drama and other salacious happenings on YouTube — was ready to pounce. Dramageddon 2, which began as a skirmish over beauty vitamins that culminated in allegations of inappropriate sexual advances by the beauty vlogger James Charles, marked the zenith of YouTube tea as we know it. (Charles later addressed the allegations, acknowledging that he was "reckless.")
But it was also the beginning of the end.
If YouTube drama was a cottage industry in the late 2010s, with influencers trading career-wounding jabs and a fleet of watchful commentators chronicling their every subtweet, it's become a shadow of its former self.
While drama still makes the rounds — like Mikayla Nogueira's #MascaraGate from January, which disputed whether she used false lashes to advertise mascara — there isn't enough of it to sustain the kind of traffic and revenue that tea channels were used to five years ago.
This may be because viewers have aged out of a reputation-stained cast of characters. Or it may be because a new generation of YouTubers has wised up to the existential and financial hazards of putting one another on blast.
The heyday of YouTube drama was like 'a thriller movie' where 'you never knew what was just around the corner'
Richard Reyna, better known to his 500,000 subscribers as Rich Lux, is a cult fixture in the gossip-channel realm — a self-described "clown in a crown" with white triangles painted beneath his eyes.
His campy theatrics are emblematic of a bygone YouTube era (the 2010s) when the platform felt untapped and an elite circle (the Stars, Charleses, and Westbrooks) ruled beauty culture.
Reyna told Insider that he made $57,000 in AdSense revenue during May 2019, the month of Dramageddon 2. And a survey of his channel shows he accumulated 6 million views that month.
But screenshots of YouTube analytics Reyna provided show that Reyna's channel tracked 1.6 million monthly views and revenue of $13,000 over a 28-day period from mid-January to mid-February.
While those figures are "still cute," he said, these days he's been feeling a bit blasé. "The beauty community is not dead, but it's just not as interesting as it used to be," he said. "I'm still inspired, but I feel like, 'Oh my God, I'm so bored — there's no drama.'
"Views have gone down dramatically when it comes to the YouTube beauty drama space," Reyna added. "And I've seen the reflection in my bank account, but it's still a livable earning."
The commentary creator Dustin Dailey said that during Dramageddon 2 he was topping out at 500,000 views an hour. That month, he said, he pocketed $18,000 in AdSense revenue.
"My channel has never done that before," Dailey told Insider. His videos posted in May 2019 clocked a total of 7 million views, while videos he posted in January together got fewer than 500,000.
Dailey said that while "the beauty community as far as a hub for drama is dead," he looks back on the era fondly.
"You never knew what was going to happen next," he said. "It was like a thriller movie that I got to live in, because you never knew what was just around the corner."
Drama grabs eyeballs but doesn't sustain careers
With YouTube turning 18 this month — officially old enough to vote — the death of beauty drama marks "the passing of another era," said Lia Haberman, an influencer-marketing professor at UCLA.
Haberman believes that today's biggest YouTubers as well as up-and-comers have become savvier to the inner workings of digital stardom. Even if drama brought them more fame and headlines than any of their YouTube videos had, it was also damaging to their careers in the long term.
"All of a sudden, people realized that there's a lot more money to be made in being an entrepreneur and being a stable businessperson versus someone who's constantly going to battle with other YouTubers," she said.
While recently there have been flashes of beauty drama, including #MascaraGate, which reawakened makeup vets and commentary channels, that conversation was born on TikTok.
Haberman said TikTok's Duets feature is perfectly primed for callout culture. But it has also resulted in a more fragmented commentary paradigm than the insular circle of commentary channels that once thrived on YouTube.
Haberman said that two of the biggest YouTubers today, Emma Chamberlain and MrBeast, are model examples of success because of their zealous aversion to controversy. The two, who are widely beloved and own multimillion-dollar businesses, vlog in a kind of hermetic snow globe, intentionally obscuring their personal lives from their businesses.
Gossip channels are mining content elsewhere, and some have called it quits entirely
Beauty drama in its heyday used to fall from the sky in a seemingly endless supply. But these days, creators like Reyna say they're having to "change focus" and branch out to different genres to survive.
Reyna has found some success covering the Kardashians and the increasingly polarizing Nogueira. Dailey said he's "going towards nostalgia," including lookbacks on the erstwhile talk-show host Jenny Jones and examinations of how he believes the media exploited the Irish singer Sinéad O'Connor.
"There's really nothing that goes on in the space anymore that's worth talking about unless it's Jeffree crawling out of the gutter or something," Dailey said.
Karina Kaboom, another former tea creator, has pivoted toward YouTube Shorts about Pokémon Go. And Monn, who said beauty drama isn't dead but rather in a perpetual state of "ebb and flow," is brainstorming videos about Britney Spears, Roseanne Barr, and the late actress Tawny Kitaen.
As tea creators like Sanders Kennedy and Sebastian Williams have gone dormant, a new crop of commentary content has risen in their place. Today, drama is no longer covered like armchair gossip but driven by investigative power and journalistic know-how. Some of the fastest-growing YouTube channels over the past year include the legal commentator Emily D. Baker and the deep-dive crypto expert Coffeezilla.
Though the drama space has radically changed since its inception, Reyna doesn't want your sympathy. Just as controversial beauty YouTubers are crafty and resilient, so too are their documentarians.
"Do not feel bad for me that the beauty community is dead — I think I'm doing OK," he told Insider, panning around his apartment on FaceTime as his assistant could be seen passed out on the couch.
"And everything that you see here has been done off the backs of Jaclyn Hill, Jeffree Star, Shane Dawson," he said. "I invested my money wisely — I don't know about the other girls."