- Insider surveyed 1,105 people to figure out how well 99 influencers are known and liked.
- The data reveals how the public views some of
YouTube 's biggest stars. Shane Dawson had the biggest drop in recognizability between April and August this year.
Former "King of YouTube" Shane Dawson has faced the biggest drop in recognizability in the past months compared to fellow influencers, according to Insider data that shows the proportion of people who had heard of him dropped from 23% in April to 15.1% in August.
Dawson, who has over 20 million subscribers on his main channel, has been active on YouTube since 2005. He originally found fame by making comedic skits, but in recent years rebranded himself as a documentarian and even, to an extent, a beauty YouTuber. Despite having little makeup experience, he teamed up with cosmetics mogul and fellow YouTuber Jeffree Star to create the "Conspiracy" makeup pallette, which was released in November 2o19.
However, his reputation as a benevolent YouTube superstar, famous for rehabilitating disgraced influencers' images, came crashing down in June 2020 when old videos depicting Dawson in blackface, using racial slurs, and pretending to masturbate to a poster of then-11-year-old Willow Smith resurfaced. This led to widespread backlash and several members of Smith's family calling him out on Twitter.
Dawson addressed the controversies in a 20-minute apology video, entitled "Taking Accountability." Despite this, YouTube suspended monetization on his three main channels, and he lost over a million subscribers in two weeks.
In December 2020, Dawson's overall favorability was recorded at 19.5% according to an Insider poll. By April it had dropped to 13% and in August, it was just 7.8%.
It follows Dawson appearing to plan his return to the internet, with increasingly frequent Instagram posts and appearances on his fiancée Ryland Adams' YouTube channel and podcast.
In June 2021, nearly a year after his last YouTube video, Dawson wrote in an Instagram caption, "I know I haven't posted a video in a long time and I promise it's not because I don't want to. I'm just trying to stay in a good mindset and be happy."
He continued, "I promise I'm not going to abandon my channel after 15 years of creating. Just been re-evaluating my life the last year and figuring out what I want to do with it."
Most recently, after relocating to Colorado with Adams in August, Dawson said in an Instagram story on August 28 that he was "ready to create again" and was "just waiting for inspiration to strike," according to PopBuzz.
SurveyMonkey Audience polls from a national sample balanced by census data of age and gender. Respondents are incentivized to complete surveys through charitable contributions. Generally speaking, digital polling tends to skew toward people with access to the internet. SurveyMonkey Audience doesn't try to weight its sample based on race or income. Polling data collected 1,105 respondents between August 16-17, 2021 with a 3 percentage point margin of error.
For more stories like this, check out coverage from Insider's Digital Culture team here.