How Did Shane Dawson Become the King of YouTube?

The rise, controversies, and documentaries.

Shane Dawson is the current undisputed king of YouTube. He is beloved and people seem to want him to ‘save’ or ‘redeem’ people with his documentary-style videos on controversial figures.

The Beginning

Shane Dawson is 31 years old and started actively posting on YouTube in 2008, at just 19 with his channel, ShaneDawsonTV. Dawson always wanted to be a movie director, telling Quartz contributor Jeff Slate, “I’d wanted to be a director since I was five, and had been making videos since I was a kid. Then YouTube came around during high school. I was making videos and it was just a place to put them, like storage.”

Dawson’s channel started almost as a cross between a video diary and a sketch comedy series with hilarious and sometimes controversial characters like Shanaynay and Rod Makkenrole. By 2010, he had half a billion views and was one of the first YouTubers to gain that much popularity.

He had a short-lived music career, releasing songs and music videos, and in 2014 Dawson appeared on Starz channel filmmaking competition The Chair, getting to produce his first and so far only feature-length film Not Cool and winning the show. While his film won him the competition, the movie has been universally panned by critics. In 2013, Dawson started a four-year-long podcast called Shane & Friends, which produced 140 episodes and was very popular. Dawson is also a bestselling author, penning 2015’s I Hate Myselfie and 2016’s It Gets Worse.

Shane’s second YouTube channel, just named “Shane,” was actually started in 2005, but he was posting far more actively on ShaneDawsonTV for a few years. His Shane channel started having more casual videos and eventually became his main channel at the end of 2016, with his last ShaneDawsonTV video, “‘The Lottery’— Short Film,” posted on December 12, 2016.

Gaining Popularity & the Evolution of Shane Dawson

Dawson has become one of the most-followed people on YouTube with over 22 MILLION subscribers on his Shane channel (plus over 8 million on ShaneDawsonTV).

Dawson has told his story to his audience many times; living with his abusive father and later a single mom, how he was obese, bullied, and incredibly unhappy before losing 200 pounds after high school and starting to audition to become an actor. When he didn’t get any roles, he turned to the then-young YouTube platform as a way of getting his work and ideas out there. Dawson was one of the first people to make YouTube his full-time job.

One of his most endearing qualities and the main reason so many people love him is Dawson’s self-deprecating humor and honesty. He has talked about his issues with food and his body dysmorphia, his bisexuality, his growing social anxiety, and his experience with going to therapy. Dawson always comes off as authentic, genuine, kind, and humble.

In recent years, Dawson has stopped really going to awards shows, doing interviews, and collaborating with other YouTubers on short videos, all of which he was actively doing a few years ago. He’s spoken honestly about how anxious and nervous they make him, his body image issues, and that he just doesn’t want to do those things now. And people love him for it.

As one of YouTube’s longest-lasting influencers, Shane has an air of legitimacy and has inspired many younger people to start their own journey on the platform. While he’s not without his share of controversies, Dawson’s authenticity and willingness to evolve has made him the king of YouTube.

Dawson’s constant evolution and willingness to adapt is his key to ongoing popularity. As one of the earlier YouTubers, Dawson has noted how many “popular” people will be there one year and gone the next. To combat that, he has often changed how he works on the platform. In the beginning, he was making videos weekly, then to posting more often, then to different formats and thumbnails, and so on. He evolved his content, comedy shorts and sketches, parodies, music videos, to more collabs, conspiracy theories, trendy stuff, food videos, and sometimes clickbait.

His earlier videos were often crude, immature, and sometimes offensive. As he grew up, Dawson’s videos have become more introspective, shown a growth of comedy humor, and became more personal.

Now, he has evolved yet again — into documentaries.

Shane Dawson Documentaries

At the end of 2017, Dawson did a three-part series starting with “The Truth About My Past,” then “Confronting My Mom” and “Confronting My Dad.” The series was a documentary-style set of videos diving into his childhood and reaching out to his estranged father.

This seemed to be a turning point.

While he was still posting conspiracy theories, slime videos, and the occasional collab, Dawson seemed to find his voice and his passion in more true stories and documentaries.

It was perfect timing. YouTube has spent years trying to find ways to stay relevant and becoming more of an episodic streaming service and has not had the success they want in that direction.

In June 2018, Shane Dawson hit the motherlode with a timely, relevant, pop culture interest three-part docu-series called “The Truth About Tanacon.”

Dawson’s love of horror-film editing and diving into something to find the truth came together in a compelling series. Tanacon was all over the news and people were outraged. It was a perfect storm. By diving straight in and trying to tell all sides of the story, Dawson turned the failed convention into must-see TV. He even invited a couple of attendees to his house to tell their story.

At the time of this writing, part 1 of the Tanacon series has over 21 million views and parts 2 and 3 each have over 16 million views.

The reaction to Dawson’s and cameraman and editor Andrew Siwicki’s series was immense and immediate. People loved it and they wanted more.

Very soon, they got more than they knew they wanted.

In August 2018, Dawson hit people with an unexpected five-part docu-series titled “The Secret World of Jeffree Star.” Part 1 alone has over 42 million views. Jeffree Star has long been an extremely controversial influencer who has his own YouTube channel with 15.5 million subscribers. He had been embroiled in scandals and controversies for years and after the release of Dawson’s series, Star became more popular than ever. Dawson made Star relatable in a strange rich-person 1% kind of way, made us empathize with Star, and took us behind the scenes.

The series was featured in mainstream media, was a huge hit, and more so than the Tanacon series, changed the way people looked at Shane Dawson and content.

Just two months later, Dawson launched an eight-part series called “The Mind of Jake Paul,” wherein he asked the question “Is Jake Paul a sociopath?” Of everything he’d done up until this point, this series was his most controversial. People were asking if Paul was the kind of person we should be shining a light on and if this series was going to make people sympathetic to Paul instead of outraged. Dawson wanted to be unbiased, but there was some backlash to this series, despite or perhaps because of its success.

Real-time editing was a huge part of this series, with backlash against the horror-style editing in the first part becoming a roar on YouTube and social media. Dawson reacted by apologizing and toning it down in the rest of the episodes, each about 45 minutes long. Critiques, feedback, and direct messages between episodes became added to and implanted into the next. Unlike regular TV, YouTube episodic content allows this to be a possibility.

There was a few months break and then a two-part conspiracy series in early 2019, before six months with no new Shane Dawson videos.

Dawson has been open that he and Jeffree Star have been filming a longer series together currently titled “Ugly Side of the Beauty World,” delving into the scandal-ridden beauty community and the process of producing makeup. This series won’t be out until the fall of 2019.

But in the meantime, on July 19, 2019, Dawson released an hour-long documentary-style video called “The Return of Eugenia Cooney.” In the three days since its release, it already has over 22 million views and people have a lot to say. There were huge holes in Cooney’s story and her lawyer was there monitoring the interview. Eugenia Cooney is a YouTuber who has been widely accused of having an eating disorder and ignoring it but has recently gone through rehab and a five-month break from YouTube and social media. This was her reintroduction to the world.

Just as with every major Shane Dawson documentary, there have been many people reacting to his video and posting their thoughts.

King of YouTube

Shane Dawson is one of the most-followed people on YouTube and in recent years has become something of a diety. He has stopped posting short slime videos and trendy content altogether, though he regularly appears on his fiance Ryland Adams’s channel and his sister-in-law Morgan Adams’s channel in their vlog-style videos.

When Dawson posts, people stop what they’re doing to watch.

They post videos of themselves reacting, they write articles, and they continue to tune in.

Dawson has found a new niche in making documentaries on controversial YouTube influencers and longer content.

Is this just the next in a series of Shane Dawson evolutions or has he found his passion? Does it even matter? Whatever he makes, we’re paying attention.

Update, June 30, 2020: Since the writing of this post, Dawson has been called out for/accused of racism (blackface and more from portraying a black character in sketches), inappropriate jokes involving minors, instigating drama, and more. On June 29, 2020, the NYT published an article on it where they linked back to this post. On July 2, 2020, Insider also picked up the story and linked here.

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