#simply nailogical reference

[clockworkcheetah]

Dirk: i'm a snack Todd: no you're a whole meal Dirk: no I'm a snack. that's like a thing people say Todd: I'M TRYING TO COMPLIMENT YOU

[academie-de-prosperite-blog]

Love Interest’s Sexuality?

6.5.18

Alexis and I have run into a bit of a dilemma: Oakley’s (The love interest’s) sexuality. We have a few ideas, but can’t decide because Lexipoo is literally impossible to deal with.

1) Make Oakley (without allowing the player to change it) a panromantic demisexual, meaning they would date anyone but are only sexually attracted to people they have the strongest bonds with (Ie; best friends, something akin to best friends). It also makes them more accepting of everyone.

2) Make Oakley a panromantic demisexual by default and allow it to be changed by the player

3) Make Oakley pansexual/Pan all around

4) Do not assign a default sexuality

Please let us know what you think!

~Kellen

[forgetmenoct]

midnight snacc, ft space pyjamas

[thestraggletag]

Rumbelle Collab Prompt

I was just watching Simply Nailogical’s podcast about collabs and this plot bunny just came to me. Someone please adopt it before it chews through the wifi cable.

So, Gold and Belle are two famous YouToubers. Gold started his antique restoration channel because Bae liked to learn from him as a boy and when Milah took him away to live with her to California it was a way for them to stay connected. He gained popularity as an absolute sadist and all around hilarious asshole with a biting sense of humour who is just savage and people love him.

He is approached at some point by Belle French, an Aussie youtouber he knows is wildly popular. She’s going around the world visiting her favourite YouToubers to collab with them and donate the money to charity. He knows little of her, has seen her videos recommended on his feed often (she does book reviews) but thinks they might not be very interesting. He just thinks she’s popular because she’s gorgeous (likely a filter or heavy editing) and sunshine-y. But he accepts because Bae LOVES her and begs him to do a collab. They agree that he’ll restore a first-edition copy of her favourite book for her while she talks about the book’s themes and so on with him.

So he starts to watch her videos in preparation. And FUCK HIM because Belle French has a biting, dark sense of humour, is very intelligent and articulate and manages to introduce and talk about a lot of social issues in her reviews. She’s every bit as sarcastic as he is, only she softens it with a charming personality and a genuine good nature. Her videos are creative and sometimes a lot of her jokes and references are deliciously obscure. She’s grown a cult following that way, people who analyse her videos obsessively to try and catch all the small jokes and easter eggs she leaves.

This means nothing. If anything, this is a GOOD thing. It’ll make the collab less of a chore, for certain. So what if he finds her videos fascinating? That means nothing. She probably isn’t like that in person at all, both in terms of personality and looks.

He’s wrong.

SOMEONE DO THE THING.

[hollyhomburg]

Hello bubie!!! In reference to the assasin jk drabble that you wrote where the reader is this very soft youtuber,, do you have any youtuber recommendations that are like her?? It really helps me sleep better if I watch calling videos like that!!! 🥺

no, I don’t unfortunately! the only YouTubers I watch consistently are Niki tutorials, Jenna marbles, Simply Nailogical, and brad mondo, and out of those- only two regularly post anymore T-T

[krinsyn]

15% off sitewide Holo Taco with code ONECOATBLACK19, excludes holiday set and gift cards, for Black Friday 2019.

Holo Taco is a high quality indie nail polish brand that I love. I use screenshots of Simply Nailogical’s holo nail art as reference for my holo coloring =)

Check it out and get yourself some beautiful rainbows!

[farklelucas]

contact, psyche, and wild card for Margo since you said her and Ceto might get along

contact: how does your OC(s) feel about touch/physical contact? are they affectionate? if so, how do they display affection to others?

so here’s the thing. margo. puts up a big front. like, acts like a total bitch, sharpens her nails into claws, angry constantly and consistently. with strangers/people she doesn’t usually feel comfortable with people touching her or touching them, but like when she knows them. oh boy. jackson and liam often put their arms around her or lay with her on the couch, snuggle with her, hold her hand, and she’s totally cool with all that, enjoys it even. and then with girlfriends she like. melts at physical touch. touching her hair, cupping her face, hugging her, holding her hand, (i wasn’t gonna put this one in here but tbh she would begrudge me forever otherwise) touching her ass–all fucking. kills her. she loves it. yes.

psyche: what’s their head space like? do they have any mental illnesses? how do they process difficult or emotional situations? what are their coping mechanisms?

she definitely has depression, because she’s very “i wanna die!” even though she covers it up with confidence and like. leadership skills. her brain is kind of just. imagine baby shark but like a really sad and minor key okay i looked it up and found it and i was not disappointed. so that’s kind of what her brain sounds like, and it looks like. a haunted filing room? idk if that makes sense. anyway she kind of chooses to ignore all emotions and, instead, do literally anything else. depressed? falling down a simply nailogical youtube hole. angry? drinks a bottle of jack daniels. turn it off! (she has no idea what that reference means, what is she, a fucking nerd, liam?)

wild card: talk about any OC! anything you want!

i love her so fucking much. she’s a lesbian and she’s so angry at the world but. mostly at herself. she’s a middle child and kind of resentful about it, but not because she’s always forgotten (it’s kind of hard to forget margo), but because she kind of just… feels lesser. but she’s not! she’s so much, actually, that sometimes delilah and orion (her older sister and younger brother) are almost washed out. also, she’s a dancer!!! like, no surprise, her dad is literally a ballet dancer, but she definitely takes after him. like, delilah and orion can for sure get down, but margo wants to dance for, like, a living, which is part of why she and liam get along so well–they’ve been on the same dance teams since they were little, and margo is like. incredible. also i know no one asked because no one cares about the storyline (beyond victor ahsjdkfl) but she and her (future) love interest?? fucking soft! literally that quote that’s like “in a fight, they’re lethal, but together, they melt.” like god they! anyway just. i love my hurricane of a girl, she’s honestly an angel, im sorry im done hajksldf.

send me oc asks!

[noodle-cats]

Why I love watching YouTube but my family hates it

They all have trade mark things they say.

Jenna: OH HELL YEAH

My name in jenna, I'm 30 and I have a basketball game tomorrow~

Ayy bebe

Liza: Hello (in Helga's accent)

Her intro (it's yo girl liza, coming at chu)

Simply Nailogical: Holo

What do you think?

PeanutButterGamer (not exactly a trademark but it was in one of his videos)

This is not a normal

Rosanna Pansino: Welcome to another nerdy nummies~ *does the finger thing*

ANYWAYS

What I'm trying to get at is that these quotes (plus a lot more) is something that my echolalia makes me repeat or say really often.

My brother doesn't mind as much, my mom on the other hand gets annoyed cause she doesn't watch YouTube to get the references.

(Ps vine quotes are bad for me too)

[silentfcknhill]

Hi! 2, 15, 25, 48, 82, 91, and 167, please? :)

Thanks! ^.^

2: What’s your dream pet? (Real or not)

I am a cat person. I have three cats. I will stick with cats. But more cats.

15: Do you have a favorite Youtuber?

I honestly spend so much time on Youtube it’s not even funny. :T I still watch all the same channels from when I was a teenager, a lot of the popular ones. Smosh, Rhett & Link, sometimes Shane Dawson….even PewDiePie, although I don’t really agree with everything he does. Also like Bad Lip Reading, Epic Rap Battles Of History, Brock Baker, Jacksfilms, Nostalgia Critic, CinemaSins, How It Should Have Ended,  Tim & Eric, Howtobasic, Jenna Marbles, Miranda Sings, Simply Nailogical, The Dom, Most Popular Girls, Filthy Frank, The Crude Brothers, tedbarrus…….and my all-time favorite is Vsauce, hands down. 

25: Favorite star?

I couldn’t figure out at first whether this question referred to an actual star or a celebrity, but I’m going with the former because the question before that asked about constellations and also because I’m obsessed with space… VFTS 352 (though it’s technically two I guess).

48: A sound you really love?

My stance on most sounds is usually anywhere from intolerable to impartial. Obviously I like music, my favorite instrument to listen to is the sitar. Also, I don’t know if you’ve ever listened to the ‘music’ planets make through radio frequencies, but oh boy is it ever beautifully eerie. My favorite ones are Jupiter (most beautiful), Io (most calming) and especially Saturn (most creepy).

82: Something you really enjoy doing?

I really want to say writing and drawing, but really I don’t enjoy DOING those so much as I enjoy having already finished them and going over the finished product many times because I’m vain xD My favorite thing to do is watch movies.

91: If a flower could aesthetically represent you, what kind would it be?

Honestly I don’t know very much concerning flowers and stuff so this isn’t really an educated answer. :v I know according to flower zodiac, I am Water Lily, but aesthetically? It would have to be short, purple….maybe a dark purple orchid?

167: Do you really care how the universe and world was created?

Way too much, to the point where I would say my life’s spiritual purpose is to explore the secrets of the universe and existence. Sounds kinda conceited, but I guess it is just the lure of things that can never be understood for certain which frustrates and intrigues me. Even though I know it will give me existential panic attacks, I still seek out videos and documentaries about these kind of things >.> I always fit much better in the abstract world of theory than the practical (I definitely have a solid preference for N in the Myers-Briggs scale), but I have started to appreciate the role reality plays in my life much more since my issues with psychedelics abuse. There must be balance. I’ve even heard it said that there is practically no such thing as a pure E, I, S, N, T, F, P or J in MBTI, anyone who embodied such would be insane, and I’ve definitely had my brushes with that. Anyways, went off on a ramble, but I would sum up by saying that a lot of the time, it is the only thing I care about, the root of everything, and I find it discouraging to see other people being able to live distracted from it all and not obsess about death 24/7. I’m really jealous of them.

[theconservativebrief]

The best way to understand Troom Troom, the YouTube channel devoted to bizarre DIY tutorials, “hacks,” and “funny pranks,” is to spend multiple hours watching it until your brain turns into sprinkle-covered neon slime that can somehow also be used as lip gloss.

Because this is precisely the sort of thing that Troom Troom traffics in: do-it-yourself how-tos that no person could or should ever replicate. The most popular videos currently on the channel are tips on how to sneak food and makeup into class in laughably arduous ways: One suggests removing the glue from a glue stick and inserting a block of hard cheese into the container, while another recommends cutting an apple in half, using an Exact-O knife to remove the center, and then stuffing an eyeshadow palette inside. Of the apple!

Troom Troom is just one of many content factories of mysterious international origin that have gamed YouTube’s algorithm with bright, clickbait-y thumbnails and SEO keywords like “DIY,” “hack,” and “prank wars.” And to stand out from the thousands of other channels peddling the exact same service, they’ve turned to stranger and stranger content.

[embedded content]

That’s how you end up with a video that recently went viral on Twitter, featuring a woman cutting off a (very long) strand of her hair, trimming it down to less than half an inch, and attaching it to the end of a pencil to create an eyeshadow brush. This, produced by the equally wild YouTube channel 5-Minute Crafts, is apparently an easier way to apply eyeshadow than using one’s fingers.

And yet it’s working. 5-Minute Crafts currently has the fifth most subscribers of any YouTube channel, nearly 40 million. According to Social Blade, its total of more than 10 billion video views translates to anywhere between $2 million and $34 million in annual earnings (the discrepancy here is from the varying possibilities of cost per impression). It’s estimated that Troom Troom, which currently boasts nearly 10 million subscribers and almost 3 billion total views of its surreal, pastel-plastered videos, pulls in between about $500,000 and $8 million each year.

Not only are Troom Troom and 5-Minute Crafts wildly successful in their own right, but they’re also part of the growing network of reaction videos to cringe-inducing content on the site, creating a cycle that generates millions of views for the YouTubers who engage with it.

But creators I spoke to also expressed concerns about these types of channels, ranging from their clickbait-y strategies to plagiarism to manipulating children’s internet behavior. The DIY YouTube space may not be all rainbows and unicorns, even if its thumbnails are full of them.

Troom Troom’s essential weirdness doesn’t just come from its how-tos being absurdly useless. They’re weird because they are narrated by a voiceover actress with a perfect American accent speaking a kind of English that sounds like it’s been run through about three layers of Google Translate. They’re weird because they feature a rotating cast of very thin white women who are referred to by nicknames like “the Blue-Eyed Girl,” “Redhead,” “Mrs. Smith,” or “Dolly,” and weirder still because those identities sometimes switch among them. They’re weird because it’s impossible to tell whether the whole thing is satire or if it’s part of a malicious Russian cyberattack targeting the YouTube-obsessed children of the world (but more on that later).

Besides being odd in its content and tone, Troom Troom is also incredibly elusive. No one can agree on who makes the videos, who owns the company, where it’s based, and who is making money off it. But that elusiveness invites speculation, and internet detectives have managed to puzzle out a few key pieces: first, that the website is registered under the name Eugene Miroshnykov, and second, that many of the videos are likely filmed in Odessa, Ukraine, judging by the Ukrainian Cyrillic script on many of the products used and the locations tagged on Troom Troom’s Instagram.

[embedded content]

The identities of the actresses, too, have been largely exposed via their Instagram accounts. Most of them say they live in Odessa and are models and artists. The channel launched in 2015, and it’s clear from watching its earliest videos that Troom Troom began with standard DIY and didn’t reach its full weirdness — and biggest views — until about a year ago.

But there are still the requisite conspiracy theories: that Troom Troom is actually run by a millennial woman in San Francisco, or that the Troom Troom girls are being held against their will, forced to make weird DIY videos for ransom. Two media outlets that published stories on Troom Troom also failed to find out much else.

Which is why I was surprised when the email I sent to the address listed on Troom Troom’s YouTube page actually garnered a response. The sender’s name was indeed listed as Eugene Miroshnykov, confirming what I’d seen on Reddit, but after one back-and-forth, the name had been changed. To protect his anonymity — he expressed concerns about sleuths finding his phone number or other personal information — I agreed to refer to him by the nickname Zeon.

[embedded content]

Zeon told me that Troom Troom was actually started by a collective of professional artists “that wanted to do something fun.” Zeon is not among these founders — he says he was hired when the channel already had a million subscribers and described his job as a “salesperson.” Writers and directors are based in Europe and the US and brainstorm video ideas via Skype, and then execute them within their own team. He described the company structure as similar to a “holacracy,” in which there is no top-down management and the content is instead “the result of the collective mind.”

“We got inspiration from [the world of] DIY text and picture tutorials,” he wrote. “Most of our team [is made up of] professional artists, so they found usually all the tutorials in text form, but not in the videos. We tried to solve that issue. Firstly, it was more educational and serious videos that [were] fun. Currently, we try to mix entertainment with DIY value. We found that any video should entertain if you want to make an impact on the viewers and not just to get them bored.”

[embedded content]

This explains the heavy lifting that narration and plot serve in the average Troom Troom video — a “funny pranks” video is never just a list of pranks; it’s a story about how, say, “Dolly” sticks a plastic lizard into “Samantha’s” toothpaste and then replaces the inside of a lemon with a tennis ball. Later, Samantha gets back at Dolly by cutting out a hole in an iPhone case and placing it over a book so that it looks like Dolly’s phone literally burned through. The back-and-forth pranking only gets more complicated from there (I am not kidding).

Zeon says Troom Troom is independently owned, does not have any outside funding, and is profitable. “[It] has plans to grow, but the direction is currently confidential,” he adds. Zeon declined to connect me with the founders, nor did he provide any other details about his background or those of his co-workers, but I was easily able to find detailed Facebook and LinkedIn accounts that matched the name on his later emails, which leads me to believe that Zeon is, indeed, a real person.

The origins of 5-Minute Crafts are, for what it’s worth, far less mysterious. 5-Minute Crafts is owned by TheSoul Publishing, which says it produces an absolutely wild 1,500 videos a month, has 550 employees, and operates 40 Facebook pages in 10 languages. It owns mega-popular YouTube channels like Bright Side (animated videos that are a mix of riddles, facts, and “hacks”) and the 8 million-strong Facebook page You’re Gorgeous (your standard Facebook content farm content). Neither 5-Minute Crafts nor TheSoul Publishing responded to requests for an interview.

[embedded content]

Notably, TheSoul Publishing is also based in Eastern Europe. According to a 2017 Forbes piece, the company was founded by the Russia-based Pavel Radaev and Marat Mukhametov, both of whom have backgrounds in social media content. To answer the implicit question, unlike many viral Facebook posts that came out of Russia over the past few years, TheSoul Publishing’s content does not appear to be overtly political.

5-Minute Crafts has four times as many subscribers as Troom Troom, but it’s supported by a 550-employee business. This raises the still-unanswered question: How many people work for Troom Troom? The channel is able to publish a 10- to 15-minute video every day, which requires a relatively large team, not to mention lots of money. For the most part, how they’re able to pull it off remains unclear.

To understand the rise of peculiar DIY videos, you have to understand the rest of YouTube. Videos on the platform succeed largely based on how well they cater to popular SEO keywords, and if they create a sense of urgency in the title (which often means using all caps and a ton of exclamation points), and use a visually striking thumbnail image — that’s why you’ll see a lot of disembodied lips biting into a strange object.

“I started noticing these really distinct, super-saturated, photoshopped thumbnails showing up in my recommended videos feed last year,” says Cristine Rotenberg, the 30-year-old YouTuber behind the nail art channel Simply Nailogical, which has 6 million subscribers. “It’s really strange. It’s like a lot of channels realized around the same time that photoshopped pictures of putting things near mouths get a lot of clicks.”

Bizarre projects with bait-y thumbnails is a strategy that plenty of channels have embraced, but that other established crafting players have rejected. Nifty, the crafting vertical owned by BuzzFeed, has invested in projects that its audience requests and is interested in actually attempting (unlike, say, an incredibly complicated DIY to make a mini box of Altoids as a prank, as one Troom Troom video offers). On these “normal” crafting channels, for lack of a better term, you’ll find how-tos for things like fall porch decor, headboard making, and pumpkin carving with thumbnails that reveal the actual product.

[embedded content]

Erin Phraner, the supervising producer of Nifty, acknowledged the pressure that YouTube crafting channels face to game the algorithm and rely on bait-y titles. Nifty has also had its projects stolen by other craft channels. “It’s the reality of playing in that space,” Phraner says.

“Those types of thumbnails and titles and crazy hack projects definitely skew toward clickbait-y,” she adds. “But I think for us, our feeling is that you might see that pop up in the feed and click to watch it once because it seems kind of outlandish, but our whole business is we’re trying to build trust and create things that people actually want to bring into their home.”

“It’s like a lot of channels realized around the same time that photoshopped pictures of putting things near mouths get a lot of clicks”

For its part, YouTube says it’s already done the work of combating clickbait on the site. A YouTube spokesperson explained that since 2012, the algorithm has rewarded longer watch times over video clicks. So for instance, if users watch a video for a few seconds, realize it isn’t what they were expecting, and click out, that video wouldn’t show up in users’ feeds as often as one where viewers stuck around.

Plus, the term “clickbait” might not even apply when the actual tutorials on Troom Troom and 5-Minute Crafts are as wild as they are. Zeon explained that Troom Troom’s strategy is the opposite of Nifty’s — the videos are about entertainment, not service. And it’s their bizarro entertainment value that makes them perfectly suited to the current climate of cringe on YouTube, and commentary about that cringe.

“There’s so much unintentional humor in Troom Troom videos,” says Rotenberg of Simply Nailogical. “I could make Troom Troom parodies every week and laugh for the rest of my life.”

So far, she’s only made a few. In one, she attempts Troom Troom’s “20 banana hacks,” which include making a “banana holster” out of felt and painting a smile on a banana peel; in another, she tries some back-to-school pranks, such as putting hay in somebody’s backpack.

[embedded content]

Rotenberg’s videos are but a small sliver of the cottage industry that is the Troom Troom reaction video. Other popular creators like Danny Gonzalez, Cody Ko, and Jarvis Johnson have each garnered millions of views by satirizing Troom Troom and 5-Minute Crafts, using the standard YouTube reaction video format in which the host talks to the camera and reacts to clips from other videos.

It’s a cycle that’s lucrative for both the reactionaries and their targets. Johnson, who’s 26 and also has a full-time job working for Patreon in San Francisco, says that a reaction video he made about 5-Minute Crafts was a “huge catalyst” for growing his YouTube channel, which now has nearly half a million subscribers. Since then, he’s published a mini investigation on Troom Troom, as well as a video about the “dark side of Bright Side,” the sister channel to 5-Minute Crafts.

[embedded content]

He says that while on the surface these sorts of channels are pretty innocuous, he does share concerns about clickbait, plagiarism, and their large audience of children. But ultimately, his reaction videos started as a joke — or rather, an exercise in telling jokes. “I thought commentary videos were a brilliant vessel for comedic writing that also fit in with what YouTube’s algorithm promotes,” he explains. “I happened upon a 5-Minute Crafts video called ‘20 Tips If You Spend Your Life in Front of Computer.’ At the time, I felt like I’d struck internet gold because I didn’t see anyone else talking about their absurd hacks.”

Because that’s the thing: Troom Troom videos are incredibly ripe for parody. The joy in watching them is largely based on their obvious absurdity — the uncanny narration, the knockoff–Disney Channel set design, the outlandishness of the projects.

Troom Troom videos are arguably part of Cringe YouTube, the ever-expanding network of uncomfortable and earnest videos that encompasses TikTok compilations, Instagram comedians, and former Vine dudes with creepy hair, among others. It’s difficult to point to a YouTube video that isn’t a little cringey in its own way, but within Cringe YouTube, it isn’t just the original videos that get views — it’s the never-ending cycle of reactions and commentary. PewDiePie, the most-subscribed YouTube channel of all time, for example, has built a career on making fun of other YouTubers’ attempts at earnestness.

[embedded content]

On why the genre is so popular right now, Johnson guesses it’s because of “mystery, community, and the whole ‘so bad it’s good’ thing. If someone sees something super absurd and can share that with someone else, there’s a catharsis there.”

He also compares Troom Troom to a movie wildly considered to be one of the most unintentionally laughable films of all time. “As someone who is a die-hard fan of the Tommy Wiseau movie The Room, I see A LOT of similarities between The Room and Troom Troom,” he adds. “I feel like I should start a conspiracy theory about how Troom Troom is short for ‘The Room The Room.’”

“If someone sees something super absurd [on YouTube] and can share that with someone else, there’s a catharsis there”

And much like The Room, the question around Troom Troom, 5-Minute Crafts, and anyone who has ever made a bonkers video for the internet will always be the same: Are they in on the joke?

In the case of Troom Troom, it seems like the creators embrace the absurdity, even if it isn’t intentionally ironic. Zeon is aware of the intense, morbid fascination with the brand, and said that often, the “story creates the crafts,” meaning that at least some Troom Troom videos were not actually produced with the intent of teaching people how to make a thing — they’re just for fun.

But is weird DIY YouTube an exercise in satire? Probably not. And while there may not be an appetite for glue-stick cheese, there’s certainly an appetite for looking at it.

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Original Source -> YouTube is full of cringey, clickbait DIY channels. They’re even weirder than you think.

via The Conservative Brief

[recentnews18-blog]

New Post has been published on https://shovelnews.com/youtube-is-full-of-cringey-clickbait-diy-channels-theyre-even-weirder-than-you-think/

YouTube is full of cringey, clickbait DIY channels. They're even weirder than you think.

The best way to understand Troom Troom, the YouTube channel devoted to bizarre DIY tutorials, “hacks,” and “funny pranks,” is to spend multiple hours watching it until your brain turns into sprinkle-covered neon slime that can somehow also be used as lip gloss.

Because this is precisely the sort of thing that Troom Troom traffics in: do-it-yourself how-tos that no person could or should ever replicate. The most popular videos currently on the channel are tips on how to sneak food and makeup into class in laughably arduous ways: One suggests removing the glue from a glue stick and inserting a block of hard cheese into the container, while another recommends cutting an apple in half, using an Exact-O knife to remove the center, and then stuffing an eyeshadow palette inside. Of the apple!

Troom Troom is just one of many content factories of mysterious international origin that have gamed YouTube’s algorithm with bright, clickbait-y thumbnails and SEO keywords like “DIY,” “hack,” and “prank wars.” And to stand out from the thousands of other channels peddling the exact same service, they’ve turned to stranger and stranger content.

That’s how you end up with a video that recently went viral on Twitter, featuring a woman cutting off a (very long) strand of her hair, trimming it down to less than half an inch, and attaching it to the end of a pencil to create an eyeshadow brush. This, produced by the equally wild YouTube channel 5-Minute Crafts, is apparently an easier way to apply eyeshadow than using one’s fingers.

And yet it’s working. 5-Minute Crafts currently has the fifth most subscribers of any YouTube channel, nearly 40 million. According to Social Blade, its total of more than 10 billion video views translates to anywhere between $2 million and $34 million in annual earnings (the discrepancy here is from the varying possibilities of cost per impression). It’s estimated that Troom Troom, which currently boasts nearly 10 million subscribers and almost 3 billion total views of its surreal, pastel-plastered videos, pulls in between about $500,000 and $8 million each year.

Not only are Troom Troom and 5-Minute Crafts wildly successful in their own right, but they’re also part of the growing network of reaction videos to cringe-inducing content on the site, creating a cycle that generates millions of views for the YouTubers who engage with it.

But creators I spoke to also expressed concerns about these types of channels, ranging from their clickbait-y strategies to plagiarism to manipulating children’s internet behavior. The DIY YouTube space may not be all rainbows and unicorns, even if its thumbnails are full of them.

Troom Troom’s essential weirdness doesn’t just come from its how-tos being absurdly useless. They’re weird because they are narrated by a voiceover actress with a perfect American accent speaking a kind of English that sounds like it’s been run through about three layers of Google Translate. They’re weird because they feature a rotating cast of very thin white women who are referred to by nicknames like “the Blue-Eyed Girl,” “Redhead,” “Mrs. Smith,” or “Dolly,” and weirder still because those identities sometimes switch among them. They’re weird because it’s impossible to tell whether the whole thing is satire or if it’s part of a malicious Russian cyberattack targeting the YouTube-obsessed children of the world (but more on that later).

Besides being odd in its content and tone, Troom Troom is also incredibly elusive. No one can agree on who makes the videos, who owns the company, where it’s based, and who is making money off it. But that elusiveness invites speculation, and internet detectives have managed to puzzle out a few key pieces: first, that the website is registered under the name Eugene Miroshnykov, and second, that many of the videos are likely filmed in Odessa, Ukraine, judging by the Ukrainian Cyrillic script on many of the products used and the locations tagged on Troom Troom’s Instagram.

The identities of the actresses, too, have been largely exposed via their Instagram accounts. Most of them say they live in Odessa and are models and artists. The channel launched in 2015, and it’s clear from watching its earliest videos that Troom Troom began with standard DIY and didn’t reach its full weirdness — and biggest views — until about a year ago.

But there are still the requisite conspiracy theories: that Troom Troom is actually run by a millennial woman in San Francisco, or that the Troom Troom girls are being held against their will, forced to make weird DIY videos for ransom. Two media outlets that published stories on Troom Troom also failed to find out much else.

Which is why I was surprised when the email I sent to the address listed on Troom Troom’s YouTube page actually garnered a response. The sender’s name was indeed listed as Eugene Miroshnykov, confirming what I’d seen on Reddit, but after one back-and-forth, the name had been changed. To protect his anonymity — he expressed concerns about sleuths finding his phone number or other personal information — I agreed to refer to him by the nickname Zeon.

Zeon told me that Troom Troom was actually started by a collective of professional artists “that wanted to do something fun.” Zeon is not among these founders — he says he was hired when the channel already had a million subscribers and described his job as a “salesperson.” Writers and directors are based in Europe and the US and brainstorm video ideas via Skype, and then execute them within their own team. He described the company structure as similar to a “holacracy,” in which there is no top-down management and the content is instead “the result of the collective mind.”

“We got inspiration from [the world of] DIY text and picture tutorials,” he wrote. “Most of our team [is made up of] professional artists, so they found usually all the tutorials in text form, but not in the videos. We tried to solve that issue. Firstly, it was more educational and serious videos that [were] fun. Currently, we try to mix entertainment with DIY value. We found that any video should entertain if you want to make an impact on the viewers and not just to get them bored.”

This explains the heavy lifting that narration and plot serve in the average Troom Troom video — a “funny pranks” video is never just a list of pranks; it’s a story about how, say, “Dolly” sticks a plastic lizard into “Samantha’s” toothpaste and then replaces the inside of a lemon with a tennis ball. Later, Samantha gets back at Dolly by cutting out a hole in an iPhone case and placing it over a book so that it looks like Dolly’s phone literally burned through. The back-and-forth pranking only gets more complicated from there (I am not kidding).

Zeon says Troom Troom is independently owned, does not have any outside funding, and is profitable. “[It] has plans to grow, but the direction is currently confidential,” he adds. Zeon declined to connect me with the founders, nor did he provide any other details about his background or those of his co-workers, but I was easily able to find detailed Facebook and LinkedIn accounts that matched the name on his later emails, which leads me to believe that Zeon is, indeed, a real person.

The origins of 5-Minute Crafts are, for what it’s worth, far less mysterious. 5-Minute Crafts is owned by TheSoul Publishing, which says it produces an absolutely wild 1,500 videos a month, has 550 employees, and operates 40 Facebook pages in 10 languages. It owns mega-popular YouTube channels like Bright Side (animated videos that are a mix of riddles, facts, and “hacks”) and the 8 million-strong Facebook page You’re Gorgeous (your standard Facebook content farm content). Neither 5-Minute Crafts nor TheSoul Publishing responded to requests for an interview.

Notably, TheSoul Publishing is also based in Eastern Europe. According to a 2017 Forbes piece, the company was founded by the Russia-based Pavel Radaev and Marat Mukhametov, both of whom have backgrounds in social media content. To answer the implicit question, unlike many viral Facebook posts that came out of Russia over the past few years, TheSoul Publishing’s content does not appear to be overtly political.

5-Minute Crafts has four times as many subscribers as Troom Troom, but it’s supported by a 550-employee business. This raises the still-unanswered question: How many people work for Troom Troom? The channel is able to publish a 10- to 15-minute video every day, which requires a relatively large team, not to mention lots of money. For the most part, how they’re able to pull it off remains unclear.

To understand the rise of peculiar DIY videos, you have to understand the rest of YouTube. Videos on the platform succeed largely based on how well they cater to popular SEO keywords, and if they create a sense of urgency in the title (which often means using all caps and a ton of exclamation points), and use a visually striking thumbnail image — that’s why you’ll see a lot of disembodied lips biting into a strange object.

“I started noticing these really distinct, super-saturated, photoshopped thumbnails showing up in my recommended videos feed last year,” says Cristine Rotenberg, the 30-year-old YouTuber behind the nail art channel Simply Nailogical, which has 6 million subscribers. “It’s really strange. It’s like a lot of channels realized around the same time that photoshopped pictures of putting things near mouths get a lot of clicks.”

Bizarre projects with bait-y thumbnails is a strategy that plenty of channels have embraced, but that other established crafting players have rejected. Nifty, the home vertical owned by BuzzFeed, has invested in projects that its audience requests and is interested in actually attempting (unlike, say, an incredibly complicated DIY to make a mini box of Altoids as a prank, as one Troom Troom video offers). On these “normal” crafting channels, for lack of a better term, you’ll find how-tos for things like fall porch decor, headboard making, and pumpkin carving with thumbnails that reveal the actual product.

Erin Phraner, the supervising producer of Nifty, acknowledged the pressure that YouTube crafting channels face to game the algorithm and rely on bait-y titles. Nifty has also had its projects stolen by other craft channels. “It’s the reality of playing in that space,” Phraner says.

“Those types of thumbnails and titles and crazy hack projects definitely skew toward clickbait-y,” she adds. “But I think for us, our feeling is that you might see that pop up in the feed and click to watch it once because it seems kind of outlandish, but our whole business is we’re trying to build trust and create things that people actually want to bring into their home.”

she attempts Troom Troom’s “20 banana hacks,” which include making a “banana holster” out of felt and painting a smile on a banana peel; in another, she tries some back-to-school pranks, such as putting hay in somebody’s backpack.

Rotenberg’s videos are but a small sliver of the cottage industry that is the Troom Troom reaction video. Other popular creators like Danny Gonzalez, Cody Ko, and Jarvis Johnson have each garnered millions of views by satirizing Troom Troom and 5-Minute Crafts, using the standard YouTube reaction video format in which the host talks to the camera and reacts to clips from other videos.

It’s a cycle that’s lucrative for both the reactionaries and their targets. Johnson, who’s 26 and also has a full-time job working for Patreon in San Francisco, says that a reaction video he made about 5-Minute Crafts was a “huge catalyst” for growing his YouTube channel, which now has nearly half a million subscribers. Since then, he’s published a mini investigation on Troom Troom, as well as a video about the “dark side of Bright Side,” the sister channel to 5-Minute Crafts.

He says that while on the surface these sorts of channels are pretty innocuous, he does share concerns about clickbait, plagiarism, and their large audience of children. But ultimately, his reaction videos started as a joke — or rather, an exercise in telling jokes. “I thought commentary videos were a brilliant vessel for comedic writing that also fit in with what YouTube’s algorithm promotes,” he explains. “I happened upon a 5-Minute Crafts video called ‘20 Tips If You Spend Your Life in Front of Computer.’ At the time, I felt like I’d struck internet gold because I didn’t see anyone else talking about their absurd hacks.”

Because that’s the thing: Troom Troom videos are incredibly ripe for parody. The joy in watching them is largely based on their obvious absurdity — the uncanny narration, the knockoff–Disney Channel set design, the outlandishness of the projects.

Troom Troom videos are arguably part of Cringe YouTube, the ever-expanding network of uncomfortable and earnest videos that encompasses TikTok compilations, Instagram comedians, and former Vine dudes with creepy hair, among others. It’s difficult to point to a YouTube video that isn’t a little cringey in its own way, but within Cringe YouTube, it isn’t just the original videos that get views — it’s the never-ending cycle of reactions and commentary. PewDiePie, the most-subscribed YouTube channel of all time, for example, has built a career on making fun of other YouTubers’ attempts at earnestness.

On why the genre is so popular right now, Johnson guesses it’s because of “mystery, community, and the whole ‘so bad it’s good’ thing. If someone sees something super absurd and can share that with someone else, there’s a catharsis there.”

He also compares Troom Troom to a movie wildly considered to be one of the most unintentionally laughable films of all time. “As someone who is a die-hard fan of the Tommy Wiseau movie The Room, I see A LOT of similarities between The Room and Troom Troom,” he adds. “I feel like I should start a conspiracy theory about how Troom Troom is short for ‘The Room The Room.’”

glue-stick cheese, there’s certainly an appetite for looking at it.

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Source: https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/11/12/18065662/troom-troom-5-minute-crafts-youtube-diy-prank

[tearaluu]

Things i’ve heard people say

“I can put candy in my fanny pack” “Did you see pussy destroyer in spencers with his hat and cape on” “Can I be Bill’s hamster” “SOMEONE'S CAT BROKE INTO MY HOUSE” “god my nails are great simply nailogical can blow me”

“Tfw you find out one of your goldfish is a cannibal and ate half of the other goldfish”

“can you make a law and order murder scene for reference” “like all my posts on tumblr or ill kick you” “why the fuck did they fucking teach that stupid fucking stuart little how to fucking play soccer he's fucking 2 inches” “I’ve been up since 4 hows your day” “im like the lsd of the friend group”

[krinsyn]

Some holo references! All of these are screenshots from Simply Nailogical on youtube. If you like the holo TF coloring experiments I’ve been trying, please check out this channel! Basically every frame of every video is a fantastic reference for holo.

Video: 100% Pure Uncut Holo

Please do not remove caption because it gives source credit!