In February 2025, YouTube turned 20. The video site has gone through a lot over the past two decades, including an acquisition, an earnings glow-up, and multiple generations of star creators. In our 20 Years of YouTube series, we’ll examine the uploads, trends, and influencers that have defined the world’s favorite video site — one year at a time. Click here for a full archive of the series.
By the time 2020 rolled around, YouTube was 15 years old. The teenagers who had grown up with the platform’s first wave of homegrown stars — the Ryan Higas, iJustines, and Smoshes of the world — had become full-grown adults. Compared to their younger years, they had less time to spend watching videos. A younger generation had emerged as the drivers of digital culture, and the merger of Musical.ly and TikTok had created a new force to rival YouTube’s dominance of the creator industry.
The business side of the creator world was evolving, too. The old order of multi-channel networks was crumbling, creator revenue was ballooning, and major stars like Logan Paul were realizing that they could dictate the course of their careers rather than deferring to their handlers.
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That’s a lot of change, and we haven’t even gotten to the 2020 of it all. A chaotic year opened up new doors for many creators, but it also showed the door to old favorites who were forced to reckon with the insensitive jokes they had made in the past.
I’m talking, chiefly, about Jenna Marbles and Shane Dawson. In 2020, they each had more than a decade of YouTube experience and tens of millions of subscribers hanging onto every upload. But as a racial reckoning swept across the United States as part of the George Floyd protests, Marbles’ and Dawson’s old videos came under the microscope — and the resulting backlash accelerated the upheaval of creator culture.
In the cases of both Marbles and Dawson, much of the controversy centered around old videos performed in blackface. Marbles came under fire for an inappropriate Nicki Minaj costume, as well as jokes that offended women and Asians. Dawson’s transgressions included his own blackface characters and numerous videos featuring the n-word.
These two linked public trials had related outcomes. Both creators posted remorseful apology videos in which they held themselves accountable for regrettable past actions. Marbles chose to put her channel on indefinite hiatus, whereas Dawson faced sanctions from YouTube that affected his ability to monetize his video. Five years later, Marbles’ channel is still inactive, while Dawson has added new uploads occasionally on his primary hub.
On one hand, there’s not much to say about the creator reckoning of 2020. It had been known for a while — if not said out loud — that many of YouTube’s biggest stars relied on tired and offensive jokes. Criticism of Dawson dates as far back as 2014, when Franchesca Ramsey called out the racist tropes that underpinned much of his comedy. Ramsey authored her take amidst the release of Not Cool, a Dawson-piloted film that was savaged by critics for its crass sense of humor.
It is easy enough to see Dawson’s “cancellation” as an overdue punishment for a creator who made millions by pushing the boundaries of taste until they couldn’t contain him anymore. The case of Jenna Marbles, however, makes this story more complicated. Despite her flaws, she wasn’t Shane Dawson. Her decision to go on indefinite hiatus felt like an acknowledgement that her time in the YouTube spotlight had passed, and she was willing to quietly pass the mic to the generation of creators she helped inspire.
“I’m just a person trying to navigate the world the same way that you are, so I don’t always know what’s right, what’s wrong, or what the truth is,” she said in her apology video. “As someone clearly with their own past that they’re not proud of, I do just try to see people for who they are right now — today.”
Some fans who had admired Marbles during her heyday backed up the assertion that she had been caught up a in fast-moving cultural shift. “By today’s standards, [Marbles’ first viral video] is undeniably offensive,” reads a 2021 op-ed in The Berkeley Beacon. “But in 2010, when controversial creators like Shane Dawson and Onision ruled the platform, Marbles joking about wearing ‘whore’ makeup and wasting her master’s degree by working as a go-go dancer was hilarious.”
That paragraph gets to the heart of this phenomenon. The cultural crusades of 2020 demanded accountability from creators who had thrived on the edgy side of YouTube, and in the case of Jenna Marbles, the critics got what they wanted. What was really going on, however, was a generational changing of the guard. Marbes and Dawson’s respective rises were aided by the tastes of a Millennial cohort that was hungry for something a lot edgier than what was available on traditional TV. But as Gen Z became the internet’s most dominant cultural force, the window slammed shut for that brand of outspoken, offensive rhetoric — at least temporarily.
While Marbles and Dawson were shown the door, active creators benefited from an influencer marketing boom driven in part by the at-home culture the COVID-19 pandemic ushered in. The term “creator economy” came into common use, and YouTube became an instrumental part of an industry that now accounts for nearly 20% of the U.S. GDP.
As the TikTok generation enjoys its moment in the sun, Jenna Marbles is living a quiet life in L.A. with her husband Julien Solomita and their pet dogs. Perhaps, had the George Floyd protests never come, she’d still be plugging away on YouTube alongside the other icons of the platform’s first decade. Personally, I prefer to think that she saw the writing on the wall. The cultural context that had thrust her to stardom had expired, and she moved on gracefully. YouTube since 2020 has been distinctly different from the preceding 15 years, and for many of the platform’s earliest celebrities, there’s no going back.
