Logan Paul

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2013 · Vine · Also known as Logan Paul Vlogs; TheOfficialLoganPaul; Maverick; Impaulsive

What it is

Logan Paul is an American entertainer, born in Ohio in 1995, who became famous by filming himself and posting the videos online. He started with six-second comedy clips, moved to long daily video diaries (called vlogs) on YouTube, then turned to boxing matches, professional wrestling with WWE, a podcast called Impaulsive and a sports drink called Prime. Millions of mostly young viewers followed him, and he's as well known for his scandals as for his work.

Where it came from

In 2013 Paul started posting short comedy sketches on Vine, an app where every video was six seconds long. He dropped out of Ohio University in 2014, moved to Los Angeles with other Vine stars and shifted to YouTube, where his channel Logan Paul Vlogs launched in 2015. He uploaded near-daily videos of pranks, stunts and his own life, and his fans called themselves the "Logang". By 2017 Forbes listed him among the best-paid YouTubers. When Vine shut down in early 2017, he was one of the few Vine stars whose audience had already followed him elsewhere.

Why it mattered

Paul was the clearest case of a creator who got famous for shock content and then used that fame to sell almost anything. On 31 December 2017 he uploaded a video from Aokigahara, a forest near Mount Fuji known as a suicide site, showing the body of a man who'd recently died. The backlash was huge. YouTube dropped him from its premium advertising programme, he stopped uploading for a few weeks, then came back. In 2022 the YouTuber Coffeezilla showed that CryptoZoo, a game of collectible digital animals Paul had promoted, never worked and left buyers out of pocket. His career carried on regardless.

What noah thinks it shows about us

Paul shows that a large online audience could survive almost any scandal as long as the videos kept coming. Plenty of people watched him to be angry at him, and the platforms paid him for that attention just as they paid him for fans.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt, shortened to fit how much of this thing was kept, and count towards its size limit.