During their appearance on the imPaulsive podcast, YouTube stars the Dolan Twins have explained why they want to move away from their old content that makes them feel “trapped” in their past selves, and onto more candid content.
The twins Ethan and Grayson originally rose to popularity on the video app Vine in 2013, and have since gone on to produce content on their highly successful YouTube channel with over 11 million subscribers.
While they have many adoring fans, they haven’t been exempt from drama, as earlier in July they were forced to address a homophobic slur used when explaining the bullying they received in high school.
Drama aside, they still have a very large, and very active subscriber base, so what is driving them away from the content that made them so popular in the first place?
When asked what they like about doing the medium of their new podcast, Deeper with the Dolan Twins, Grayson said: “it’s just an open conversation, like I have so much sh*t on my mind that I wish I could say on YouTube, but YouTube is just not the place.”
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While they say that they are “trying to make YouTube the place” for those kinds of videos, they describe the site as having “premium entertainment” and that they have to make the decision to either “retire or reinvent.”
“We’ve been like at a point where we just have been really confused as to what to do with the content,” Ethan says. “I feel like I’ve been kind of trapped in my 17-year-old body as soon as the f**king camera turns on, because I’m like, ‘this is what my audience likes.”
“We just tried to film a video and it completely failed just because I was like ‘I don’t feel like myself when the camera’s on,” he continued. “It’s hard to find the balance between what you wanna film and what they wanna see.”
He says that “we haven’t really been living our lives as like, dudes,” and have been editing their daily schedule to do things that will appeal to their audience base and keep their numbers up.
While not a guarantee that they will move on from YouTube altogether, it certainly is an indication that their content will begin a shift into being more open and for a wider audience, in order to allow the twins to break away from their restrictive online personas.
