When Emma Chamberlain was growing up, people would often tell her that she talked too much, and she thinks they were probably right. “Naturally, I’m a talker,” she confirms when we speak over Zoom. “But it ended up giving me this special ability to share with random people on the internet.”
Chamberlain is 21 now, but she still has plenty to say. The difference is that today, millions of people are listening. Since she first started her YouTube channel some five years ago, she has built a combined online following of roughly the size of the population of Canada. To date, her videos have been viewed more than one-and-a-half billion times, and she now oversees an online empire that also includes her podcast, Anything Goes, her coffee company, Chamberlain Coffee, and endorsement deals with some of the biggest brands on the planet.
“I remember when I first started making YouTube videos, I was kind of emulating the style of the time, which for girls my age was make-up and clothing-focussed, and very pristinely produced,” she says of her earlier work. “I loved consuming that content. But I had this epiphany where I was like, why am I doing this? There’s no need to be emulating what’s already there. So what do I need on YouTube? What do I need to watch?”
What Chamberlain landed on would shape the kind of content you see everywhere now, a contrast to the tidal
