Controversial YouTuber Colleen Ballinger built a young fan base with her antics. Now that they're older, some can see through her act.

• Colleen Ballinger has been a YouTube mainstay since 2008, largely known for her character Miranda Sings.
• Ballinger has been accused of "grooming" her minor fans and making skits that included racist stereotypes.
• She cultivated a young fan base, and now that they're older, they can see the strangeness of her act.

Who knows what the veteran YouTuber Colleen Ballinger thought she would accomplish when she sat down in front of her camera with a ukulele in late June. 

Maybe she thought she was being clever, responding through cutesy song to allegations of mistreating minors. In any case, many of those who watched her perform the 10-minute non-apology, which had 14.6 million views by mid-August, were quick to say that she was not.

Maybe Ballinger thought a song would dampen the controversy engulfing her, which has been steadily undoing the work she's been doing online — and offline — for almost 15 years. Whatever the poorly conceived intention, she accomplished one impressive feat: She's now responsible for one of the grimmest public responses to a PR crisis in recent memory, and she's crashed and burned. After about a decade as one of the most popular YouTubers on the platform, Ballinger has now become a widely reviled figure.

For the uninitiated, Ballinger has been a YouTube mainstay since 2008, largely known for her unbearable character, Miranda Sings. Miranda is the theater kid of your nightmares: an unpleasant, inappropriate creep with smeared red lipstick who is convinced she can sing — but can't.

She's notable only for her bad wardrobe and lack of self-awareness; she's devoid of any visible trace of charisma but has the audacity to believe in herself. Like so much social-media output of the 2010s, Ballinger's work is all about cringe — the watchability of the unpleasant — and the result was a horde of about 10 million followers.

Over the past few years, Ballinger has been accused of unsavory actions including "grooming" her minor fans and making skits that included racist stereotypes. The latter, it must be said, is practically a rite of passage on YouTube. 

Rumblings that she'd engaged in unseemly behavior first began gaining traction in 2020, when a former fan said Ballinger sent him lingerie when he was a child. She confirmed that she did indeed send the lingerie. "It was never a creepy, gross thing that I was doing in secret," she said in a YouTube video three years ago. "It was a silly, stupid mistake that now is being blown way out of proportion."

This summer, after one former fan posted about how Ballinger went out of her way to humiliate female fans at her live shows, there's been a resurgence of accusations against her: Fans have alleged Ballinger fostered inappropriate relationships with her minor fans, overshared about her 2016 divorce, and nonconsensually shared nude photos of her fellow content creator Trisha Paytas.

Ballinger has yet to publicly respond to Paytas' allegations that she shared her nude photos, but soon after the allegations emerged Paytas announced a podcast the two had started together would end after just three episodes.

Ballinger did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.

And while the allegations against Ballinger had been public for a while, it was only in early June when they led to tangible career consequences.

A former fan, Kodee Tyler Dahl, made a since-deleted video titled "why I left the colleen ballinger fandom…," outlining Ballinger's alleged history of joking about race, weight, and sexual assault. They also said there was a Twitter group chat featuring minors and Ballinger herself, called "Colleeny's Weenies." Rolling Stone reported on screenshots of messages from Ballinger to the group in which she was said to have asked things like "Are you a virgin?" and "What's your fav position?" Swiftly, other former fans and detractors alike started accusing Ballinger of grooming the minors who loved her YouTube channel and live shows.

Ballinger responded with her aforementioned ukulele non-apology. And the ramifications continue, weeks later — she appears to have no real friends in the YouTube space at the moment, her social-media accounts have been dormant since the ukulele apology, and the remaining dates in her live tour have been canceled. No allies, no videos, no touring, and no money.

It seems Ballinger was woefully unprepared for the inevitable: that her main audience in her prime — who were mostly kids and preteens — would one day grow up and no longer find her brand of humor to be funny, but creepy.

Lots of early YouTubers knew how to weaponize the hate watch 

Ballinger's work can be interpreted as part of a larger YouTube trend of "cringe" content. 

Millennials raised on early YouTubers know the vibe well: videos made by creators who know how to weaponize the hate watch, who expertly craft videos designed to make their viewers feel ill.

Nicholas Perry, a YouTuber with 3.6 million subscribers who's better known by his channel name, Nikocado Avocado, started as a YouTuber who simply ate vegan meals on camera. He now eats massive quantities of food, usually dripping with cheese sauce, and sometimes while crying or hitting himself on camera.

Trisha Paytas — who has 5 million subscribers and is known for her own host of controversies that require a dedicated encyclopedia — was the queen of oversharing to her own detriment online. She sat on the floor of her kitchen, eating chicken tenders and crying about her failed relationships, her health issues, and the constant, never-ending stream of harm of which she said she was the target. These days, Paytas has chilled out measurably and posts mostly about her daughter while creating ASMR videos on one of her secondary channels. She is no longer online, it seems, to make you sick. 

YouTubers such as Ballinger, Paytas, and Perry profited handsomely off our disgust. Ballinger was once among the 10 highest-paid creators on YouTube, netting $5 million in 2015. Paytas, meanwhile, is big rich. When I profiled her in 2021, she claimed to be raking in $800,000 a month. For a week that same year, she was responsible for seven of the 10 most disliked videos on YouTube.

On TikTok, a new well of cringe videos springs eternal with users acting out interactions with the worst — fictional — figures someone could make up. The goal of these TikToks is to generate attention, but, of course, sponsorships and brand deals have followed. 

"To craft the perfect CringeTok video, creators mine the depths of the internet and their own experiences for traits they can exaggerate," The New York Times wrote in June. "Identifying behaviors that make us recoil, like self-absorption and obliviousness, requires an ironic amount of self-reflection."

You'll recognize the cringe archetypes that TikTokers are inventing: a shitty boyfriend asks you to make him lunch, a Karen bothers you at a store, a pick-me girl whines about not knowing how to do her makeup. But these new creators are working on a different level: They're inventing fake scenarios to be cringe-worthy. They're not enacting any of these acts on unsuspecting participants. It's all fictionalized, perhaps because actually making people uncomfortable isn't as profitable — or acceptable — anymore. 

Ballinger's now-adult fans can see the strangeness of the relationship they had with her

Ballinger's Miranda, on the other hand, is a character who purposefully misses social cues, pushes boundaries, and makes people uncomfortable with her nagging presence. The entire purpose behind her characterization is to be a creep.

And while most adults can hopefully differentiate between someone performing as a character and someone performing as themself, Ballinger's downfall came in that her act was meant for children who didn't necessarily know the difference between being cringe for comedy and someone performing disturbing acts and asking inappropriate questions. There's a fundamental difference between playing a character who makes adults uncomfortable and being an adult who makes minors uncomfortable.

It's no wonder that now, years later, after Ballinger's formerly enthusiastic underage fans have become adults, they are finally able to metabolize the strangeness of the relationship they had with her. What was once exciting — one's favorite creator responding to their DMs — has warped in an adult context.

These days, the Miranda Sings YouTube channel, which still has 10.6 million followers, is riddled with comments from people realizing how weird her shtick for kids actually is. "Collen, just because you're playing as Miranda while doing inappropriate things to children, doesn't mean you're excused for your actions," one commenter wrote on one of her more recent Miranda Sings video. "Especially since you literally are Miranda." 

Countless more wrote about feeling as if a piece of their childhood had been taken from them, learning more about the allegations against Ballinger. "I found solace and safety in this online group of people," a former fan of Ballinger, Johnny Silvestri, told Rolling Stone. "And these grown-ass adults abused it."

Allegations of grooming an audience are not specific to Ballinger — they come up a lot among younger YouTubers, namely the ones who made their names when they were just barely out of adulthood themselves.

James Charles, the makeup YouTuber best known for being cringey himself — but in his case, it's purely unintentional — was also accused of going after minors through his channel. In 2021, he was accused of messaging several minors and flirting with teenage members of his audience when he was already an adult. Charles was 21 at the time, and the accusations against him stemmed from when he was 18 to 20. Charles apologized but also said the boys accusing him had lied about their ages. 

It seems these YouTubers often think of their audiences — even when they're much younger than them — as their peers. And YouTube fame, though now firmly established in the pop-culture zeitgeist, is still unregulated. To an 18-year-old YouTuber who's only recently become famous, flirting with a 16-year-old fan may not feel ludicrous. Maybe the power dynamics at play aren't so evident, because you still think of yourself as the teenager making YouTube videos in your bedroom because you're bored.

"I was grateful that she was talking to me," Adam McIntyre, a YouTuber who's one of the people to bring allegations against Ballinger, told Rolling Stone. "As a content creator you can't control the baseline parasocial relationship that happens. However, you can feed into it and you can abuse it. That's when it becomes a problem. And that's what I believe Colleen does."

Besides, what is any teenager supposed to say when a 35-year-old famous person starts speaking to them like there isn't a clear power dysfunction. "Sometimes people make mistakes simply because they made a mistake," Ballinger said — or sang — in her video, which again, bears no real apology to anyone. "That mistake doesn't make them a terrible human. It just makes them human." 

It's apt that Ballinger would address the controversy with a poorly conceived song: It's childish and speaks to the very young audience she thought adored her unconditionally.

Ballinger will likely find an audience again

Still, internet memories are short. Ballinger will, in all likelihood, return to some kind of public stage. She will still find an audience, whether on YouTube or another platform. There always seem to be new avenues for YouTubers to reestablish trust with their audiences after controversy. It would be foolish to think being accused of grooming underage fans means Ballinger's online career is dead.

Charles, years out from his own proto-cancellation, was recently the subject of a profile in Cosmopolitan — a clear attempt at reputational rehabilitation. On TikTok, he continues to be an object of scorn and displeasure, but he also has 38 million followers. The frequently controversial Paytas has laundered her own reputation as well; she got married, she had a baby, and she took a step back from being online. It's all benefited her in the long run. She remains an internet mainstay: popular and wealthy but far less bombastic. 

Regardless, Ballinger's ukulele non-apology laid bare how little she seems to think of her audience, still treating them young and malleable enough to be manipulated and merciful enough to accept, as she sings, that she's "not a groomer, just a loser."

Ballinger thought — or hoped — that all she had to do to lull her audience into a false sense of complacency was sing a little song. Children, after all, love songs. But what she forgot, as she has so many times, is that young, impressionable audiences always grow up.