Hailey Elizabeth, the girl who covers controversial people while doing her makeup

Welcome to a weekend edition of Creators Digest!

Sundays include a deep dive into a single creator that you may or may not have heard of, this is their origin stories and a compilation of content links and more.

With that, let’s just jump into it.

Humble Beginnings

Meet Hailey Elizabeth. Hailey was born in the Chicago area and started her YouTube channel in November 2020 in the midst of the pandemic. She started with a video called “how to look rough and dirty but cute (everyday makeup tutorial)” where no surprise here, she did her makeup.

Brief side-bar. As a person who has no interest in makeup and hasn’t used makeup (except for the one time I was on Netflix), I am definitely not her target demographic. That said, her first video is not like her others. Like any good content creator, she diversified her content & combined her interests.

It’s comments like these that I resonate with because I have no interest in makeup myself but I still end up watching the whole video.

Her next video was a week in my life type video where she talks about finals (remember she’s 18 so still in school), studying, Christmas celebrations and more. And the follow-up to that is a 10 minute video about a makeup look she likes. It’s great content but her next video was what would help her channel takeoff.

A New Format

Her next video was a 40 minute deep dive video on Shane Dawson being a sociopath. It worked. The video has almost 440K views vs 10-15K on her previous three videos. The amount of research she did to captivate her audience is mind blowing and the ease and pacing at which the information is delivered is sheer editing brilliance. She still does her makeup but she’s talking over it with the story about Shane Dawson and delivering a deep dive on him and his past.

Why 40 minute deep dive videos with makeup work

Hailey created this format and it works well for 3 reasons:

1. Combining audience expectations. If you want to watch her do her makeup, you still can, but you stay for the story if you’re not interested in the visuals

2. Passive consumption. Contrary to let’s say a Mr. Beast video where the visuals tell the story better than the audio, Hailey has a voice that captivates and hooks the viewer but you don’t necessarily have to be watching. You can just be listening. Huge when you think about the amount of people who just put on long-form YouTube in the background.

3. The Ongoing thread. The makeup setup at the beginning hooks the viewer into wondering what the end result will look like. Along the video, the story ends up becoming a hook while viewers wait for a “big reveal”. That ongoing thread makes it easy to stay and wait for the big reward.

For those that don’t know Shane Dawson is one of the most recognized names on YouTube. With 20 million subscribers on his main channel and literal documentaries on his channel that get 20M+ views each, he’s the king of long-form content that lives exclusively on YouTube. That said, he’s also a somewhat polarizing figure with a controversial past.

Once this first video hit, Hailey doubled down on making these long-form makeup deep dive videos. The combination of both and the amount of research and editing she’d do for a 40-50 minute video is so different than other YouTubers who churn out 5-10 minute videos on a weekly basis.

What made Hailey different is she would still deliver weekly but the product (read video) she would be delivering is so well-researched, edited that you could always rely on her to deliver something of value to her.

Any goal of any content creator is to have their viewer hopefully learn something they might not have learned if they consumed other content. With Hailey, it’s exactly that up-leveled because she’s synthesized all this information and then presented it in a compelling fashion.

Getting Traction & Growth

Her next big video that took off was about David Dobrik. I’m not going to comment on the allegations against Dobrik (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, just Google it), but the video is one of Elizabeth’s most viewed at 1.5M views (as of June 2021).

The video breaks down David’s past and leads up to the current allegations along with. including various members of the Vlog Squad and the happenings therein. It is a true literal deep dive as she shows so many different clips from various vlogs, videos and tweets. It’s a thoroughly researched piece that deserves a watch.

Her next few videos covered controversial figures and topics and led to her most-viewed video to date, covering the toxic world of family vloggers, specifically the ACE family, led by Austin McBroom.

The video has almost 3M views as of June 2021. It’s getting some more views as of late as Austin McBroom just won his boxing fight against Bryce Hall yesterday. The fight was well a literal bloodbath with Bryce Hall starting to bleed from his nose after the first round and then Austin won by a total knockout (TKO) after a few rounds. You can watch the fight highlight here.

How Hailey Makes Money

As with any YouTuber, the majority of your income comes from brand deals and after getting some traction and a format that is entirely her own, Hailey started doing some brand deals. Her latest few videos include brand integrations with Honey (the free browser extension that saves you money via coupons), Etah Love (a jewelry store), Surfshark (a VPN client) and Scentbird (a fragrance company).

By the way, the links above are affiliate links from Hailey’s YouTube channel, not general links, so if you want to support Hailey, go purchase or sign-up using the links above.

Moving onto the numbers because in the words of one of my favorite rappers:

“Men Lie, Women Lie, Numbers don’t” - Logic 2015

Quick Look at the Numbers

Hailey continued making her deep dive videos while doing her makeup and her channel growth started to skyrocket. Her first long-form video was uploaded in March 2021 covering Shane Dawson and you can see the sub growth start nearing 100K by end of of March. It started growing even more in the month of April and onward.

She currently sits at 262K subscribers at almost 10M views on all of her videos collectively. The format clearly works and the smart part about these well-researched videos is that they are in a way forever evergreen. As I mentioned above with Austin McBroom, as any of these start getting more notoriety or start becoming mainstream news, people want to learn and view these deep dives into their lives.

Humans naturally crave drama and backstory, Hailey provides that in one of the best ways I’ve seen.

Takeaways

Hailey’s format of long-form 40 minute videos work because:

1. Combined Audience Expectations: coupling makeup with well-researched content

2. Passive Consumption: listen & learn instead of continuously watching

3. The Ongoing Thread: makeup naturally has a before/after and keeps the viewer watching to see the finished result. Or you care about where they story ends. Either way you’re listening all the way thru.

Hailey is a great example of someone who tried and copied some formats (the makeup, week in my life type content), and then found her content niche with long-form well-researched & edited mini-documentaries on different people/topics. Her deep-dives are incredible and I’m excited for her next one coming next week.

You can subscribe to Hailey here and view her latest video covering controversial figure Dan Bilzerian below.

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