Submission 3,027

About

Jennelle Eliana is a vlogger who posts videos about living in her van. Her meteoric rise in subscribers and views on the platform in the span of 2 months has led to numerous conspiracy theories about her and her channel. To date, she has over 1.8 million subscribers.

History

Jennellecreated her channel on April 8th, 2018.^[1] Her first video was posted on June 26th, 2019 and was titled "VAN TOUR | SOLO FEMALE TRAVELER lives VANLIFE with PET SNAKE!"(shown below). To date, the video has over 7 million views.

Within a short span of that first video, her channel quickly rose in prominence, and catapulted in views and subscribers. On July 18th, 2019, Redditor scott_doge_wow made a post to /r/OutOfTheLoop asking about her swift rise to fame, noting that at the time, she had 1.1 million subscribers but only two videos.^[2] The following day, YouTube channel Memology 101 started a series of videos about the rise. The videos point out some questionable means with which the channel was promoted, such as Philip DeFranco endorsing her channel after only two videos, perhaps as part of the Rogue Rocket ad agency, which has partnered with DeFranco to bolster new talent. The videos also point to people saying they discovered they were subscribed to the channel without ever having done so (shown below, left). The channel was monetized three weeks after its first upload, which is extremely rare for a content creator. Memeology101's video also suggests bots are posting duplicate comments on her videos.

Distractify^[3] covered the rise, noting people felt she may have been a type of industry plant pushed on YouTube due to her long and algorithm-friendly content. Tubefilter^[4] spoke to YouTube about Eliana. YouTube declined to comment on Eliana specifically, but noted that sustainable-living and van-life videos do very well on the platform. “We have found there to be a general rise in interest around sustainable living on YouTube,” a spokesperson said. “In fact, videos on sustainable living have doubled this year, with some of the top categories being van life/tiny home, minimalism, and zero waste… videos related to van life increased over 4.5x last year vs. 2017.”