It’s a weekday morning in late August, & Lele Pons’s body is slouched in an armchair in her three-bedroom apartment; her mind is deep in her phone. Her manager, Sam Shahidi, is trying to guide the 23-year-old social-media phenom through a taped interview with a journalist.Bạn vẫn xem: Lele pons với amanda cerny
She has just walked downstairs to lớn her living room wearing white sweatpants along with some of her branded merch — a đen hoodie with a white rectangle under the words, “YES I’M.” The idea is for Pons’s followers lớn use permanent marker lớn write in the blank the word they want khổng lồ define them.Bạn đã xem: Lele pons cùng amanda cerny
Pons’s rectangle reads, “INSECURE.”
Social media star Lele Pons, 23, was the first lớn reach a billion loops on the micro-video site Vine. (Roger Kisby/for The Washington Post)
Her long blond hair has been blown dry into soft waves, và she is heavily made up. This afternoon, she is scheduled to tape a new YouTube đoạn phim in which she & Twan Kuyper, who acts as her fictional boyfriend, will play farcical social truyền thông vloggers going on their honeymoon.
Bạn đang xem: Lele pons và amanda cerny
The apartment, featured regularly in her clip shoots, is decorated generically with neutral couches and several orchid plants. A Ouija board và a trò chơi of Twister sit on the bookshelf. There’s a hole in the wall where a friend threw her in a staged fight during the filming of one of the slapstick videos that have made her a multimillionaire YouTube star with aspirations for greater fame.
She became the first to reach a billion loops on the micro-video site Vine in 2014 and is sometimes credited with popularizing the phrase “Do it for the Vine,” an exhortation khổng lồ live one’s life in service of the social truyền thông post that will result. She is so representative of a generic online personality that it is hard to tell what has exerted more influence: YouTube on Pons or Pons on YouTube?
She and her mother — who serves as an occasional extra playing herself in Pons’s videos — live here together.
There’s a golden crocodile displayed on a side table because Pons, who was born in Caracas và lived on a Venezuelan farm until she was 5, loves crocodiles.
Shahidi has said that crocodiles are a topic that engages her. “I’m obsessed with them. It’s the only thing that gets me off my phone,” she says, as she looks at her phone.
Crocodiles remind her of her wild, solitary early childhood when she would watch them from her house in the country.
She’s explaining distractedly that her father, who lives in Miami, arranges for small alligators to be delivered khổng lồ his pool when Pons visits, so that she can swim with them as a form of therapy.
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David Chang • Andy Cohen • Lele Pons • Mark Bradford • Lana Del Rey
All of a sudden, she stops. “Wait, is this the interview?”
It is. Pons looks confused. “If you can tell me, like, ‘action?’ ” she asks.
Action.
Pons sits up.
“Well,” she says brightly, with an uptick in energy. “I’m obsessed with them,” she says of the crocodiles & continues the story she told before, just more colorfully, as if the previous exchange had never happened.
The distance between her real self and her on-camera self has grown in recent years, as Lele Pons has evolved from a 16-year-old high school student creating videos about how to skip class into one of the biggest entertainers on social media.
She has lasted — và outlasted other social media personalities — because she does nothing to lớn subvert the expectations of her fans and nothing khổng lồ offend. She has all the right fights at all the right times. She lives by the rules of Instagram and YouTube & is in turn rewarded by them.
Her videos had 121 million views on YouTube in August, & she has created posts sponsored by Google, Tinder, the “Dragon City” video clip game & Budweiser. She appeared in a Jack in the Box commercial. She recently recorded a Spanish-language pop single, “Celoso” (“Jealous”), that reached triple platinum status for Latin music on the American music charts. She plans to lớn release a new music clip this month that she wrote, directed and edited. She wants to lớn be an entertainer and cringes when she’s called an “influencer.”
Among her fans are the platforms that monetize her: “She is vulnerable, hilarious & insanely creative,” says Jake O’Leary, global head of artist kinh doanh at YouTube, noting that her nội dung connects with the platform’s global audience.
She’s nostalgic for her early start on Vine, the video clip platform that made her famous. Now, social media is so big that “it’s less fun,” she says. “It’s less fun, but you just have khổng lồ adapt.”
“No one even told me a schedule for posting. I just needed it,” Pons says of creating videos for Vine. (Roger Kisby/for The Washington Post)
Short videos, supersized success
Eleonora Pons was born in Caracas, Venezuela. Soon after she was born, the family moved to lớn the countryside to take over a family business that manufactured farm equipment.
“I didn’t talk until I was 3,” Pons recalls in her apartment.
Even after she could talk, “she was much better drawing or painting or a story board, instead of having lớn tell her story with her own words,” says her father, Luis Pons, an architect & interior designer.
When Lele Pons was 5 years old, she and her mother, who is Italian and a pediatrician, were kidnapped và ransomed, a common occurrence in some parts of Latin America. The experience spurred the family to move to Miami.
After she entered grade school in Miami, “immediately we figured out . . . She had learning disabilities,” her father says.
She didn’t stop playing with her Barbies until she was 14 — “which is not normal,” she says. She also remembers being the class clown và the popular kids saying: “Lele! Lele! bởi vì something funny. Make us laugh.”
“I didn’t get that in my school because my school was like a school for engineers and doctors. My mom was a doctor, she probably wanted me khổng lồ go lớn a good school, but I was not born for that.” In Vine videos, she found something she enjoyed, almost a passion. “And then it just, like, blew up.”
Her first Vines were about how she was doing poorly in school, how she would cut corners to do something, or how she was not seen as the popular girl. Her father thought her work was brilliant and an extension of the kind of drawings she used to lớn make lớn tell a story when she was little. She was making at least one, sometimes two Vines, a day.
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“No one even told me a schedule for posting. I just needed it,” she says. If she didn’t make one, she felt the day was wasted.
She can’t remember her first sponsored deal, sometime around 2013. Her father says it was for MTV.
When she was on Lincoln Road — the famous outdoor shopping district in Miami — and people asked for selfies, she knew she was getting somewhere.
In 2016, Pons made Time magazine’s danh sách of “The 30 Most Influential People on the Internet.” (Roger Kisby/for The Washington Post)
In addition to lớn the crocodiles, growing up, Pons mostly watched telenovelas, Latin American soap operas. She says she sometimes watched five episodes a day. She loved the drama of them — an evil twin sister or a suddenly blinded stepmother — and they often depicted the love story she wanted lớn have. She appreciated the plot climaxes & the resulting adrenaline. (Venezuelan telenovela star Gaby Espino was the inspiration for Pons’s nose job.)
She says she used to like doing stunts for her videos, and they often show her walking into doors và falling down.
In a change of pace, first lady Michelle Obama, seeking lớn reach the massive audience of young people who followed Pons, invited her lớn the white house in the fall of 2015 to help promote her initiative khổng lồ encourage students to lớn apply lớn college. Pons remembers when she met Obama because it occurred almost one month after her nose job. The medical procedure caused her to lớn take one of her only significant breaks from posting.
Her mother cried when she met Obama. But Pons rushes through that story khổng lồ tell of her meeting her “only true idol” — Shakira.
“You know, Michelle Obama was more elegant, và I was on my best behavior. & it was very inspiring. But when I met Shakira, I was crying, I was a mess, I was sweating, I smelled because I was just, like, very, like, anxious. . . . I was just a mess.”
In 2016, Pons made Time magazine’s danh mục of “The 30 Most Influential People on the Internet,” joining Caitlyn Jenner, Kanye West and Donald Trump.
In 2017, she walked the runway for Dolce & Gabbana; she was one of Forbes’s 30 under 30; she has a role in Camila Cabello’s “Havana” video.
Pons’s followers are interwoven with her life story. Her book, “Surviving High School: A Novel,” starts each chapter with her number of followers. It was not an instant classic. Kirkus wrote, “Lele Pons is your typical social media star: pretty, quirky, insecure, và sensitive,” and added that she “puts an inordinate emphasis on the value of physical attractiveness, financial gain, & fame.” School Library Journal was even harsher, calling it a “frivolous book” in which Pons “comes across as arrogant và unlikable; case in point: ‘My life is dope và I do dope things. People think I’m cool và want khổng lồ be around me; I attract crowds lượt thích moths to lớn a flame, I am in demand.’ ”
For all her fans, Pons seems lớn over-index on haters, who have created a YouTube subgenre of videos about how much they hate her. A sampling: “Lele Pons is bad,” “What’s wrong with Lele Pons?” & “Lele Pons is still bad.” Fellow YouTuber Jessi Smiles counts Pons among “THE RUDEST YOUTUBERS I’VE EVER MET.”
“Lele is an underdog. She gets the most negative comments,” says Shahidi, who manages Pons with his brother John. “Everyone says she’s not funny, & everyone wants her to lớn fail.”
She may have earned this lack of affection.
In 2016, Pons had a public breakup with her fellow Vine star and former best friend Amanda Cerny. Amanda told gossip site the Dirty that Pons had been swiping Cerny’s phone to delete the most popular posts.
Pons won’t discuss Cerny’s allegations. “We have never commented on it và prefer not to,” Shahidi says. About haters in general, Pons says that they are the reason she sticks to lớn comedy.
In other instances, her artifice for the camera has backfired. In 2017, she posted that she cut her hair lớn donate it, only to lớn be outed for cutting off hair extensions. (She says she intended to donate the extensions and didn’t realize that they would not be accepted.)
Pons has fans as young as 9 và others who are 21. She doesn’t want khổng lồ alienate any of them. It has made for a difficult set of topics. One day, she’s twerking on a tree. The next day, she’s making a đoạn phim about Dora the Explorer. The span of topics has drawn criticism over exposing children khổng lồ inappropriate content.
Pons says she has noticed a hardening in the digital atmosphere over the past few years. People are more sensitive và quick lớn take offense. They’re out for digital blood. “If there’s any opportunity you can give them for you to lớn fail, they will take it, & they will try their best to lớn make you fail,” she says.
Her solution is to lớn reveal nothing. “You will never see me cry,” she says. Her skits are born out of her experiences but are never too personal. “When I cry or when I feel sad, I’m going lớn talk to my mom.”
An immigrant, she never addresses the issue in her videos. Would she ever discuss Trump’s rhetoric about Latinos? “I would never — like, honestly, social truyền thông scares me khổng lồ the point that I’d just rather be private and talk about it with my friends.”
She offers examples of what you can and cannot say on YouTube — and takes caution to lớn a new level.
“You can say, ‘I lượt thích pasta.’ No one is going to say, ‘You lượt thích pasta! That’s horrible,’ ” she explains. But you cannot say, for example, that you don’t like puppies. “Then people would find fault with you for not liking animals.”
Pons has fans as young as 9 & others who are 21, resulting in a broad span of clip topics and, sometimes, criticism. (Roger Kisby/for The Washington Post)
“If there’s any opportunity you can give them for you to fail, they will take it,” Pons says of people in internet culture. (Roger Kisby/for The Washington Post)
Pons has fans as young as 9 và others who are 21, resulting in a broad span of đoạn phim topics and, sometimes, criticism. (Roger Kisby/for The Washington Post) “If there’s any opportunity you can give them for you to lớn fail, they will take it,” Pons says of people in mạng internet culture. (Roger Kisby/for The Washington Post)
What comes next?
In 2016, soon after the Cerny episode, Pons signed on to lớn be managed by Shots Studios, co-founded by Sam and John Shahidi & partially funded by their friend Justin Bieber. The production and management company also manages other Vine-turned-YouTube talent, such as Rudy Mancuso, Hannah Stocking & Anwar Jibawi. They often appear in one another’s posts.
Managing stars who were born online calls for a specific sensibility & guidance, says Sam Shahidi: “We have the stigma of influencers trying to lớn be artists. The industry view is they aren’t talented: ‘Yeah they can build a tín đồ base, but they can’t act or direct or sing or perform.’ We always have to work against that.”
A lack of critical acclaim has no apparent effect on the bottom line. “There’s quite a few eight-figure talents working in this world, và they are making this money consistently,” says Reza Izad, the chief executive of Studio71, a digital media production and distribution company.
Advertising revenue on YouTube for the biggest stars can range from $2 million to lớn $5 million a year, one industry expert said, depending on the geographic breakdown of the audience. Individual sponsorship deals and other commercials can địa chỉ onto that, not lớn mention Instagram, Facebook và other platforms.
International audiences are worth less lớn global advertisers than American ones, experts say. About 40 percent of Pons’s audience is in the United States, và 60 percent international.
YouTube is a lot like an old-school Hollywood studio, except that instead of Louis B. Mayer, entertainers are terrified of an algorithmic violation of the platform’s terms of service.
Shahidi says he is helping his clients climb the ladder of fame from 1 khổng lồ 10 — 10 being a major role in “Pitch Perfect” or directing their own show. (He won’t say where he thinks Pons ranks right now.) He takes a long-term view & aspires to lớn be in business with Disney. To bởi it, he’s setting strictures now khổng lồ protect his clients in a world where regulators are paying more attention, và he predicts the business will soon start maturing và acting more lượt thích a grown-up.
One of the rules: no swearing for the camera. Pons doesn’t curse in any of her videos. She used to, but then, Shahidi says, “I said, ‘I think we need khổng lồ stop swearing, & the market will change, & ad revenue will change, because Pepsi & others won’t want to put ads around someone who is swearing.’ ”
She’s been at this for seven years, which can feel lượt thích a long time. Few YouTube stars think they will stick with it forever. In five years, Pons hopes to lớn have a family.
“I get tired ideas-wise,” she admits. But she doesn’t see a day when she’s not posting. She says she’ll stay interested if she can evolve, which means releasing more music, traditional acting and maybe directing. “I didn’t come this far just to lớn get this far,” she says. “I’m going to keep going.”
sarah.ellison“I didn’t come this far just khổng lồ get this far,” Pons says. “I’m going lớn keep going.” (Roger Kisby/for The Washington Post)
