Trisha Paytas pushed by COVID economy to attack James Charles

Trisha Paytas criticized the integrity of the Ace Family’s stability and maligned James Charles in passing, but the resultant drama may just be a way to survive pandemic economics as a YouTuber.

Paytas highlighted problematic behaviors among the Ace Family, suggesting those behaviors were emblematic of fissures in the marriage. Pontificating in that context on TikTok, she mentioned James Charles, YouTube makeup artist and first male Cover Girl, in passing to compare Ace Family neuroses to those she claimed Charles also possessed.

“I’m seeing so like scary red flags like more so than any I have ever seen. Yeah, James Charles is like narcissistic and sociopathic. But like, [the Aces] have kids,” Charles said.

Charles tersely responded to this in the comment section: “Keep my name out of your mouth you do not know me.”

Paytas then replied, saying that Charles built his fortune by being involved in constant, online drama—ostensibly by generating lucrative web traffic in videos arguing or clarifying scandals involving other popular influencers.

Many like Dankanator’s Nashmia Adnan note, though, that Paytas has “criticized many other YouTubers such as Gabbie Hanna, Charli D’Amelio, Addison Rae, Vlog Squad, David Dobrik and her ex-boyfriend Jason Nash” and feuded with each of them for it, Charles now just being the latest.

“You’r right, I don’t know you,” Paytas spat back at Charles. “But this is a big big big big guess of why I think people really dislike you. Because you’re arrogant as f*ck to think you can tell people to keep your name out of their mouths when you’re a public figure.”

Paytas didn’t stop there, unleashing several more harsh words, invoking sexual orientation and mentioning others with whom she’d already had popular online feuds. Whether this manifested from an affinity for drama or not, though, some like Adnan consider it likely that Paytas may be attacking Charles because of her friendship with arguably Charles’s most popular enemy, Shane Dawson.

Dawson is the quintessential victim of cancel culture, having fallen from celebrity to obscurity when it became more or less apparent to the world that Dawson had not supported Charles during Charles’s feud with YouTube makeup artist Tati Westbrook.

In fact, what was revealed was that Dawson may have even manipulated Westbrook into feuding with Charles in the first place out of what has been widely characterized as jealousy of Charles’s success. Being a public friend of Dawson’s, it’s not at all inconceivable that Paytas would avenge Dawson, even if only because Dawson encouraged her to do so.

However, Paytas is not actually a creator, as YouTube calls its uploaders, of the same caliber that Dawson previously was prior to cancellation. For that matter, Charles—a paragon of that creator echelon with his 23 million subscribers on YouTube—is many fathoms deeper in the YouTube game than Paytas is, and fans rarely consider the financial significance of this.

This year was the first in 15 that Alphabet, parent to both YouTube and Google, published earnings data for YouTube, revealing it to be a $15 billion-per-year business. It’s ad revenue generated by YouTubers whose cost-per-click (CPC) ratios reflect their value to advertisers.

That CPC also dictates the rate at which YouTubers earn; furthermore, the number of subscribers they have, as well as how many views they’re averaging in a given month. While some YouTubers publicize their CPC occasionally, it’s not readily available information for the public, so fans and critics can only speculate about the kind of money a given YouTuber is making.

Throughout much of the pandemic, though, YouTube traffic has been especially high, which would translate to higher earnings for YouTubers if advertising rates hadn’t dropped precipitately at the beginning of the COVID-19 event. The OneZero report by Chris Stokel-Walker in the first fiscal quarter, advertising rates had dropped by almost half by April as sponsors paused their campaigns.

Popular creators, as YouTube calls them, like Roberto Blake have complained about pandemic CPMs, and many have voiced their grievances on Twitter—Pimpnite, RealThunder402, JayCanada10, Eric Floberg, Bodil40 and countless others. The latter, Bodil40, has more than 2 million subscribers.

Bodil40 tweeted: “Is anyone else’s YouTube CPM going like -30-50% these days because of COVID?”

According to Search Engine Journal, creators were reporting CPM deficits ranging anywhere from 15% to 60%. Paytas has about twice as many subscribers as Bodil40 with 4.84 million subscribers for her main channel and another 1.36 million for her vlog channel.

The aforementioned creators are Paytas’s peers in that they occupy the same creator echelon and earn comparable incomes, so their complaints could reasonably be her own. Regardless of how much Paytas earns annually or what her tax returns will say for 2020, she is most likely losing expected income this year, probably to the tune of at least 15% yet perhaps 60%.

YouTube is a business that has monetized social relevance, so it’s likely that at least one of the reasons, if not the main reason, Paytas lashed out at Charles was because she needed the relevance to restore her abbreviated income.

If that were the case, it might have pushed Paytas to criticize the Ace family in hopes of a response, and it might also have encouraged her to lean into the opportunity to feud publicly with Charles for the same reason.