Alisha Marie started on the platform at age 15 but recently has been feeling creatively squeezed.
In this series, YouTube Icon, Entrepreneur speaks with the individuals behind popular YouTube channels to find out the secrets of their success.
Alisha Marie created her YouTube channel two weeks after her 15th birthday in 2008. Just over a decade later, on May 13, 2018, she uploaded a video to her channel titled, “This Isn’t Goodbye…” In it, she told her audience she would be taking a break, of undetermined length, from posting videos.
“Creatively, I am just not in it like I used to be,” she said, alternating between crying as she admitted to not being “proud” of her recent videos and laughing out of relief. “I’m burnt out.”
Alisha Marie, who uses her middle name as her professional surname, told her audience of more than 7.3 million subscribers of how she used to look down on fellow YouTubers who scaled back their posting rate. Their decision to create less only fueled her to create more videos — about travel hacks, room decor DIY ideas, roundups of common social faux pas and more.
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Increasingly, though, this attitude and approach took a toll. She wasn’t happy with the quality of the videos she was uploading and felt that she was uploading them simply to stick to a schedule and accrue viral views. (Her most popular video has 29.8 million views.)
Her hiatus applies only to her primary YouTube channel, and she made that clear in “This Isn’t Goodbye.” She said she’d keep posting to her secondary channel, AlishaMarieVlogs, which has more than 2.7 million subscribers, but on one condition: She’ll vlog if and when she wants to, not because she thinks she has to. She uploaded her most recent vlog five days after she announced she was taking a break from the primary channel.
After a brief break from Instagram, she’s also active on that platform once more, where her account (@alisha) has 3.7 million followers. But her main YouTube account remains frozen.
She’ll be back, refreshed, she insists. In the meantime, she tells Entrepreneur in the interview that follows, she’s thinking about ways to channel her passion and creativity into something “more tangible.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
1. How did you get your start with YouTube?
I was in high school when I first started — at the time, I had a part-time job at a sandwich shop. I remember finding makeup tutorials from brands and then through that, I saw a whole bunch of normal people doing them. My channel first started with a lot of beauty tutorials and fashion. And that was just on webcam at my parents’ house. No one edited — YouTube was so different back then.
My channel did not grow for probably three or four years, but I just loved it so much, and it was a genuine hobby. I never saw this really taking off. YouTube was so new, so there wasn’t really anyone to look up to as far as a role model. I remember I was planning on being a dietician. I was going to school and just kind of going with the flow, then I changed my major to business.
I just stuck with it, and then slowly, it started growing. That’s when I realized, wow, this could actually be something, and slowly but surely, it became my full-time job. I transitioned to more lifestyle content around that time, too. I realized I’m not a makeup artist. I’m not like, a Jaclyn Hill, you know? At the same time, I noticed comedy being a big push on the platform.
I moved about a year ago, and around then, I had another rebranding. I feel like people want to see real people doing real things on YouTube now. Before, it was more about how-tos, and now, people want to see someone’s personality more.
2. How much of your time do you spend on a video and what does that entail?
I’m a perfectionist. I don’t know if it needs to be this long, but planning a video could take half a day to a day. Whether I need to go get any props, or write out a script, that takes a long time. Filming the video itself takes day or day and a half, or sometimes two days, depending. I also edit everything myself, which can easily take anywhere from five to 10 hours.
The vlog, which is my second channel, doesn’t take as long, but because it’s more frequent, it would probably…
