You can witness just about every intimate aspect of someone’s life on YouTube: people opening their college decisions, buying their weekly groceries, or birthing an actual baby.
Since the start of the pandemic, serialized posting about a relationship has become one of the most-viewed trends on YouTube — and has helped some creators launch lucrative social media careers.
“I think people just love to see love,” YouTuber Veronica Merrell, who documents her relationship with her now-husband, fellow YouTuber Aaron Burriss.
But their journey from becoming official to getting married, a three-part video series uploaded onto Burriss’s channel in December 2021, shattered their previous viral records.
RonRon’s serialized story brought you along from becoming official to their wedding day, a very personal vlog that Burriss said the couple spent four months working on.
the joy just radiates through and i’m so happy for you guys and one day i can hopefully marry the the man of my dreams,” another person wrote on their “We Got Married” video.
Trending Google searches around relationship content have also increasingly skewed toward creators, with searches for specific social media couples like Katie and Josh Brueckner and musicians Jess and Gabriel Conte, rising 200% to 300% in the past year.
“It can mess with you if a video does well — like now we gotta post this and this as a couple.
But now they see the pay off.
And RonRon’s viewership aged up.
Maddy Buxton, a trends manager at Google, said the mind-boggling numbers have been a result of changes in the creator landscape as well.
In the 2010s of YouTube, the variants of “Boyfriend Tag” dominated lifestyle content as we watched our favorite influencer couples put makeup on each other, answer our need-to-know questions, and talk about why they broke up.
Nick Bencivengo and Symonne Harrison have built their online presence together as Snick, but unlike RonRon, they’ve been public since day one.
One of their most-viewed videos was a series where they pretended to get married.
The posts spanned five YouTube videos and a whole host of TikToks, split between their individual channels.
The couple had an inkling that the series could go viral with the marriage and engagement aspects, they said, because they knew how well relationship content performs on YouTube, but they were still shocked by the response.
But they are also cautious about milking their relationship for content.
Livestreamed weddings became a global phenomenon during the pandemic, as public health guidelines forced private, intimate moments to move online.
In part, Burriss said, people are looking for guidance.