The Prime craze and the power of YouTube

Samantha Hawley: Hi, I’m Sam Hawley, coming to you from Gadigal Land. This is ABC News Daily. It’s an energy drink that contains more than double the Australian legal limit of caffeine, and teenagers can’t get enough of it. So how and why did Prime drink become so popular to a point where it’s being traded on some school buses? Today we take a look at how YouTubers are infiltrating the lives of kids around the world and why, even if they try, parents can’t keep up.

Rachelle Hampton: My name is Rachelle Hampton and I host Slate’s internet culture podcast, In Case You Missed It or ICYMI. Our aim is to be extremely online so that other people don’t have to be.

Samantha Hawley: Good idea. I like the sound of it. All right, Rachelle, I’d never heard about this Prime Energy drink until recently, but apparently I’m a bit late to the party because it’s almost like it’s taken on its own persona. It’s a big deal, apparently.

Rachelle Hampton: Yeah, it very much is.

Reporter: It’s the drink. Everyone’s going nuts for prime, and it’s safe to say it’s been causing absolute mayhem.

Rachelle Hampton: Logan Paul and KSI are they’re very much targeted towards, I would say, teen boys. It’s not entirely surprising that this product they decided to launch together would sell out, though I I’m always surprised to see people mobbing for an influencer product, I’m not going to lie.

Logan Paul: Okay. I have officially achieved everything I’ve ever wanted to in life.

Boxing announcer: Logan Paul looking to shock the world. Do bad things to him, Logan.

Samantha Hawley: Yeah, right. Well, I don’t even know who Logan Paul is. So you’re one step up on me, so fill me in. Who is this Logan Paul guy? And I think I have heard of KSI, but just tell me who they are.

Rachelle Hampton: Oh. How long do you have?

Logan Paul: Big, big thing. Big announcement. Probably the biggest ever. Starting a lifestyle drink with KSI. My, my once rival, I feel like.

Rachelle Hampton: So Logan Paul is an American YouTuber, is probably best known for, I would say, his YouTube videos with his brother Jake Paul.

Logan Paul: What do you think, Jake? Honestly, this is the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. Yeah, it’s not even a ramp. It just goes straight up. Yo. So did he sign the waiver?

Rachelle Hampton: The two of them have been involved in so much controversy since they first started on YouTube.

Reporter: Logan Paul came under fire for posting an alarming video showing the body of a person who took their own life.

Rachelle Hampton: Though he has, over the course of his career, I think been ranked in the highest paid YouTube creators at least three of the years that he’s been creating.

Logan Paul: Hey how are you internet? It’s me, Logan. I know what you’re thinking: Logan, how did you trick the entire internet internet into subscribing to your channel?

Rachelle Hampton: He has over 20 million subscribers on YouTube, and he got his start, I would say, vlogging, which is blogging through videos, basically. Then he pivoted to a boxing career where he has gained a lot of fame and money. And KSI has kind of a similar trajectory. He started with video game vlogging videos.

KSI: Hey guys it’s your boy KSI. And today I’m going to be doing something I haven’t done in a very, very, very long time. I’m going to be playing games.

Rachelle Hampton: And eventually moved towards the boxing route. Logan Paul and KSI had a boxing bout that, pulled them, I think, about $1 million each in 2021.

Boxing announcer: To the winner by split decision from the United Kingdom, KSI.

Rachelle Hampton: And they have decided to link up for this Prime Hydration product.

Logan Paul: We have created our own drink company.

Samantha Hawley: Logan Paul, even though I haven’t really heard of him, he’s a really big deal and lots of other people have heard of him obviously, and KSI, and they’ve teamed up to basically market this energy drink, Prime drink, and at some supermarkets here, I can see there’s a limit on the amount of this that you can buy because it’s selling out so quickly. So what’s going on? How are they managing to make this so popular?

Rachelle Hampton: So the product of basically their entire careers, this is the moment that I think most influencers want to experience, which is for teens to be fighting in stores over their energy drink. Stores are having a really hard time keeping them stocked because everyone wants it right now. Logan Paul and KSI have both reached a level of fame that most people, both on the internet and even in real life, would never be able to imagine.

Samantha Hawley: I can see within three months of launching Prime, the company had made something like $10 million worldwide. So it got popular and it got popular really, really quickly. It’s worth pointing out, too, isn’t it, that it can get a little bit confusing because there are two types of Prime drink. One has a huge amount of caffeine in it, almost double the legal limit of caffeine for drinks sold here in Australia. That’s actually been banned in schools. And then there’s just the stuff that’s sort of sold in supermarkets that doesn’t have the caffeine in it.

Logan Paul: The number one selling energy brand in the world versus prime energy. They’re both the US version and they’re both 12 ounce cans, 114mg of caffeine. We got 200mg.

Samantha Hawley: Let’s have a bit of a deeper look, Rachelle, at how people like Logan Paul have such huge influence, particularly I think on teenagers and particularly on teenage boys around the world. So how do they actually build their influence and get these teenage boys hooked on what they’re saying?

Rachelle Hampton: Both Logan Paul and KSI started with a mode of content called vlogging, which is when you basically kind of just record your daily life.

Logan Paul: Yo Good morning, Logang What’s up? Or should I say what’s poppin?

Rachelle Hampton: And it has this really kind of seductive premise of I’m just a regular person documenting my life and people get incredibly famous doing this. Their audience starts to grow up watching them.

Logan Paul: One year of vlogging every single day, bro, what have I done with my life? What am I doing with my life? Brandon, you’re not wearing pants.

Rachelle Hampton: And getting what seems to be this unvarnished look into these people’s lives. Logan Paul and KSI lives. And so part of the appeal of Logan Paul and KSI is this idea that if you watch them and if you do the things that they do, if you record your life in the way that they are, if you drink the drink that they’re making, if you start boxing, that you can be like them because they started basically with a video camera and a dream.

Logan Paul: Bro, this is crazy. When I first started YouTube, Dave here for a second, when I first started YouTube, I never thought the day would come where I would hit 10 million subscribers. I thought it was possible, but I never realised we’d do this in.

Rachelle Hampton: The same way that most kids now have access to video cameras in their phone. And so part of it is the idea of growing up with these characters Logan Paul and KSI, who both started as teens or as young adults. And then part of it is that they just produce an absolutely enormous amount of content in the way that if you like a television show, there’s kind of a set amount of that television show with internet content, there’s kind of just this untold amount of it. You can go on Logan Paul’s YouTube channel, you can go on Logan Paul’s TikTok, you can go on Logan Paul’s Instagram, you can watch Logan Paul’s fights. You can go on Logan Paul’s livestreams. You have access to be able to watch him pretty much every single moment of your life if you want to.

Logan Paul: Oh shut up. It’s 730 in the morning. How bad is this going to hurt? Oh, it’s nothing. Ooh, ooh. Become numb to most things. So sometimes I’ll do things like, literally anything so I can feel something. This is the fourth time I’ve done this. I every parent I meet whose kids are under the age of like 12, I go, hey, you, you let your kids watch my stuff and they go, Yeah, what am I going to do?

Rachelle Hampton: Another way that they hook teens in is through the TikTok algorithm. And so once the algorithm figures out that you like something, it’ll just keep serving you more of that. So part of it is just that you can really invest your life into these people in a way that just wasn’t possible before the Internet. So you can kind of get, for lack of a better term, radicalised into Logan Paul content.

Samantha Hawley: So Logan Paul and KSI, they’ve teamed up to make this Prime energy drink a really big deal around the world. It’s been sold, I hear, even on school buses, at a marked up rate. I mean, it’s quite unbelievable. And the concern, I guess, for parents and adults is that we don’t see the same thing that these teenagers are seeing. We don’t see this same marketing because we don’t use the same platforms or we’re not served up the same content. So what should we actually be doing about this? Because it can’t be that healthy, particularly if we’re talking about something like Prime, which has this huge amount of caffeine in it.

Rachelle Hampton: It’s honestly a really complicated question. Even as someone who covers the internet, Prime hydration is not something that was on my radar until very recently. So even if this is your full time job, it’s impossible to keep up with everything that’s happening right now. I honestly think the only real solution for parents, and this is unfortunately one that’s going to sound very trite, is just to talk to your kids and ask them what they’re interested in in the least judgemental way possible, not in a attempt to lecture or tell them what’s right or what’s wrong, but just in a genuinely interested way. It’s really one of the only ways to find out what they’re looking at because no one’s internet looks the same as someone else’s. So it’s it’s very hard to know what your children are seeing online unless you just ask them directly and they feel like they can be honest with you.

Samantha Hawley: And I gather, Rachelle, there’s no stopping this. So, I mean, Prime is just an example. Logan Paul and KSI, they’re just one example. But this is a big deal. I mean, we’re going to have a lot of different sort of products being sold to kids around the world.

Rachelle Hampton: Definitely. This is just, I think, a flash in the pan. There will be so many and there already are so many exactly like this. It’s extremely hard to keep up. So I think that anyone who’s finding it difficult to know what’s going on online should feel, okay. You’re not supposed to know everything that’s happening on the internet. It’s kind of designed to be confusing.

Samantha Hawley: Rachelle Hampton is the host of the Slate podcast ICYMI. In the UK, A pupil recently suffered a cardiac episode after drinking a Prime Energy drink. Several schools across Australia have banned it due to its health risks for children. On Prime’s official website, it states the drink is not recommended for people under the age of 18. This episode was produced by Veronica Apap and Sam Dunn, who also did the mix. Our supervising producer is Stephen Smiley. I’m Sam Hawley. ABC News Daily will be back again tomorrow.

Thanks for listening.