80 Million Paige Views

“She literally does everything about YouTube right,” says Larry Shapiro, head of talent at Fullscreen, a global network based in Culver City, Calif., that manages thousands of YouTube channels. “She’s got a great channel trailer. Her thumbnails are very inviting. There’s one that’s very bloody. There’s another where it looks like she’s in her underwear, so you get the creepers out there. Her titling is great. She uses keywords like ‘paranormal activity’ and ‘haunted,’ which are highly searched terms on the Web. She is playing the game so well.”

Since 2011, Sunshine Girl has been a member of YouTube’s partner program, which allows content creators to share revenue from ads sold on their videos—pop-up banners, pre-roll ads and so on. Hagen says the channel now makes $4,000 to $6,000 a month. They recently earned $500 from a Japanese television show that compiles video clips from across the Internet. Product placement—they’ve approached Ford, Vitamin Water and Pendleton Woolen Mills—has never panned out. 

Then again, YouTube was always a means to an end.

“I knew that if we built up our numbers, people in L.A. would have to pay attention to us,” Hagen says. “The goal had always been to get a lot of subscribers and views, and YouTube was the place with the biggest audience.”

In her first video, made in December 2010, McKenzie twiddles her hands and tugs at her sleeves as she describes her plan to document the “creepy sketch stuff” at her new house. She has a way of speaking with her mouth in a perpetual smile—much like a fidgety, aggressively positive Lonelygirl15, one of YouTube’s earliest video bloggers and a clear precursor to Sunshine.

McKenzie likes to say Sunshine is 95 percent her, but off-camera, she’s less bubbly and more sarcastic than her character. Notably, she doesn’t like horror movies—she’d rather watch rom-coms, read Neil Gaiman or make tattooed cloth dolls to sell on her Etsy shop, which she plugs in her videos.

McKenzie doesn’t spend much time with friends her own age, but she’s extremely close with her mother. They share frequent high-fives and a Diet Coke habit, and Rose likes to rib her daughter about her Pinterest obsession and her crush on Tom Felton, the blond British actor best known for playing Draco Malfoy. They’re fond of saying they complete each other’s sentences, but it’s more that McKenzie has a tendency to repeat her mother’s phrases. Friday is “Bride Night”: The two eat apples with peanut butter while watching Say Yes to the Dress and I Found the Gown.

“I have really bad social anxiety,” says McKenzie, picking at a gluten-free cinnamon roll—she has celiac disease—at New Cascadia bakery in Southeast Portland. “Doing anything alone really bothers me. Interviews on national television are cool, but going to the grocery store and having to ask somebody where something is, I break out in hives.”

She has no problem interacting with her fans, though, which is another key to Sunshine Girl’s strategy. It’s one thing to show up in search results; it’s another for viewers to stick around long enough to share videos and subscribe to the channel. To make that happen, McKenzie has made herself into a brand that extends beyond YouTube. Her viewers—58 percent female and most between the ages of 13 and 24—aren’t just subscribing to the story of Sunshine Girl; they’re subscribing to a personality. Her Instagram is a sea of selfies, and on Vine she posts looping videos of puppies and pancakes. She retweets her fans feverishly. On YouTube, she often asks viewers to tweet at her, whether theories about the ghosts in her house or what color she should paint her nails. She estimates she responds to 100 Facebook messages a day.

Such a social-media presence is nearly a full-time job. When McKenzie isn’t shooting a paranormal video, she’s chronicling other exploits—going crabbing, playing softball, visiting the Oregon Zoo for Packy’s birthday—or filming shout-outs to her viewers.

“What’s happening in today’s social-media explosion is that the audience feels a part of the ride,” says Fullscreen’s Shapiro. “The audience feels like they’ve helped create the success. And to a certain extent, they have.”

That’s the case for Trip George, a 15-year-old fan in Houston who’s had an email relationship with McKenzie for a year and has even contributed some of his own paranormal videos to the channel. “Other YouTubers don’t interact as much with their subscribers,” George says. “She got my email and actually read it. I was really surprised. I admire her. She didn’t start out with much, but she built a fan base and is making her own dreams come true.”

After wrapping the video in her parents’ bedroom on that overcast summer morning, McKenzie runs upstairs to shoot five more. The YouTube star still lives at home, in a lavender bedroom decorated with heart-shaped lights, ceramic elephants and framed photos of Audrey Hepburn. The family doesn’t like to reveal details about where they live since McKenzie has overzealous fans.

“She has a whole group of 30-year-old men that really think they have a chance with her,” Rose says. “It’s the weirdest thing ever. When she’s Jennifer Lawrence, I can pay to protect her. But she’s not. She’s a YouTube star.”

Their town is about an hour outside of Portland, far enough from the city that suburban strip malls give way to vineyards and dilapidated barns. The family home, a farmhouse built in 1911 and extensively remodeled, has a grandmotherly feel—all mauves and lilacs, with floral wreaths and gauzy paintings of angels hanging on the walls. (An exception is the bedroom of McKenzie’s brother, Christian, a 23-year-old with wispy facial hair who’s covered one of his walls with gargantuan The Lord of the Rings posters.) McKenzie’s father works from home, and while she says he’s supportive, he’s not involved with the series aside from occasionally slamming a door for a video. The family’s dog, a black Doberman mix named Lucy, isn’t allowed near visitors: She bites.

High school was difficult for McKenzie. “There were under 500 in my school,” she says. “My junior year, my best friend moved away, and this one girl sought me out and decided I was the bane of her existence. She made my life a living hell. She turned everyone against me and nobody talked to me. It totally sucked.”

She shrugs. “Whatever. I moved on. Typical Hollywood story.”

Two years ago, after graduating from high school—and having turned down offers of admission from two local arts colleges—McKenzie and Rose spent a week in Los Angeles. They’d been working on Sunshine Girl for a year and a half by that point, and they aimed to sell talent agencies on the series.

“One of the places we went, they were like, ‘You’re just not sexy enough,’” McKenzie recalls. “And I was like, ‘I’m 18 and really young-looking. I look 12.’ They didn’t understand the YouTube stuff, either.”

Rose continues: “It was mostly, ‘Oh, you’re adorable. You’re from Oregon and you’re doing YouTube.’ People were very confused by that. They didn’t understand how it could go from YouTube to network or cable television.”

For a while, McKenzie worked remotely with an agent and manager. She sent in audition tapes—for The Spectacular Now, Palo Alto, We’re the Millers, The Call—but was never cast. McKenzie dropped the agent and manager after six months. Hagen, meanwhile, directed her in two films. Sunshine Girl spinoff Black Eyed Kids played at Vancouver’s Kiggins Theatre in 2012 but didn’t find distribution. The other, an ’80s-set thriller called Thr33, is still being edited.

A scholarship competition in Seventeen magazine proved to be McKenzie’s breakthrough. After appearing in the magazine last year, she was contacted by a literary agent, who pitched Sunshine Girl to the Weinstein Company and helped secure book and movie deals. Weinstein has a reputation for making critical darlings such as Oscar winners The King’s Speech and The Artist but hasn’t ventured much into young-adult fare. McKenzie is the only YouTuber on the studio’s roster.

It may go without saying that the content of Sunshine Girl doesn’t impress in terms of plot, acting or production value. Robert Thompson, a media scholar at Syracuse University, finds McKenzie authentic and appealing, but calls the storyline “pretty old and hackneyed.” And he’s skeptical about the Weinstein deal.

“Sunshine Girl is very effectively using the medium of the Internet,” Thompson says. “It’s perfectly sustainable because you’re watching it on a small screen, and you’re watching it in small bursts. One of the great appeals is that it’s kind of shoddy. But that could be completely neutered when it gets the full Hollywood treatment.”

Even so, the Weinstein deal is evidence of the changing relationship between traditional media businesses and the legions of young people (and their millions of fans) who’ve found fame online. Take the sequel to Pitch Perfect, whose cast will include several YouTube stars. Or the movie deal recently secured by Australian YouTube pranksters the Janoskians, or the film set to star teenage heartthrobs/Vine sensations Nash Grier and Cameron Dallas.

“What’s happening here is that traditional entertainment is trying to tap into the youth culture,” Shapiro says. “Online is where the fish are. We’re at a tipping point. This is just the beginning.”

YouTube itself is striving to improve the quality of its programming. It’s built massive production facilities in L.A., New York, London and Tokyo that YouTubers can access for free. A year ago, McKenzie, Rose and Hagen were tapped to join a fellowship program at YouTube Space L.A.: They attended seminars on lighting, editing and copyright infringement law, shot collaboration videos with other YouTubers, and received a $5,000 grant, half of which they put toward a new HD camera.

The Weinstein deal has the potential to line their pockets further. Rose is optimistic. During the June video shoot, I spot a cardboard box filled with mockups of the first book. On the cover, McKenzie, dressed in a frilly white dress, pearl necklace and Mary Jane heels, appears to be levitating. Rose encourages me to take a copy.

“Have Paige sign it, though,” she says, “so it’ll be worth money.”