Clockwise from top: the digital stars KingBach, Tyler Oakley, Brittany Furlan, Joey Graceffa, and Cam and Nash. Illustration by Alex Williamson

If you haven’t watched YouTube in a while—if you’ve joined the Amish, or you’re Edward Snowden—a lot has changed. Early on, the platform was a salmagundi of out-of-focus lifecasts. The viral hits were cats getting wet and one-offs like “Charlie Bit My Finger—Again!,” a 2007 video whose exposé of House of Atreus-style family strife has earned it more than eight hundred million views. (Spoiler alert: a baby bites his brother’s finger.) YouTube was adults with camcorders shooting kids being adorably themselves. It was amateur hour.

Nowadays, YouTube is almost alarmingly professional. It has millions of channels devoted to personalities and products, which are often aggregated into “verticals” containing similar content. The most popular videos are filmed by teen-agers and twentysomethings who use Red Epic cameras and three-point lighting to shoot themselves. And the platform’s stars behave in ways that are contingent upon a camera. For instance, they act. One of YouTube’s most visible shows—currently featured in magazine and subway-car ads everywhere—is an action series called “Video Game High School” that would be right at home on MTV.

So it wasn’t entirely surprising that some of the most eager participants at this summer’s VidCon, a conference celebrating YouTube, were those who’d been displaced from the platform’s dynamics: adults. Indeed, the conference felt like a May-December romance. Onstage at the Anaheim Convention Center, as the proceedings began, sat Jeffrey Katzenberg, the sixty-three-year-old C.E.O. of DreamWorks Animation. In the audience were more than a thousand middle-aged spectators—producers, agents, ad execs—as entranced as Katzenberg was by YouTube’s smorgasbord of “snackable content.” With the platform’s users watching more than six billion hours of video a month, and people consuming more than nine times as much digital video as they did in 2010, Hollywood planned to secure its own future by consummating a merger. Last year, DreamWorks bought AwesomenessTV, a company that manages YouTube stars, for thirty-three million dollars, and a wave of old-media investment followed.

Sitting opposite Katzenberg, in the role of the skeptical father of the bride, was the thirty-four-year-old Hank Green, one of VidCon’s founders. Green, a fierce advocate for YouTube’s singers, comedians, and “vloggers” (video bloggers), wondered aloud whether YouTubers, most of whom yearn for Hollywood’s embrace, wouldn’t be wiser to shrink from it. “You have everything we don’t have, which is resources and money and expertise and connections,” he reminded Katzenberg. “You, obviously, if you wanted to, could just be like”—he swept his arm sideways and made a crushing sound.

Katzenberg, professing his sincerity, said that he simply wanted to be a “great lighthouse” beaming out helpful links and new verticals to orient those lost in this teeming sea. But his musings were swiftly silenced by a prolonged roar from outside the building—the rest of VidCon’s nineteen thousand attendees, mostly teen-age girls who’d come not to monetize but to adore. The clamor was for Tyler Oakley, an impish YouTube personality with brightly dyed hair whose passion for gay rights, suicide prevention, fast food, One Direction, Lady Gaga, and pretty much everything else exemplifies the platform’s all-embracing ethos. “I’m glad I had security,” Oakley said afterward, “because everyone was trying to touch my hair.” Oakley’s was only the first “bomb rush” of the three-day conference, as attendees swarmed anyone hidden by bodyguards, fangirled at the VidCon prom, and scouted for wizards on the Quidditch pitch. More than nine hundred YouTube channels have at least a million subscribers, so every passing Australian prankster pack evoked Beatlemania. Even unknown buskers inspired squeals and selfies: as in Pascal’s wager, little was lost if the singers turned out not to be stars, and—who knows?—maybe they’d be stars tomorrow.

Because people can watch whatever they want whenever they want on their phones, digital platforms reveal what tweens and teens really like. Thematically, the rebellion is pretty traditional: they like hearing that their feelings rule and that the adult world is an epic fail. It’s the formats that are new; instead of finding reassurance in scripted soaps like “Dawson’s Creek,” they find it in unscripted homilies from charismatic kids and curated images of idiocy.

Devotees of the digital brand Break surf channels that include “All the Animals,” “Heartwarming,” “Pranks & Fails,” “Bizarre & Amazing,” and, of course, “Gaming.” Girls love YouTube’s beauty tutorials and boys love its “Let’s Play” videos, where you follow along as someone plays video games. The platform’s biggest star is a Swedish gamer who goes by PewDiePie and live-snarks as he battles mutants or navigates the virtual reality of Dinotown. “Oh, God, now he’s eating my beautiful face!” he cries, upon meeting a Carnotaurus. “I bet I was delicious!” PewDiePie has thirty-two million subscribers and earns four million dollars a year.

Like punk and piercings and paintball before them, these videos seem to have been designed expressly to blow parental minds. Adults focus on the brevity. Noting that most of the popular material on YouTube is between two and seven minutes long, Ynon Kreiz, the president of Maker Studios—a leading multichannel network, or M.C.N., which aggregates channels to increase their ad revenues—told me, “I’m not sure the millennial generation has the patience to watch twelve, thirteen episodes of an hour-long show—even a half-hour show.”

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Kids focus on the community. Digital stars are always in your pocket, always available for oversharing; because the viewing experience is so handheld and interstitial, it feels less like vegging with “NCIS” than like carrying around a newborn puppy. The viewing relationship is bilateral—digital stars take fans’ programming ideas and regularly answer their questions—and its promise is “I’m just like you.” Stardom used to be predicated on a mystique derived from scarcity; you don’t really know much about George Clooney. Now it’s predicated on a familiarity derived from ubiquity. As the teen-age beauty vlogger Bethany Mota exclaimed at VidCon, referring to her legion of subscribers, “I never thought I would have over six million best friends that are all around the world!”

Robert Kyncl, the global head of business and content at YouTube, told me, “People who grew up in an age of connected phones and cameras everywhere are self-aware at all times—they can’t escape it.” Digital stars look like Larry King’s grandkids: they have large heads, wide eyes, great teeth, and active hands, and they never blink or pause for breath lest they lose your attention. A chatty race of manga people, they stream their lives across multiple YouTube channels (one for outtakes and B-roll, one for live gaming, one for podcasts, etc.) as well as over Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, with merch available on each. Traditional entertainers call themselves actors or writers or directors or the “Blue’s Clues” guy. Digital talents, who often do all of the above—who learn Final Cut Pro and Photoshop from YouTube videos—call themselves “creators” or “influencers.” They don’t have to respond to executives’ notes or depend on a marketing division in Burbank. They just have to be radiant, humble, and terrific. The singer Meghan Tonjes introduced her set on VidCon’s main stage by calling out, “I love you all very much,” but it went without saying. YouTube, with its culture of D.I.Y. meets B.F.F., is how a generation admires itself.

“Within five years, YouTube will be the biggest media platform of any, by far, in the entire world,” Katzenberg told me. But the digital realm is no country for old men; younger, fleeter forms and stars are emerging faster and faster, and you almost can’t trust anyone over thirteen to understand them. YouTube’s primacy as the place teen-agers go after school is already being challenged, especially by Vine, an app of looping six-second videos that launched last year. AwesomenessTV’s biggest stars are the teen-age Viners Cam and Nash: Cameron Dallas and his friend Nash Grier, a rascal with antifreeze-blue eyes who, at sixteen, has ten million followers. Rob Fishman, the co-founder of Niche, a branding firm that connects Viners with advertisers, noted that, after only a few months on Vine, an unshaved account manager at his company “has more viewership than the New York Times has circulation.” Freddie Wong, a twenty-nine-year-old director who co-created “Video Game High School,” told me, “This world, even to me, is so vast and nuanced and incomprehensible it’s like the blind man feeling the elephant—a giant merry-go-round of teens chasing someone who’s famous for making six-second videos.”