The Fingernails of YouTube Stars
Around 2014, every German legacy publisher had the same panic attack simultaneously. The internet was eating their audience. Teenagers were on phones. Something had to be done. Bento launched—a youth offshoot of Der Spiegel. ze.tt launched—a youth offshoot of Die Zeit. And Axel Springer, the continent’s largest tabloid empire, launched Celepedia: a digital magazine aimed at girls aged 12 to 24, specifically fans of YouTube beauty influencers and German reality TV.
The content was something to behold. Recent headlines included "What Dagi Bee Says About Lisa and Lena!", "Does This Girl Only Have Four Fingers?", and "Is BTN-Peggy Pregnant by Theo?"—BTN being short for Berlin—Tag & Nacht, an RTL2 reality soap that functions as ambient noise for people who find standard television too demanding. There was extensive coverage of BibisBeautyPalace, a German beauty YouTuber named Bibi, including detailed appraisal of her chocolate cupcake-scented lip product. There was coverage of Sarah Lombardi, a pop star who rose to fame on the German version of American Idol. There was a great deal of coverage of fingernails. Celepedia landed somewhere below BRAVO—Germany’s long-running teen magazine, which at least occasionally mentions a band—and made no apparent effort to close the gap.
I think about the interns. Two years of slapping oversized emoji onto the faces of beauty influencers and reality TV cast members in Photoshop. That’s on a CV now.
Editor-in-chief Bettina Lüke gave it everything. She commissioned real surveys of real teenagers in 2015, asking what was actually important to them. The surprising finding: young people live more conservatively than assumed. What the magazine did with this information—continuing to publish content about whether Bibi’s new nail color was sufficiently on-trend—is one of those editorial decisions that doesn’t survive close examination.
Axel Springer announced the shutdown in late 2016. Two years of operation, millions of page views, no convincing economic perspective. Media trade journalist Alexander Becker wrote at Meedia, not unkindly, that failure is part of the startup risk, even for established publishers chasing the supposedly digital-native 12-to-24 demographic. The company had repositioned twice: first as celebrity news, then as a youth magazine. Neither stuck.
VP Andreas Wiele issued the statement these situations require: the team had shown creativity and passion from the start, it takes a founder’s spirit to recognize when to stop pursuing an idea, thank you all, looking forward to new projects. These sentences exist in a register adjacent to human speech.
The actual mistake was the premise—that being young and online in 2014 meant wanting the stupidest possible version of one’s own culture. Berlin twenty-somethings convinced themselves that twelve-year-olds wanted nothing beyond makeup tutorials and YouTuber gossip, because that’s what showed up in engagement metrics and fit on a pitch deck. The twelve-year-olds have the internet. They’ve seen better. They always have.