I imagine almost everyone on the internet has seen a Miranda Sings video or related meme; she is the queen of the internet, after all. Colleen Ballinger, the comedian behind the popular character, seems to have struck gold with her portrayal of Miranda.
Her videos have over 2.5 billion views, she has a (critically panned, but nonetheless impressive) Netflix TV series and has been showered with awards and accolades. And now, we have a new little star: Colleen is pregnant!
The 31-year-old studied vocal performance and musical theater for years before creating her Miranda Sings character. She began doing live performances in 2008, and began posting videos as the Miranda Sings character around the same time. By 2013, she was creating videos with popular YouTubers such as Tyler Oakley, Ricky Dillon and GloZell, and almost all of her videos were breaking 1 million views.
In 2016, Ballinger was ranked as YouTube’s ninth-highest earner — Miranda Sings has more than 9 million subscribers, and her personal Colleen Ballinger channel has more than 5 million.
The Colleen Ballinger channel looks more like the standard YouTuber’s feed: just last week, she posted videos with both Trisha Paytas and Joey Graceffa, and of course, her pregnancy announcement. Hilariously, everything about YouTube that Ballinger seems to make fun of through Miranda Sings — the titles in Caps Lock, the overexaggerated stories, the silly collaborations — is something she employs on her own personal channel.
It has worked for her, nonetheless. After being featured on an episode of Jerry Seinfeld’s “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee” in 2014, Ballinger’s popularity has transcended the YouTube and meme community and into the mainstream. Also in 2014, she was on an episode of “The Tonight Show,” and she co-hosted an episode of “The View” in 2015.
“Haters Back Off,” her Netflix series, premiered in 2016 and ran for two seasons before being cancelled. Though the reviews were mixed, Ballinger won in another sense — she met her fiancé after casting him for her show.
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bj51GJ-DzVL/?hl=en&taken-by=colleen
Fans are thrilled to see Miranda’s on-screen love interest become the recently divorced Ballinger’s real-life love interest. Photos of the two on Ballinger’s Instagram (@colleen) are flooded with comments from fans and fellow YouTubers alike about the beloved couple.
To those who have been watching Ballinger’s content for several years, as I have, the news of Colleen’s engagement and pregnancy causes mixed emotions of happiness for this person who has brought so much laughter into the lives of others, but also questioning: Will her videos be as good, or will they be all about the baby? Will she have the time to be Miranda anymore?
YouTube culture is reaching the point where the content creators of old are starting to grow up — hopefully, even with these changes, the YouTube community and its creatives will still maintain the same appeal for fans they always have.
