Jessica Contrera (thanks, Michael): When 13-year-old Caleb LeBlanc’s death made the news this week, millions of people already knew him. He wasn’t a pop star, an up-and-coming actor or a child prodigy. He was a boy who liked to wear his hair floppy, play baseball, and belt out nonsensical songs about being a baked potato — all for an audience usually bigger than the population of his home state.
Caleb, whose parents said he died of an “undetected medical condition,” was the oldest son of the “Bratayley” clan, the YouTube-famous Arnold, Md., family. Their lives and their income revolved around creating 10- to 20-minute clips of their unremarkable moments: bouncing on a backyard trampoline (15 million views), walking the Ocean City boardwalk (10 million) or roaming the aisles of Walmart (22 million). Compare it to the Nielsen estimates for the record-breaking season finale of “Game of Thrones”: only 8.11 million viewers.
With cameras seemingly always rolling, family vloggers such as the Bratayleys let viewers come along for errands, birthday parties and doctor appointments. They let them comment on the soothing of crying children, the hunt for a new house or the selection of a baby’s name. With each video, the line between YouTube and reality blurs; strangers watching from afar start to feel like part of the family.
But inevitably in any normal, happy life comes some kind of bad news: The sickness of a cat. A miscarriage. Or, tragically, an unexpected death.
This week, the Bratayleys are faced with a question the new world of family vloggers will all somehow confront: If you live in front of the cameras, how do you know when to turn them off?
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