But think about it - it’s her whole life. It’s all she’s really known and is the only way she can continue living the lavish lifestyle that she does. It’s not going to be easy to just cut all ties and give it all up, is it?
The problem is Zoella wants the lifestyle without the work, and the advent calendar is not the first time this has happened, it's just the one that everyone has sat up and taken notice of.
Zoella is 27 years old, she is not a child. She is one year younger than I am and she is working in a business that she effectively created. Her issues are of her own making and because she has grown out of her teen/tween audience and is wanting to aim her channels at her older viewers, but the tweens are the ones bringing in the revenue so she can't drop them.
The main problem with Zoella is that she has relied on Youtube to be her cash cow without establishing any other long term "career" path from it. Even the other Gleam vloggers all seem to have other careers or have used their Youtube channels as a platform to create their own brands based on things they love, enjoy and are good at. Zoella isn't really good at anything so she has nothing to expand on beyond her channels, unless it's things other people have created that she just slaps her name on for the £££.
Some vloggers have suffered with the issues relating to their audiencess changing and growing and strugling to keep "on brand" when they aren't the teenagers in their bedrooms any more. Louise Pentland (Zoella's "chummy" bff who never sees her unless they're doing a "work" thing) is one of those ... I have a lot of issues with her in general but I actually respect the fact that a year or two ago she actually addressed this issue of wanting to rebrand because she was a grown up and wanted to be able to act like it. She used to market the tween/teen audience much like Zoella back when she was "Sprinkle of Glitter" and did all kinds of Primark hauls, beauty tutorials etc that were aimed at that market because that was what she was in to when she started ... fast forward 10 years and she is early thirties, divorced, with a new partner, has a 6 year old daughter and a second baby on the way, her life is entirely different and so her content has changed to reflect that not always for the better but that is a whole different issue for another time She wanted her channel to reflect herself and what she was generally about without having to add a layer of sweetness and glitter to make it PG13 for her audience.
This has been the case with many Youtubers ... but not Zoella. She has used the excuse of her "anxiety" to avoid moving on with her career - she is still doing the same thing as she was doing a decade ago but she's almost forgotten who her audience are ... when she started people could relate to her because she was reviewing/discussing things within their reach as most were high street brands that were readily available. Now, she lives in a gilded tower where she is gifted thousands of pounds worth of products by high end companies and then gushes about designer products to the regular viewers who still only have the money for high street brands but want to be like her so will badger their parents or spend their savings trying to afford a sliver of the lifestyle that she is given for free, just because she is popular, which just perpetuates the cycle further.