Famous for her viral drunken cooking videos , YouTuber Hannah Hart seeks to harness the powers of the internet for good.
Hannah Hart, creator and host of web shows My Drunk Kitchen and Hello Harto.
Pearl Wible
Hannah Hart was not supposed to be famous — or at least not in the way she is now. But the internet, for all its faults, can also be a wonderful place, catapulting everyday people into a new kind of fame. For Hannah Hart, it took one video — one video of her highly intoxicated, and equally hilarious — sent to a friend as a sort of digital "I miss you" to change the course of her life.
For those who don't yet know Hannah Hart, she is most famous for creating the YouTube series My Drunk Kitchen, or MDK for short. Much like the name suggests, the premise of the show is simple: Hannah gets drunk, cooks, and general hilarity ensues. But for someone whose career grew completely around a single drunken gag, Hannah Hart is surprisingly deep, an altruistic pioneer in a digital space that does not yet have a defined set of rules for what one is supposed to do with their internet success. In fact, she just may be the best example of what is yet to come in an era of new media, rapidly transitioning away from the traditional media we once knew.
One of Hart's first MDKs, entitled "Brunch?," which now has over 2 million views.
It was two years and millions of video views after filming her first MDK that Hart would set out in an RV to tour the United States and Canada for her new online travel series Hello Harto. A big jump from the weekly drunken videos she had been making since 2011, Hello Harto, according to Hart, was a way of "doing something different for the fans." Having funded the tour completely through the power of crowdsourcing, Hart set out to create something new and special that would allow her to break the barrier between the online world and the real world, meeting her fans — quite literally — in their homes. Hart, who originally only sought to raise $50,000, ended up raising over $223,000, allowing her to expand the tour to include 23 cities around North America.
In many ways what Hart did with Hello Harto is indicative of the largely untapped powers of the internet and its real ability to deliver results — not solely for the benefit of the stars, but also the communities they reach. For Hart, who had previously hosted a volunteer event in Los Angeles with her self-named community of fans, or "Hartosexuals," the decision to turn Hello Harto into more than a meet-and-greet tour was a natural one. "I really wanted to do volunteer work in every city," Hart told BuzzFeed. "Wouldn't that be amazing, wouldn't that be refreshing ... a great way to do meet-ups? So it's not just like, 'The Hannah Hart Show,' instead it's like, let's do something good."
