Welcome back yet again to another episode of Whatever Happened To; where we talk about YouTuber's that were very promising but soon fell apart for being terrible. Previously around the beginning of September, I talked about the golden age YouTuber known as ChimneySwift11 and how he went from being such a great Minecraft YouTuber to resorting to Twitch streaming and not engaging with his audience. Now we have another golden age YouTuber that has been around since the beginning of YouTube and to no surprise it's FRED; a character played by Lucas who does skits but has fallen into obscurity when he sold his channel to an unknown company.
FRED (real name is Lucas Cruikshank) began his channel on October 1, 2005. The account remained inactive for roughly a year until he started doing uploads. Many of his older videos were reuploaded in 2008 from the originals. An example of this is 'Fred on Halloween' which was originally posted in 2006. Around in 2008, he would post new skits for his videos like 'Fred Loses His Meds' and 'Fred Goes to The Dentist.' Apart from him acting crazy and going wild, you rarely ever see another person in the video, that is until 2010. Anyways, his videos ended up being so popular at the time that he appeared on an episode of icarly and within the later years, struck partnerships with companies to produce films with his name on them. That being Fred: The Movie, Fred 2: Night of the Living Fred and Fred 3: Camp Fred (all of them feature John Cena). I may be getting off track here but one of his most popular and yet most viewed video on his channel is titled "Fred Goes Groccery Shopping featuring Annoying Orange" which sits at over 95M views. Oh yeah, he was also featured in an episode of Annoying Orange to at some point.
The Fall:
Selling His Channel / Decline in Viewership:
You may be thinking that he was annoying back then and he was cringe. No matter how you look at it, he was considered to be one of the few channels that blew up in massive popularity because Lucas himself would play as the FRED persona. His channel from back in the day was at an all-time high and it was rated on the top of the list when YouTube first started. Now remember what I said about him and the striking of partnerships? Well, he was doing that a bit too much. When he got the deals to make three separate movies, each one was one year apart from the others and all of them were rated terrible. Plus, in the 2010s, Lucas kept the persona running until 2013 and by the time that 2014 and 2015 rolled around things were about to change.
Lucas had moved on from the channel to pursue his alternate channel dream. So, whatever happened to FRED? Well, Lucas sold his channel to a company which remains unknown and had left the channel open for anyone to post family friendly content. Not only that this was way ahead of its time (when it came down to the bullshit COPPA), it was also the complete downfall as to why the channel fell off the wagon. When this change was happening, YouTube didn't feature him on the frontpage anymore. Now in terms of his channel, viewership had decline since then, the like to dislike ratio was more dislikes than likes and the last video that was ever posted to the channel was on July 16, 2015. Since then, Lucas has an alternate channel which you can view here. While the FRED persona maybe gone, Lucas is still hanging around doing the popular trends to which people do nowadays.
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