Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - The Downfall of Skibidi Toilet: How Hollywood Fumbled A Powerful Fandom

Episode Date: April 8, 2026

Skibidi Toilet changed how storytelling works on YouTube. But behind the scenes, things got messy.Support my independent journalism: 🙏 Patreon: ⁠https://www.patreon.com/cw/taylorlorenz  ⁠ ���️ Buy a paid subscription to my Substack: ⁠https://www.usermag.co  ⁠ Back in 2023, a creator named Alexey (better known as DaFuqBoom) launched a super weird, viral series about a singing head in a toilet called Skibidi Toilet. It went viral and quickly became one of the most popular online series to ever exist. Over the course of 79 episodes, it evolved into an epic, fan-favorite story about an intergalactic war. Then, Hollywood stepped in. A traditional (or "tra-digital") entertainment company called Invisible Narratives bought the Skibidi Toilet rights. By early 2025, Alexey took a step back to become an executive producer, meaning he was no longer making the daily videos. The studio released a new spin-off series called "Emergence," but fans instantly noticed a massive change.    Now, the Skibidi Toilet fandom community is furious. After a disastrous, leaked call between the studio and popular YouTubers, fans are demanding the original creator take his show back with the hashtag #BringBackBoom. Meanwhile, Skibidi Toilet has become one of the most valuable franchises in Hollywood. Steven Asarch is a journalist who's been covering this controversy. In this video, he joins me to break down what is going on with the Skibidi Toilet franchise, the #BringBackBoom movement's true goals, and answer the biggest question fans are all asking: is Skibidi Toilet officially dead? We cover:How Skibidi Toilet became so popularThe creator’s role and what changedThe studio takeover and what it meansWhy fans are upset and pushing backThe future of internet-created IP

And all of these characters that just kind of like existed on the internet, like creepy pasta back in the day, we all collectively own it. But now there's so much money in internet weirdness. Everybody wants a piece. Since launching in 2023, Skibbitty Toilet has gone from a niche internet meme popular with school-aged children to a massively popular global entertainment franchise. But Skibbity Toilet's meteoric rise has come with some speed bumps. And right now, the creator of Skibody Toilet is embroiled in a messy controversy with invisible narratives, the company that bought the Skibbity Toilet IP years ago. All of this has led to the future of Skibbity Toilet being very up in the air, and no one has been covering the story better than Stephen A. Sarch, a freelance internet culture journalist. He wrote a piece for the aftermath this week titled Skibbity Toilet Community Goodwill, Circling the Drain after Hollywood Studio takes over.

Today he's joining me to break down the drama unfurling around Skibbitty Toilet. Talk about how fandoms, IP, and franchises are being warped by the dynamics of the internet and discuss where the future of entertainment goes from here. Stephen, welcome to Power User. Thanks for having me. Hopefully, I think if you're listening to this internet culture podcast, you know what Skibbitty Toilet is. But just to take everyone back to the beginning, how did Skibbity Toilet get started and emerge

into this, like, global phenomenon? So in 2023, a young Russian man named Alexi, who goes by the internet name DeFuck Boom, launched a few seconds short of a head in a toilet singing a gibberish song. I'm not entirely sure why it went as viral as it did. Maybe it was because YouTube was really prioritizing shorts at the time or the brain rot nature of the weirdness of it all just kind of captured the algorithm. but the thing went mega viral, pulling in millions of views in a very short time. And Alexi, he was creating Transformers animations before this and Grand Theft Auto animations, and he didn't expect it to blow up in the way that he did, but he kept making them. And slowly, as he started pushing them out, a story started to develop, and fans really

were interested in the idea. The videos themselves don't really use dialogue. they don't use a lot of words at all. It's all just kind of the animations of the characters. And slowly, over the course of 79 episodes, which I have watched, we learn about this intergalactic war that's happening between the speaker men and the skibbitty toilets. And it's all very well made, and the animation is good.

It definitely appealed to a younger audience. And it sort of evolved past its brain rot origins into like an actual story. Yeah. I mean, I reported a bunch on Skibbitty Toilet when I was at the New York Times and Washington Post and sort of like mainstream media outlets. And I think what I found so interesting about it is I do think it was one of the first kind of like serialized shows on short form content. Like before Skibbity Toilet, there was not really like serialized content on social media. Each individual short was like its own thing. And Skibbitty Toilet kind of made, at least I wrote about this years ago, like this new model where suddenly you could watch this really complex narrative emerge over time, you know, evolve over the course of dozens and dozens.

And now at this point, I think hundreds of episodes. And you could have these like plot lines that it would have almost like, I don't want to say it's like exactly like a traditional TV show because there's not like seasons in the same way. But I do think that it developed a fandom because of that because it was this like sort of rich story. that a lot of people dismissed because as you said, it was like mostly for six-year-olds, you know? I think the average Skibbitty Toilet viewer is between the ages of six and ten. I don't think that's the case anymore. I think Skibbitty Toilet walked so AI Fruit Island can run. Yeah, now it's funny because, of course, you know, Skibody Toilet also was created really before the rise of generative AI.

And now we see so much serialized, you know, animated content. And I think what's interesting, too, is that you mentioned, Boom, the founder, you know, he previously was creating content about Transformers. And so Michael Bay, obviously, involved in the Transformers universe, the filmmaker, reached out to Boom really early, I think, and, like, expressed, you know, support for his project. And from what I understand, that kind of got Boom sucked into this, like, weird Hollywood world kind of early. So while, you know, Alexi is just one guy kind of making all of these Skibbitty Toilet videos, and they're going mega viral.

at one point, Alexi's channel is getting more subscribers than Mr. Beast. And while that is happening, Alexi gets the attention of Adam Goodman, who runs a tradigital studio, as he calls it, called Invisible Narratives. Yeah, this word traditional is something I think Adam Goodman himself made up. Adam Goodman was an executive at Paramount in Hollywood. He was kind of a traditional guy. And then a little maybe less than a decade ago, he decided to get into digital entertainment. in and he launched this idea of a traditional sort of studio.

He was working with Jake Paul for a little while. I think he had some other clients. He got on my radar pretty early and I actually interviewed him for this podcast because he seemed to be kind of like going out and looking for digital talent to work with. Yeah. Invisible Narratives when it was first founded was trying to find the next big internet identity to kind of go off of. Goodman told me a story about how his kid was really interested in Jake Paul and saw that

Paul's Lamborghini that he was buying was becoming a viral phenomenon and he was selling merch about this car and he was like, whoa, there's a real market here. So he branches out into this internet space. First, he works with Faye's clan to launch a series of movies, only one of which got released with Faye's Rugg, which was basically like a horror vlog where they pretended that there were like haunted clowns inside his house. Very weird. Then they do a collaboration with Glad, where they do a live stream with a bunch of different LGBTQ plus celebrities, and they launch something called Invis.TV, which is basically like a marketing agency for influencers, but they never really find a massive amount of success. They kind of struggle to figure out what

is the next big thing in the space. And then Goodman finds Skibbitty Toilet. And Goodman has a good relationship with Michael Bay. Goodman had helped the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle series kind of get greenlit at Paramount, and Alexi is a huge fan of Transformers. You know, he's been doing all these animations. So Goodman helps Bay kind of get into contact and they start talking. And then eventually, Alexi signed a deal in 2023 to give over the rights to Skibbity Toilet and sort of work in collaboration because Alexi didn't have the necessary push to get Skibbity Toilet. to the next level. And together, they become even more viral.

Yeah, I think this is around when I had Adam on my channel back in, I think it was 2024, maybe. I know that at that point, Skibbitty Toilet was the most popular Halloween costume for children that year. There were endless bootleg, skibbitty toilet pieces of merchandise, toys. It was everywhere. I feel like in the absence of a big company like Disney or Universal or whatever, like coming in and kind of owning this IP, it kind of just belonged like almost collectively to the internet. And, you know, you had all these people making Skimiti Toilet Games and da-da-da. And I think like fans felt a real ownership over it.

And then, of course, Adam Goodman comes in and very quickly they do these deals, right? Like they start working with merch companies. They do a deal with a toy company. And they start to crack down on some of these counterfeit products. Yeah, exactly. When Adam gets control over Skivety Toilet, he wants to turn it into a more traditional property. You know, like the way the internet kind of works is that once a creator kind of puts their idea out there, it becomes part of the masses. And internet animation becomes as successful as it is,

like The Amazing Digital Circus or Has Been Hotel, they become successful because the fans start making this type of content. They start doing lore videos. They start doing their own animations. But from my research and my interviews that I've kind of been doing, Invisible Narratives wanted to control the ecosystem that existed around Skivety Toilet Content. If you wanted to make a Skivety Toilet video, a lore video, an animation, you needed to side with Goodman. So what does that look like? Around this time, Invisible Narratives creates the Skivety Toilet Creator Alliance, a group where if you wanted to make Skivety Toilet Content, invisible narratives would help in some way.

If you agreed to sign a contract where you would give up the monetization on your YouTube channel, and they would pay you directly. And for that, you would get assets, you would get spoilers, you would get specific discord calls with Goodman and members of the Skibbity team. And the people that are signing up are already diehard fans. These are YouTubers who have kind of built their career on Skibbity Toilet. They are super invested in this stuff. So a company that is tied to Skibbity Toilet is like a dream come true for them. they idolize Alexi.

And the idea of kind of being in his inner circle is super, super valuable to that. So what happens next? So the Skippity Toilet Creator Alliance sort of, you know, moves along for a little bit. They release a single spoiler, but that gets leaked early so they stop doing spoilers. They start doing discord calls, but eventually the community and invisible narratives, they start feuding. So what started that feud? So in March of 25, Alexi signs a new deal with invisible narratives where he takes less of an ownership over Skibbity Toilet. He becomes an executive producer on the series, and he's no longer involved in the day-to-day making of Skibbity Toilet.

This is when I started to, I feel like, see a lot of fans claiming that Skibbty Toilet had changed. It seemed like a lot of people were maybe skeptical of the person. content or saying that like Alexi was taking a black seat. The narratives didn't seem as like compelling, et cetera. Yeah. So the the last episode that Skibbitty Toilet that Alexi worked on was episode 79, which is the last official episode of Skivety Toilet. In October of 25, Invisible Narratives releases Emergence, which they want to be the first spin-off of Skivety Toilet. One of the biggest problems that Skivety Toilet had was that it was made, with something called Valve Source Filmmaker.

Valve is a big video game company, and the assets inside of it are owned by Valve. So if Invisible Narrative wants to make toys and merch of all of these Skibbitty Toilet assets, they can't because the main character of Invisible Narratives, one of the Skibbitty toilets, is a character in Half-Life. You can't just make a toy of that. So they had to basically remake it.

They had to use a new engine. They had to do everything. And when you watch emergence, it is very clear that it is not something Alexi worked on as much. The fights are a lot more confusing. The character sizes are all over the place. And the lore that it tries to implement doesn't really make sense in the overall scheme of things. And you can see that the community itself really isn't that big a fan of it by the views. It has such a smaller amount of views compared to the rest.

Around October, November 25, the Skibbitty Toilet Creator Alliance has a Discord call with Adam Goodman, and it doesn't go very well. The whole thing has leaked online if you kind of want to see it. But basically what happens is these large YouTubers who have been making Skibbity Toilet content for the past few years share to Goodman that they feel that the quality of emergence just isn't up to par. And Goodman, you know, it kind of becomes a bit confrontational. And the community in general just kind of starts to side away from Invisible Narratives. Invisible Narratives actually took over Boom's channel. And the last thing posted was a compilation of clips that just seemed very odd and low polish, considering how high tier a lot of the other Skibbitty Toilet content is.

So in general, this community is just kind of fighting itself and doesn't know what to do because they love Skivety Toilet. The fans that I've spoken with really love Skibbitty Toilet. And I can understand because it doesn't matter if you don't really speak English or, you know, don't really need a lot of lore. There's so much you can really grab onto. This is something that I think is fascinating and I love about fandom, you know, is that like this was supposed to be this silly kids show. I don't think Alexi ever intended it for it to get, you know, as big as it did. But there is so much lore based around the community. I mean, there's Skibbitty Toilet fan fiction.

Like, people have really clung to these characters. They've developed backstories. And it's been this sort of like co-creation between Alexi and the fandom. And Skibbitty Toilet, I mean, it just remains such a popular franchise, even though that that franchise is not a traditional franchise. Like, there are these massively popular Skibbitty Toilet Roebock games. There's Skibbitty Toilet themed content spinoffs all over the web. I mean, there's even Skibody Toilet adult content being made.

Like, it's just become this sort of like cultural force. And I think to me, what's so fascinating about this story is, like, you have this, like, traditional Hollywood guy of, like, Adam Goodman and Michael Bay, who's very much of, you know, old school Hollywood, like, trying to kind of milk this, like, internet IP for money. And that's not really done. I mean, I think of something like, it's not exactly a one-to-one, but, like, even just the Italian brain rot characters, right? Like, the most popular Roblox game now, I believe, is still steal a brain rot, which is just,

Like, you know, a game that has all these Italian brain rock characters. But as far as I know, I don't think that there's any company that's come in and bought the rights to that Italian brain rot? Or is there? AI Brain Rot is owned by a company. No, Steven. Wait. Who has, who owns the Italian brain rot? Momentum Labs. They're this French art collective that purchased tongue tongue tongue so whore. I wrote an article about it for PCMag because how do you copyright AI brain rot?

But turns out you actually can. The courts are kind of confused on how it all works. Wait, I kind of remember this because Tung Tung Tung Suhr made it into like a video game, right? He's in Fortnite now. Yes, exactly. Okay. I totally forgot about that. As far as I know, Bombardio, Crocodillo, Trawlaloo, Trawlala, Tragalah, la, are still not owned by this company, though, right?

I'm not entirely sure. The thing is, they're all created by these young men, a lot of them in Asia, who just kind of, they go really viral. And then momentum just kind of picks them up from there. Because owning a character, like, IP law on the internet is so weird. People don't know who owns what. And now we're just kind of dealing with the side effects and all these characters that just kind of like existed on the internet. Like creepypasta back in the day, we all collect. collectively own it, but now there's so much money in internet weirdness.

Everybody wants a piece. Yeah. And I mean, so in that sense, like, I feel like the Skibbitty toilet thing should be more open and shut. In this case, you have this creator. It's a man. We know he made it. Yes, he made it, you know, using Valve and all this stuff.

And that's kind of, I guess, a liability. But at least it's like a human being that made this stuff. But at the same time, I can also see why that almost makes it more difficult because it is so contingent on this one. person and when that one person's vision is no longer being reflected in the franchise, fans can turn. So what happens next? After that Discord call gets leaked, the community is up in arms.

The hashtag Bring Back Boom starts going viral on social media, messages claiming to be from Alexi that I did confirm as legitimate, start to leak online, where Alexi is talking about how he's kind of disappointed in how this is. deal has kind of come to be. And Invisible Narratives is desperately trying to keep control of the narrative. They're releasing multiple Twitter statements. They are releasing, you know, statements from Alexi. They are just trying to get control of the internet back in their hands, but they're constantly having to play catch-up because you're dealing with YouTubers. YouTubers can play by their own rules. There's one YouTuber in the story called Iron Cameraman, who is a diehard Ski Bitty

Toilet Guy, and he gets brought out to Invisible Narrative Studios to see the little bit of work that has been done on Michael Bay's movie, because allegedly, there's still a Skibbitty Toilet movie in the works with Michael Bay. Iron Cameraman is so angry at what he sees, that he creates an AI-generated vignette of what he thinks, the Skibbity Toilet movie, of what the video he saw was and then post it online and then Invisible Narratives sends him a cease and desist. Like this whole story gets so complicated and so messy because these fans are so devoted and Invisible Narratives is so devoted to keeping the IP in their hands. Well, that's what's so funny too. Like when this was trending on Twitter and I feel like

you and I were both like texting about it because I was like, who else is monitoring this? But Steven, I mean, I think they even added me to like some of their Discord groups because they were like, somebody needs to, you know, cover. I'm like, guys, Stephen, I trust that Stephen is on this one. But there's so much like fervor, like they were so angry. And it also seemed like such a kind of like misstep from invisible narratives because they're so clearly not adept at dealing with the internet. And listen, we all crash out online.

Literally earlier today, I was fighting with dumb people just taking L after L. Like, you know, when you were just in a bat, you're just like doubling down because you're like, you know, mad about something. like, so I can understand invisible narratives, like overreacting, getting annoyed, posting a statement. But I feel like the way that they were seeking to kind of exert power over the situation honestly made it worse. It just like pissed these people off even more because if there's one thing that YouTubers and internet fans like hate, it's some like corporation trying to come in and tell them like

how to, you know, express feelings about or make content about this art and this franchise that they love. that. Invisible Narratives really believes that they can control what people are doing with Skibbitty Toilet. They want to take all of the learning that has kind of happened in Hollywood over the past 100 years and bring it to the world of the internet. But as we mentioned, when something gets made online, everybody owns it. They can do with it as they please. Invisible Narratives is a company that cares about the contract. They care about the business of it all. They care about the letter of the contract and how everything. everything should be followed to a T.

And a lot of these, you know, people that they're dealing with are younger in a foreign country. They don't know the rules of Hollywood. They weren't designed for it. And Invisible narratives, I don't know if it's that they don't care or that they don't want to care. It's just they feel that like, this is something that they control so they should be allowed to do with it as they please. And by intellectual property law, they probably do. It's the same way as if when a dad has a child pass away and Spider-Man gets put on their tombstone or Minnie Mouse gets put on the side of a nursery. You know, Disney is going to send them a cease and desist, even though it is probably not good public relations.

They just kind of want to control everything and make sure that the people who are doing skibbity toilet stuff are doing it by their rules, which the community absolutely hates. Yeah, it feels like a losing battle increasingly in the internet. And obviously, you know, it's interesting to see these big companies grapple with it. Disney, you know, Lucas Films, et cetera. Like they've been dealing with this stuff for so long. But at the same time, too, they have these massive corporate PR teams that can mitigate this type of stuff. And I feel like it's mostly handled behind the scenes. If anything, obviously, sometimes things do blow up into the media.

But Invisible Narratives is still pretty new. And they're dealing with this very intense internet native fandom. So where does this all go? And where's Alexi during all of this? Now at this point, the future of Skivety Toilet is broken up into two camps. The fans desperately want Alexi to come back. They want him to start making content the way that he used to and post the crazy monster robot fights that they love so dearly. And then there's invisible narratives, which views Skivety Toilet as an intellectual property that they can turn into a Marvel Cinematic Universe-style,

massive cash cow, where they do lots of different spin-offs, merch, all of this, you know, all of these ideas that they can. They want like a movie with Michael Bay and animation teams across the world, where they can just sort of get out as much content as possible. At one point, if the Creator Alliance hadn't completely fallen apart, they were going to do the Skibbity Toilet HQ channel, where they were going to pay fan animators to make content for that channel and do spin-off videos to kind of build on the lore of Skibbitty Toil. Alexi has not spoken out publicly about any of this. He has remained entirely quiet. I believe I am one of only a handful of people that have ever spoken to Alexi. When I put out on Twitter that I was interviewing Goodman, he reached out to me.

I am fascinated that you spoke to him. I think the most that I have ever gotten was maybe an email back when I wrote my story. I wrote this big feature for The Washington Post about the movie deal. deal. He's notoriously reclusive. Did you put this interview out somewhere? Yeah, I put out a single quote of the interview in my aftermath story, but I don't think the interview is ever going to see the light of day for a few reasons. The first, Alexi does not like his voice being on the internet. I did a little oopsie and I posted a little clip of my chat with him and he wasn't too happy with it because he's not a fan of his voice. We squashed the beef. He's cool with it now. But for the most part, like, he didn't want it out there.

So I was like, okay, I still want to do this interview. Maybe I started reaching out to other YouTubers to kind of maybe I'll do voiceovers and read his quotes. But that didn't work either because I, Alexi wanted quote approval because everything he says has to be buttoned up. He is not allowed to publicly speak on invisible narratives, skibbitty toilet or his contract. The problem was I did speak to him on the record. Well, I mean, Stephen, I will say, I think it sounds like you're being very nice to this man. He gave you an on the record interview. But I also understand, you know, from his perspective and yours, even when somebody does give an on the record interview, it doesn't mean that you necessarily want to release that source material.

Especially if like you're interviewing him in the context of an article. His quote is included in the article. Like most journalists don't release their source material and source interviews. This came up when I interviewed Hire Reichek, the founder of Lips of TikTok. I was also interviewing her for the. this big feature I wrote. And it went, you know, it took a lot of approvals, honestly, from the place that I worked to even get that interview out there. Like, I think we live in this like YouTube receipts culture and I understand why people want that interview. But it's like,

I don't know, there's constantly this tension, I feel like with journalists where it's like, we don't always put ourselves out there. Not even just because like he doesn't want that content out there. But I imagine also like, I don't know that you were doing that interview for public consumption. Like it's very different to do an interview in the context of an article versus doing an interview for public consumption where like your questions are going to be scrutinized just as much. Like your questions are also public statements on the record. You know what I mean? Yeah. The last thing I like to do is kind of burn a source and make sure because this whole situation is so complicated. Invisible narratives and Alexi, they have contracts that make them

unable to talk about the other. And, you know, I know the fans just want me to dump it on the internet, but I've never released a whole interview. It feels kind of weird and unnecessary. I love the tea of it all in the mess, but I don't think that's something that really fits with this. You know, I don't want to overstep my boundaries as a journalist. Yeah. And also, I mean, I highly suggest people go read your story on the aftermath, which will be linked below. But you included his commentary in the story. Like, you know, I know people want to hear his exact words and voice and everything, but you're a journalist and you went out and did the reporting.

And it's in this story as I think the only journalist that I know to have actually interviewed him. I mean, where do you think he's going with all this and how do you see this playing out? I think Alexi just wants to be able to live. When it comes to Skibbitty Toilet, he is an executive producer and can do what he's pleases. But if he was to ever make another property, Invisible Narratives has a first look deal with him. So if he makes anything, they're the ones who get to decide if they want it or not. So he's basically in the palm of their hands. There's not much he can really do.

And I know there's this idea in the fan community that Alexi is locked in a basement, sort of like playing with Funko pops and sort of stuck playing with this. And that's not like entirely true. But Invisible Narratives is so focused on enforcing the contract that nobody involved really feels like they can talk about it freely. That makes sense. I mean, if I signed a contract with this big, you know, company with these Hollywood guys, especially like when he's getting paid.

Like, I mean, I could see Alexi also just not wanting to jeopardize the potential income, right? Or upside. Like, I have a lot of sympathy for him. I also think like, you know, I don't know what he wants to do in his life or how sort of closely aligned he feels with Skiddy Toil, but he was making content before. Hopefully he'll go on to make content after. What interests me right now is to see what invisible narratives does. Like right now, they've kind of like started beef with their own fandom.

Skibbitty Toilet is definitely the crown jewel of that company. And I don't know that they've successfully proved that this like traditional model is working because this whole situation has been such a mess. Yeah, the future of invisible narratives is something I'm really fixated on. We're at this point in the internet where all of these big companies want to come in and figure out how they can extract as much wealth from it as possible. And these internet animations are doing gangbusters. Like the amazing digital circus sells out of every merch drop they do. And Vivesypop at Haspen Hotel has a deal with Amazon to put all of their stuff on there. Internet animation, what used to be a niche, is now an incredibly lucrative cash cow.

And if you can find an intellectual property early and sort of milk it as much as you can, you can make a lot of money. And Invisible Narratives saw the dollar signs really early. Those Roblox games were making them bank. And all of these other little, like, you know, brand deals were kind of working. But now that there isn't really new content coming out, there isn't an opportunity for these brand deals to kind of happen. The companies that they work with are struggling to come up with new things to release because there isn't new skivety toilet content. So Invisible Narratives is basically stuck in a really hard place where how do they keep the money train going when the creator who makes it doesn't want to speak publicly on the matter? The fans hate what they're doing.

And Invisible Narratives also feels like they're getting a bunch of harassment from the community. They feel like this community hates them. Yeah. It's also like, you know how quickly the internet moves on from things? Like Skibbitty Toilet was so culturally relevant in 2023, 2024, even into 2025. But 2026, 27, 27, 27. We have Fruit Love Island now.

We have new forms of brain rot. We've got the YouTube shorts, RIS party kids. Like, you know, everything moves so fast. And there's so much, especially with the rise of AI, new animated content being generated, I just wonder if it'll end up being sort of a relic. Like, you know, it partially reminds me of some of the people that came in and tried to, like, monetize Vine memes, you know, like the backpack kid, you know, got this like multi-million dollar brand deal on opportunities.

And like people would sort of like recognize these like viral moments or viral creators or stars of memes, try to monetize them and inevitably fail just. just because the internet would move on. It's so hard to find something that's like lasting online. And so I feel like that's another challenge as well. It's not just identifying the IP early, but also it's like what is the half-life of that franchise? And will any internet franchise last as long as, you know,

the ones owned by Disney and Star Wars and, you know, that came from traditional entertainment back when we had a whole monoculture and the entire, you know, media ecosystem wasn't driven by algorithms, prioritizing newer and newer stuff. Yeah. If you look at the intellectual YouTube properties that have lasted the long time, it's just some dudes hanging out. It's Good Mythical Morning. It's Smosh. It's I Justine. These creators that have built fan base for over a decade, and that parisocial relationship is what keeps their longevity going. These newer animations and these newer properties don't have that same amount of legroom.

There isn't as much space as there was a decade ago to really enjoy how YouTube can make you into a millionaire. Now, there's so much out there that it's so crowded. And invisible narratives, again, from speaking with Goodman, speaking with their PR, speaking with everyone in this space, they feel like this thing has legs forever. And I just don't think that's the case. Eventually, people will get bored of Skivety, though they shouldn't because it's great. Yeah, you know, it's so funny. I watched so much scubity toilet back when I was reporting on it, you know, a little bit more often. And it is entertaining, like, there is this, like, it's fascinating thought behind it.

And I feel like it's what makes, like, timeless entertainment really good, which is like, it's language agnostic. But also, like, there's these themes that even like adults can kind of enjoy. Like, it's, it's themes of, like, good and evil and struggles. And there's all this sort of like lore and myths surrounded of like, you know, the symbolism involved and stuff. And I don't know. I don't want to like completely. off invisible narratives because I do think it's a compelling case. I do think that, I mean, look at that

French company that owns Tung Tung, Tung, Tung, Soor, right? Like, there are people making money in this world. I think that this case is just sort of like uniquely complicated and reveals a lot of pitfalls in this new economy. So it's sort of a fascinating case study, no matter which way it plays out. And you know what? Maybe the Skibody Toilet movie will come out. It'll be the biggest hit ever. That'll ignite, like a whole new fervor around the franchise. And like, they'll look back. back in two years and think like, ha ha, remember when we thought it ended. In invisible narratives, they've shown a lot of promise when it comes to working in the online space.

I think Skivety Toilet is not over. There's going to be a lot more of it as the years go on. And it's going to be really interesting to see how this whole thing pans out. Yeah. I'm definitely going to be watching and reading all of your coverage. Steven, thank you so much for coming on and chatting about all of this. Of course. Thanks for having me.

Titan speaker man. Is that a little Skippity Toilet Toilet Merge? Oh yeah, I got a few. I went to Toy Fair a few years ago, and they gave me all the Titans. I had no idea what they were at the time. They just handed them to me and they're like, you want to know about Skibbty Toilet?

Sure. You got it, bonkers toys. And now they just like sit on my desk because I think they're adorable. Well, Steven, thank you so much again. All right, that's it for this week's episode of Power User. If you like the show, please, please support me on Patreon via the link below or buy a paid subscription to my substack newsletter at usermag.co. That's usermag.com. Right now I have zero, zero long-term advertising partnerships. So seriously, every single dollar of your support makes

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