Indian-Canadian comedy vlogger Lilly Singh ended 2016 as the richest female YouTuber on the planet, having raked in an as much as $7.5 million from her channel (which has 12.6 million subscribers and counting) as well as her various other ventures. This made her the third highest paid YouTuber overall that year — prankster Roman Atwood came second while PewDiePie remained in the top spot — and she built on that success in 2017, with Forbes recently naming her the top influencer in the entertainment sector.
Singh has come a long way from her first upload (a spoken word piece on religion and humanity watched by just 70 people) but she remembers the trials and tribulations of those early days very clearly. From her humble beginnings to her imminent mainstream breakthrough, this is the untold truth of Lilly Singh.

She has a degree in psychology


After graduating from York University with a bachelor's degree in psychology, Singh couldn't decide what to do with her life. She spent an entire year doing nothing as she tried to figure out what her next step should be, but walking an ordinary career path simply wasn't appealing to her. Her parents (both of Punjabi descent) insisted that she go back to school and study for a masters in counselling psychology, but she had an epiphany while filling out her application form.

"I remember writing the application for my masters and then going 'Oh my god! I don't even want to do these applications, how am I going to do this for four years?'" she told The Hindu. "It was during that time, between sending applications, that I decided on doing YouTube videos seriously and I already had a few videos out at that time. At that moment, I walked up to my parents and was like 'Hey, I've decided that I am not going to do my masters, and instead I am going to make YouTube videos."

Her parents didn't get it

Singh's decision to go full time on YouTube came as a shock to her parents, though after Superwoman (her online persona) became popular on the platform, they slowly started to come around to the idea. "When I first started it was not that they were unsupportive, they just didn't get it and that's fair," she told Flare. "Even my friends don't get YouTube right now. It took my relatives calling them saying, 'Is your daughter Superwoman?'"

Her Punjabi heritage was a big part of her channel early on, and Singh regularly portrayed fictionalized versions of her mother and father in her videos, which they came to not only understand, but really enjoy. "Recently, I feel so grateful because they've become supportive in a new way," the YouTuber said. "They actually watch my videos and understand the art I'm doing. My mom really believes my message. My dad has watched all my videos and he knows how many subscribers I have at any given moment, he's obsessed. They understand what I'm trying to do and that's really special to me."

She didn't set out to become famous

Back when Singh started her channel in October 2010, fame and fortune were not words that people associated with YouTube. The platform had been around for a couple of years at that stage and there were a few content creators that were well-known among viewers, but the notion of the internet celebrity was still alien to most people, Singh included. The real reason she decided to become a YouTuber was actually to counter some mental health problems she'd been suffering.

"When I started on YouTube, nobody knew that you could make a living off of YouTube," she told Elle Canada. "I started because I was sad, and I wanted to be happy. And a lot of my peers who started around the same time, it was for the same reason. We were all messed up in some way. We had anxiety, we were loners, and we turned to YouTube. But now when people start YouTube it's: 'I want to be a YouTuber, I want a career, I want to make money, I want to be famous.' And it's much more of a business now."


She didn't want her race to define her

While Singh used her South Asian roots as a source of humor in her content regularly to begin with, she never wanted her race to define her comedy, which was exactly what happened. "There were already so many females on YouTube but I am pretty sure I am the first Indian big YouTuber that's also female," Singh said. "When I first started, all the media I ever got was 'Hey! There's this Indian girl, and even though she is Indian she gets views and stuff.'"

Before long she realized that if she was ever going to shake that tag she would have to make her content more universal. "Earlier on my videos used to be so geared towards Indian people because that's what I thought I had to do," she told AOL. "So I would call my videos things like 'My Indian Parents Do This' or 'Indian Girls This' and very quickly I realized that I didn't have to do that. All girls are pretty much the same and all parents are pretty much the same, so I stopped doing that and I stopped cornering myself into a niche that I thought I had to be in."

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