Poppy says Poppy is an alien, an object, a computer, your pet. “I am not in a cult.” Then she bows: 2.1m views.
“Say it with me: ‘I am not in a cult,’” she says. In one of her higher-concept clips, she kneels in prayer before a metallic P. In another, she wonders aloud why Selena Gomez has so many social media followers: 2.6m views. In the first video of Poppy ever posted, in November 2014, she wordlessly consumes candy floss: this has had 2.3m views. Her videos are the sort you stumble upon while following links blindly down an online rabbit hole: portals to a pastel-washed parallel universe populated by platinum-blond Poppy and her fellow characters – a basil plant and a mannequin called Charlotte. Poppy has about 300 videos on her channel, which have received a combined 235m views, increasing by 250,000 a day YouTube says her subscribers have grown 260% in the past year.
This has been viewed more than 12.6m times. In one of her hundreds of videos on YouTube, she repeats those two words in her childlike monotone for 10 minutes.
