Of course they play along with it since they get donations almost every minute. Excited for season 5 of the show, me and my friends watched as the hosts fought amongst each other, desperately trying to keep the show as kid-friendly as possible however 2 hours in a user by the name of Truebuddhist donated $5 (when you donate you get to enter a something which is read out by text to voice). Suddenly the show went offline. Confused, I went to the official Discord server to see what had happened.
According to the moderators TrueBuddhist had leaked the real names of the show hosts. It was then I reliased that Jonathan Hills, Mathias Miles and Gregory Pecks were all fake names.
I thought about it and the more I did I noticed how there was a massive amount of these reality shows on Youtube. Ricegum, The Paul Brothers and KSI are the best examples of this trend and it makes me wonder if Youtube is becoming one massive tv show that gets new episodes every day from multiple different angles. You've got the main contributors (like the names mentioned before) who record the footage of their daily lives. Then you have the reactors like Keemstar and H3H3 who react to what is happening, giving their views on the situations.
This kind of Youtube is racking up millions of views. Of course you still have other content like gaming and memes which still get views but nowhere near the amount Jake Paul gets for putting his brothers dog up for sale on Ebay.
Buddhist Hotline is obviously not part of the reality show Youtube has created but has instead made its own and it makes them enough money to keep it going.
