It's been nearly three years since Austyn Tester let a documentary crew into his life to chronicle his attempt to become internet famous. Jawline, a Hulu documentary, shows the 16-year-old's rise to semi-celebrity, but it doesn't really let audiences know how everything worked out (or didn't work out) in the end. In 2019, Austyn Tester seems to have stumbled a bit in his fame attempt. The influencer world is fickle, indeed.
Now nearly 19 years old, Tester unfortunately has fewer Instagram followers than when the documentary filmed. He still objectively has a lot more than the average Instagrammer, but talent manager Michael Weist said in the film that he wouldn't represent Tester with the 20+ thousand followers he had back then. Now, that number has now slipped to under 20,000.
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And even worse news for anyone rooting the star of the doc, Tester's other social media sites aren't necessarily popping off either. Hi TikTok has 17.9K followers, but he has no content posted on the page. Meanwhile his Twitter has 4500 followers and his YouTube has even less, at just 1.6K subscribers. His only YouTube video is from two years ago.
The Hollywood Reporter said that Tester was big into the YouNow streaming scene in the documentary. But it seems he hasn't streamed to his 7.4K fans in quite a while. His most recent post is from a year and a half ago. In the doc, Tester made it clear that he wanted to make it big and get out of his small Tennessee town of Kingsport. However, his tagged geolocations on Instagram indicate that he's still there and waiting to make that move happen.
Tester was already struggling in his attempt to make it big in the documentary, with THR reporting that his residual checks were often under $10, but it seems he's put his rise to fame attempt on the backburner entirely now. And it's hard to fault him. Becoming internet semi-famous at 16 seems overwhelming, especially seeing how much work he put into it in the film, so perhaps Tester chose to pull back a bit.
It is possible that he's laying low until Jawline's Aug. 23 premiere, which could propel him back into the spotlight again. An interview from the 2019 Sundance festival, where he was promoting Jawline, shows that Tester has maintained the sincere charm that won over those 20k followers in the first place.
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In the above video clip, he flashes a smile as he waxes poetic about how he's always his authentic self online and loves connecting with his supporters.
If the documentary helps more people learn his name, he could finally realize that dream of making it big and moving away from Kingsport, Tennessee. He just has to hope that Jawline reginites that insta-flame once again.