Bree Avery was a 16-year-old YouTube celebrity who uploaded webcam videos from her bedroom, where she talked about life in her small American town.

Her videos are nothing special — she complains about her family, boys and pulls funny faces — but Bree soon became one of the internet’s first viral sensations.

Millions tuned in to watch her awkward, fumbling rants and she gained a loyal following online.

But four months after lonelygirl15 posted her first video, Bree Avery was outed as a fake. Her real name is Jessica Rose, a Los Angeles actress employed by two young filmmakers. The whole show was fiction.

“A lot of the hardcore fans were really quite sad and I don’t blame them,” says Rose in a new interview to mark the show’s 10-year anniversary. “It’s like you lose a friend, which a lot of people felt like. But that girl doesn’t actually exist.”

Rose, her co-star Yousef Abu-Taleb and the show’s creators Miles Beckett and Mesh Flinders, sat down with Vocativ to talk about the legacy of their strange series.

Here are the 10 things we learned from the interview.

1. The internet was nothing like it is now

Jessica Rose: “At that time, I did have a MySpace, but I didn’t use it often. I had an e-mail, but I also checked maybe once a week. The internet just … for me, it wasn’t what it is today, where you use it every five minutes.

“[The show’s creators] had us watch a few YouTube channels. I found it really strange and voyeuristic just watching this other person’s life. I watched that and I was like, ‘Okay, that’s kind of cool. I get it. Sort of.’”

2. The creators found their star on Craigslist

Jessica Rose: “It was when I first started acting in Los Angeles, so I submitted myself on Craigslist. I submitted two separate headshots and they called me in on one of the younger-looking headshots, and I just auditioned.

“As I was leaving, I let them know that I had been homeschooled, which worked out really well, because obviously they were looking for someone who wasn’t going to be too well-known in public.”

Jessica Rose accepts the award for Big Web Hit onstage during the VH1 Big in 2006 Awards held at Sony Studios in 2006 in California. Picture: Kevin Winter/Getty ImagesSource:Getty Images

3. The original plan was to make Lonelygirl into a feature film.

Jessica Rose:“When we got there, they told us it was actually going to be on the internet, and that it was going to be on this thing called YouTube, and it was going to be called ‘Lonelygirl15.’

“My heart just dropped, because, in my eyes, you know, you move to L.A. as a young girl, your parents tell you to be careful. I’d gotten so excited when I booked this movie that when they told me what it was, I was like, ‘This is one of those scams. This is probably porn, or something really dodgy.’

“I was really upset. Actually, Miles called me later on, because he could tell that I was not into it anymore, and was like, ‘It’s not porn! I promise!’”

4. They gained a loyal following through curating the YouTube comments section.

Miles Beckett: “Every single comment that somebody would write, we would write back to. Through that, we were able to get the videos consistently into [YouTube’s] most-discussed section. It worked shockingly well, because by July 4th [the series debuted on June 16th] we had our first video to get half a million views, which was the video My Parents Suck.

“Other things that worked: really good freeze-frame thumbnails for videos—big eyes, usually a girl, something crazy happening, something that makes people want to click. At the time YouTube would automatically take a thumbnail from the middle of the video.

“I would obsessively edit the videos, and then test upload them, to get the perfect freeze-frame, because you couldn’t control that in any other way. It was like click-bait before there was click-bait.”

5. It didn’t take long for people to start figuring out the videos were fake.

Yousef Abu-Taleb: “In the beginning there was constantly comment wars on YouTube. People would say, ‘It’s fake’ and other people would say, ‘No, it’s not fake. If it was fake, the production value would be way better.’ In the beginning, it was just four of us and a little crappy web camera and a nightstand that was actually broken.”

6. Jessica soon started to get recognised by fans on the street

Jessica Rose: “I had two jobs other than Lonelygirl. I had a job at Abercrombie & Fitch and a job at T.G.I. Friday’s. Yousef was bartending. When it started to get popular they were like, ‘We don’t want you out.’ They took out a loan so they could pay us a very small salary to not go to work, and just do Lonelygirl.

“I was out at the bookstore once in Santa Monica, just sort of, enjoying stuff. I got home, and one of the comments on the thing was, ‘I could’ve sworn I saw you at Barnes & Noble in Santa Monica today.’ And they were like, ‘But I knew for sure it couldn’t be you, because there’s no way you’d be in Santa Monica.’”

Jessica Rose pictured in 2008. Picture: Timothy Norris/Getty ImagesSource:Getty Images

7. Fans threatened to expose the show as fake

Mesh Flinders: “Jess was having to wear a hat and sunglasses. She couldn’t go out of her apartment. It was getting to a point where people were writing directly to us, because we maintained the account for Lonelygirl, and saying, ‘I know you’re a fraud and I’m going to expose you.’ People hacked us and that just freaked us out.”

8. Then mainstream press became interested and journalists started digging

Jessica Rose: “I remember about two months in that, I think it was The Tyra Banks Show, asked Bree to come on her show. Bree, not me, the character. I was like, I absolutely cannot do that. I don’t think I could’ve pulled it off. And I just thought it was too much. It wasn’t in line with the story or anything like that. That was when it started to get kind of out of hand, with the whole press sensation.”

Mesh Flinders: “The decision was made for us. We were either going to admit to it or the whole world was going to know about it.”

Miles Beckett: “We were terrified that if the press went the wrong way, maybe people would hate us. But after the press, viewership skyrocketed even more.”

9. Once the secret was out, the show’s popularity exploded. So they kept going.

Miles Beckett: “It was the No. 1 channel on YouTube from subscribers and views, for six months to a year, around when YouTube was bought by Google. We were meeting with every single studio and network in town, and it was really hard to explain to people what the opportunity was, or where it was headed. Our first advertised was [chocolate brand] Hershey’s. They took a chance on Ice Breakers Sours gum. We did a little product placement. Neutrogena was our first six-figure sponsor. We actually created a character, Spencer Gilman. He was an ‘employee’ of Neutrogena.”

Actress Jessica Rose at the premiere of Battle: Los Angeles in 2011. Picture: Frazer Harrison/Getty ImagesSource:Getty Images

10. They eventually killed Bree off and the show ended in 2008.

Jessica Rose: “It was kind of my decision to have Bree die. I was the only way that Bree was going to go down. She just couldn’t be like, ‘Peace. I’m out. Maybe I’ll come back and maybe not!’ She had to die.

“We went into contract renegotiations and it just wasn’t going to work. It kind of felt like Bree was up in the air. They were adding in all these new characters, and we didn’t know what to do with her. She sort of had gone a little too far into this whole cult thing. It was very hard to bring her back as the original Bree, as how she’d been in the beginning.

“I think that made her a bit stuck, and it made it not the Bree that I had enjoyed playing in the beginning. So then they decided, ‘Yeah, she’s going to die. We’re going to make it, like, epic.’