The resurfacing of Jai Brooks—the Australian YouTuber who dated Ariana Grande from 2012 to 2014—in a "'Memba Him?!" feature this week is not news in any traditional sense. Brooks, now 30, has been living a quiet life far from the pop stratosphere his ex-girlfriend inhabits. But his reappearance in the celebrity media ecosystem illustrates something more interesting than any update on his current haircut: the formalization of ex-partner nostalgia as a content vertical.
The arithmetic of association
Brooks's claim to fame was always derivative—he was famous for dating someone famous, a parasocial footnote in Grande's origin story. The Janoskians, his comedy collective, had their moment, but it was the Grande relationship that granted him permanent residency in celebrity archives. What's changed is how systematically media outlets now mine these archives. The "where are they now" format has existed for decades, but its application to romantic partners of A-listers represents a refinement: you don't need the star's participation to generate engagement about them.
This is the content equivalent of arbitrage. Grande's name drives traffic; Brooks provides the hook. The reader clicks not because they care about Jai Brooks in 2026 but because they want to briefly revisit 2013, when Grande was still a Nickelodeon alumna with red hair and the world felt smaller.
Nostalgia as infrastructure
The celebrity-ex industrial complex operates on a simple insight: fans form attachments not just to stars but to the eras those stars represent. Grande's relationship with Brooks belongs to a specific cultural moment—Vine was ascendant, Instagram was still chronological, and pop stardom hadn't yet fully merged with the streaming economy. Revisiting Brooks is really revisiting that moment, with all its attendant feelings of lost youth and simpler parasocial relationships.
Media outlets have recognized this and built editorial calendars around it. The "'Memba" format, anniversary retrospectives, and "where are they now" roundups are all variations on the same theme: weaponized nostalgia, served in easily digestible portions. It works because memory is cheap to produce and expensive to resist.
Our take
There's something faintly melancholy about watching a man become content simply because he once held hands with someone who became very famous. But Brooks isn't the victim here—he's just the raw material. The real story is how efficiently the attention economy has learned to extract value from proximity, even proximity that ended a decade ago. In 2026, you don't need to be famous; you just need to have once stood next to someone who was.
