If he had a conventional TV show nobody would be surprised. The number of people that watch his content is astronomical, every one of his videos has over a million views. He's much more heavily viewed than, say, cable news networks like CNN. Indeed, more people watch him than NBC, ABC, or CBS.
Well, quantity vs. quality I guess. "Mostpopular", "tens of millions of views", "audience skews young". Thanks for sparing me the time of trying to sub him...
> I think his channel only hit 100k subscribers last year, so it looks like he might finally be getting some well-deserved recognition.
No kidding. Even if he hit 100K subscriber 2 years ago or at the beginning of 2015, he is at 500K subscribers now. If his growth hasn't slowed too much, he could be looking at [close] to a million subscribers before this decade is done.
His videos are pretty cool so far. Happy he is able to do this for a living.
That is rather what I am talking about. He posted 18 videos this week (I'm not counting the two from the last 24 hours) with an avg. of ~55,000 views.
There's a lot of noise and people have short attention spans, he also posts stuff willy nilly. So only some small fraction of his 700,000 subscribes see any one video, for the rest it disappears into their feeds.
His 360 Million views is still quite a lot, by definition there can only be so many accounts with such a high view count. And yet that translates to a check of only around a quarter million dollars.
This is great for a highly caffeinated individual sitting in underwear and recording his screen - it simply doesn't cover a cast and crew even if you improve the CPM by a factor of x10.
The truth is that TV advertising is very overpriced and just like newspapers trade physical print dollars for digital pennies the same thing applies here.
He's not that different to a top-tier Youtuber or influencer of which there are hundreds who have managed to build successful content businesses with very small staff.
They are all just standing on the shoulders of the platforms and content creation tools which allows them to affordably produce and distribute high quality content to billions. Something which has never previously been possible.
he makes success seem so easy even though the odds are overwhelmingly stacked against someone else replicating anything close to his success, except for maybe a few people. when the barriers to entry are low means lots of competition. like muckbang videos. for every video that gets >100k views of someone shoveling food in his or her mouth, there are hundreds of videos that have just a few thousand to 10k views.
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