YouTube's Biggest Draw Plays Games, Earns $4 Million a Year
online.wsj.com
online.wsj.com
I also highly recommend the annual Speed Demos Archive charity marathons, especially the races and challenges. For instance, several top Super Metroid players racing for 45 minutes and finishing within seconds of each other, or players completing Punch-Out and Super Punch-Out blindfolded.
> "content quality black hole", "I intensely dislike it", "WTF are kids watching these days"
You know, there's a reason he's popular. And sure, 80% of his output aren't going to match your quality filter. But the remaining 20% will. And, if nothing else, he's a cultural influence. Here's an idea: Turn off your brain and just watch some highly rated or very popular ones in the background. Can't be worse than the vast majority of TV you (and I) watched in the 90s, all things considered.
Edit: And, if nothing else, two decades from now whoever is going to be working with you as a statistical inevitability by then when you're older will have grown up on PewDiePie (or one would hope, something a bit more educational) in the same way that you did on The Simpsons?
Nope; I'm in my 20s, not 30s.
> And sure, 80% of his output aren't going to match your quality filter. But the remaining 20% will.
Quantity has a quality all its own, but no, even 20% seems unlikely.
> And, if nothing else, he's a cultural influence.
Which brings me back to "What makes me really sad".
> Turn off your brain
No. I'm not a fan of "mindless" entertainment when there's so much that I don't have to turn off my brain to enjoy.
And sure, The Simpsons was from the beginning targeted towards a young male audience as a cheap form of entertainment too, but how does define the potential of the work?
No intellectual video games? Please, spare us that train of thought.
I don't mean it in the sense of being mindless entertainment, it's more off the get rid of your preconceived ideas of what constitutes entertainment and at some point you may well hit on a hook of some sort. Even if it's not with PewDiePie.
At some point the chasm between what's popular and what you have trained yourself to enjoy becomes so large that you'll be in a bubble and miss out on a shared global cultural experience. I think spending 2 or 4 hours a week just to keep up with pop culture from around the world is pretty damn important, and PewDiePie is a part of that. As is at least knowing about 非诚勿扰, stupid as it is. As is following the world cup in Brazil.
Now making jokes about rape and the holocaust? PewDiePie can go fuck himself.
OK, I can't find anything on Google on the latter, and only something on the former from three years ago. If you're saying that with 1 billion views in the past three months alone and across dozens of hours of content in that time there's a possibility that someone might interpret him something he said as making jokes about the holocaust, then yes, I believe /that/. But I'm not sure his intentions are evil or that he is a bigot or a hateful person.
PewDiePie has single-handily made me break that promise. WTF are kids watching these days????
Of course being a kid his video time is strictly limited.
But the fact that he would choose that activity on his iPad vs. playing all sorts of games makes me think there is something huge there. Huge as in the future of mass entertainment.
You know all those cheesy Sci-Fi books and movies where new sports are invented and masses of people cheering them?
This is the future. PewDiePie is competing with Formula 1 racing, World Cup Football, and prime time TV. He's got more people watching than most TV shows.
In some ways this this is just classic entertainment - good looking guy being funny, doing funny stuff. Take out YouTube and video games and it's the same formula for entertainment we've seen in the last 100 years.
PS: And yes you should stick with your promise.
I don't understand the appeal at all, but you're almost certainly totally right that there's be something huge there.
It gets worse though. My daughter likes to watch some girl make up stories with barbie dolls and other similarly sized characters. Every one of the videos I've looked at has millions of views, so she's not alone. It's a little weird.
Some have been nearly as successful as PewDiePie (Tobuscus is one), but PewDiePie has effectively created a content quality black hole on YouTube.
If you want something more, there's a ton of that, too. On the internet, the LCD doesn't have to crowd out the "better" stuff (for whatever personal definition of "better" you may like)... there's bandwidth enough for all. Which eliminates the biggest reason to hate it.
Atleast with PewDiePie, you know what to expect.
These exist? I mean, obviously the 'growth hacking' exists. Is there an example of a startup who managed to build a real business solely on the basis of these tactics? One that 'you can't argue with'? I wouldn't call Groupon a real business.
RapGenius seems to have had a guy doing some underhanded promotion.
LinkedIn still does this stuff (or maybe it just started).
Safe to assume there are others.
Ditto for reddit. Not sure how well the RapGenius people have made out but it seems they're doing well.
Remember, being a viable business is different than being successful. Twitter hasn't turned a profit, but the people that started it made off quite well. Splunk still loses cash left-and-right, yet is considered solid.
If I came up with a money-losing idea that got millions of users, never made a dime, and I sold it for even $10M, I'd be very happy with my "failure".
Article from last year about Reddit's struggle for profitability:
http://www.businessinsider.com/reddit-is-trying-to-become-pr...
Article on RapGenius's own struggle:
I can't find anything wrong with that to be honest. It's not about making money for me, it's about how you make money. He's not scamming anyone, he's just providing content and people choose to watch it. And it's probably still better than most of what's on TV.
Still a substantial sum in the end, but I felt the title may potentially be misleading.
If it's $4 million "mostly profit" I would take that as what he gets before taxes. If he pays his taxes in Sweden I think closer to 70% of that would disappear.
> The 24-year-old Mr. Kjellberg, who created PewDiePie five years ago, has parlayed his persona into a brand name that pulls in the equivalent of $4 million in ad sales a year, most of it pure profit.
And I'm pretty sure the title isn't misleading - it's $4 million after YouTube's cut, which seems to check out, having cross-correlated other sources.
There are different levels taxation in Sweden if I recall correctly the upper level takes out 70% of the income, that is income earned after $200.000. So if I understand it correctly that would mean he needs to pay $2.660.000 in taxes on those $4 million.
I could be wrong though, but that is my understanding of it. If he's got a corporation where the money goes, that's an entirely different thing. My assumptions are it's a sole proprietorship or equal to that.
I know nothing about taxation in UK, but I guess it also depends on where he has his company (if any) registered. Either way, it's a lot of money even if a lot of it is tax.
As a developer-designer, I've had a few ideas around potential services around this stuff that I wish I had the time and resources to execute because I can totally see this market exploding right now… :)
Kjellberg maybe the biggest personality, but there is a significant group of people who make a decent living out of doing this.
I do strongly believe that this will become a major genre in reality television/entertainment. And I am not taking into account the other universe called DOTA here.
I'm also really interested in apps/games (ex. strawpoll.me) that let viewers participate in their stream. Seems like a good use case for meteor.
They also do videos of games.