I’m a You Tube millionaire!
TEN years ago this week, the firstever video was uploaded to YouTube. And it didn’t even feature a single cat or Kardashian. The 18-second clip, entitled “Me at the Zoo,” featured site co-founder Jawed Karim standing in front of the elephant pen at the San Diego Zoo.
“The cool thing about these guys is that, is that they have really, really, really long, um, trunks, and that’s, that’s cool,” Karim mumbles. “And that’s pretty much all there is to say.”
The clip was so dull, Karim’s own parents would have deleted it after a family vacation. But in terms of online media, the video launched a democratic revolution.
Today, YouTube has more than one billion users, and some 300 hours of video gets uploaded every minute. One of the more unexpected side effects is the rise of the YouTube star — those people responsible for viral videos that get passed around via e-mail or social media.
“What’s interesting about the YouTube phenomenon is that for the first time since TV began, here comes a new way to be a star,” says Pete Farrell, producer and co-writer of “The Chronicles of Rick Roll,” a movie due next year featuring viral-- video stars.
The difference between TV and You- Tube, however, is that many of those who make it big online do so by accident. Take “Keyboard Cat”: One day in 1984, unemployed Charlie Schmidt shot a video of his T-shirt-wearing cat fake-playing an electric piano.
“It was born out of boredom,” he tells The Post. “I was trying to make myself feel better by making weird videos.” Some 23 years later, on a whim, he uploaded the video to YouTube. It’s been viewed nearly 40 million times.
“Every once in a while I run into an old friend,” Schmidt says, “and they say, ‘You know w all that junk you do, do you get paid for that?’” The answer? Um, yeah. Many, including Schmidt, have made a well-paid full-time career out of YouTube fame. First, there are the views, which earn a creator ad revenue. The general rule of thumb is that every million views equals $1,000. (That number can vary wildly, depending on how many views are on mobile devices and other factors.)
FunToyz Collector, a channel that shows various toys being unboxed and displayed (seriously, that’s it), has more than 4 million subscribers and earns between $1,000 and $16,000 a day, according to online-data company Social Blade.
Videos from PewDiePie, a Swedish video-game vlogger named Felix Kjellberg, have racked up more than 8 billion views and pull in as much as $18.2 million a year in revenue.
“I think a lot of these viral-video stars experience that whiplash effect, like, ‘Holy cow, I was driving a beatup Camry and now I have wads of cash,’” says Farrell. “Some of them were down to earth. Others, you can tell it got to their head and made them [go] out of control.”
Ad revenue is one thing, but the real head-ballooning money may be made through other channels. “Keyboard Cat,” for instance, has brought in a total of about half a million — a figure Schmidt doesn’t dispute — but much of that has come from licensing deals with Microsoft and other advertisers.
Bethany Mota, now a 19-year-old from California, got her start on YouTube in 2009, posting videos of clothes she’d bought. She’s since become one of the Web’s top fashion bloggers and earns a reported $40,000 a month from her videos alone. She’s spun that success into her own Aéropostale clothing line and a spot on “Dancing With the Stars.”
For every Mota though, there is a Chris “Leave Britney Alone!” Crocker. Remember him?
“Some of them were doing well with the YouTube fame,” Farrell says. “And others were discovering a cruel aspect: that it could disappear as quickly as it appeared.”