In today’s time, fame is not just being an actor or actress in Hollywood or having hit albums and songs; another type of fame exists. YouTube is well-known as the place to go to for witty videos, music videos, and various other types of videos, and it is also the place where one can start his or her career.
YouTube has its own celebrities – or personalities – that people may or may not have heard about. Some of these people create their own assortment of videos and make money off it from corporate sponsors who put advertisements in before the videos or ask for product placements. A handful of these sponsored personalities have quit their day jobs in order to accommodate for filming schedules.
An example of an early rise to YouTube fame comes from Ian Hecox and Anthony Padilla, also known to viewers as Smosh. Their video “Pokémon Theme Music Video” from 2005 began their rise on YouTube, gaining 24.7 million views over its lifetime. The video contained Hecox and Padilla mouthing the words of the Pokemon theme song with the words and filming it as if it were an actual music video. The success of the video caught the attention of Time Magizine, who featured Hecox and Padilla in their issue “Person of the Year: You” in 2006. It also led Smosh to continue with videos of the same style. Since then, Smosh has been one of the highest subscribed channels on YouTube, with about 4.3 million subscribers and almost 1.1 billion video views.
Another rising YouTube channel belongs to Peter Shukoff, or as he is known to viewers, NicePeter. He describes himself to his viewers as a comic/guitar hero, because most of his videos are comedic music that Shukoff has composed. His most well-known venture is probably his team-up with another YouTube personality – EpicLloyd – to create the “Epic Rap Battles of History” series. The series pairs up two notable figures (such as Darth Vader and Adolf Hitler) to face off in a rap battle. NicePeter and EpicLloyd usually star in the video, but they also have special guests enter battles as well (such as MC Mr. Napkins as Albert Einstein or George Watsky as William Shakespeare). Eventually Shukoff set up a separate channel on YouTube for the battles, and now uses his channel for just his music. On his original channel, Shukoff has over 1.3 million subscribers and over 381.1 million video views, making him the 35th most subscribed of all time and the 11th most subscribed musician as of January 2012.
Those are only two examples of the numerous faces viewers can find on YouTube. Others would include people like Ray William Johnson, Rebecca Black, Sean Plott, and Amy Walker. Wikipedia has comprised an incomplete list of notable YouTube personalities at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_YouTube_personalities.