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Today’s YouTube and Online personalities are the celebrities of tomorrow. We’re only a few years removed where people will recognize the names of online stars before they recognize the stars of the silver screen. The insane part of all this is the attainability of how these online personalities got to where they are. However, that’s not to sound cavalier and ignore the countless hours invested into growing an online presence. Here are 3 online personalities that you should know and follow by example:
Gary Vaynerchuk
Gary Vee as he’s known in the online space is an online personality offering advice and motivation for his viewership in an entrepreneurial spirit. He’s a confident, passionate and strong spoken entrepreneur who boasts a “Love him or Hate him” feel. Once you become acclimated to his style, it becomes evident quite quickly why he is so interesting to watch—he’s damn smart. Viewers get an insanely insightful perspective from Gary Vee and his most popular show “Ask Gary Vee” exemplifies that.
Why is he so popular? The free advice and extremely passionate manner in which he carries himself would be the answer. Gary Vee epitomizes hustle and serves as a good example of what the payoff of a daily grind yields.
Casey Neistat
Casey Neistat is a vlogger that distinguishes himself with daily videos highlighting his day, new cool products, philosophies, and adventures among other things. The silly quirk that makes him so addicting to viewers is his ingenuity and resourcefulness. His lifestyle does not come across even remotely as forced, so to viewers it seems to smart and simple to adopt his methods.
Neistat’s channel has grown immensely over the past year and this can be attributed from the quality poured into each video. As a creative, Casey is able to devote his talents into his videos during pre-production through post-production giving his video’s an unmistakable flavor.
Pewdiepie
If you haven’t heard of Pewdiepie then you’re up for a surprise and a little bit of confusion. Here’s the skinny; Pewdiepie is the biggest channel on YouTube raking in $11,000,000+ annually and is run by Swedish native, Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg. What are his videos of? This is the kicker, they’re simply of him just playing video games.
You may wonder why that’s even a thing or why so many people would flock to him. You may sit there thinking it’s the dumbest thing in the world that people would spend countless hours just watching someone else play a video game. You can wonder and doubt the legitimacy behind a channel such as this, but the formula is simple and this is why he’s successful: be a friend to your audience. That’s it. People watch him playing games because for the viewer, it feels as if they are there hanging out with Pewdiepie (who refers to the camera and viewer very often).
Another way Pewdiepie is able to drive his growth is that he's maximized the YouTube algorithm. YouTube awards watch time and will reccommend channels and videos that have a lot of watch time. Pewdiepie uploads almost daily and his videos are around 15-20 minutes long. Because of this he has massive amounts of watch time and viewer retention, thus being rewarded by YouTube's system and getting more exposure. This takes a lot of growth to begin to game for yourself, but it is good to be aware of it.
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There are countless other YouTube personalities out there but these three harness some basic traits that can help you in your own video and professional endeavors. If you can fuel the passion and grind mentality of Gary Vee and merge it with the creative authenticity of Casey Neistat while rounding it off with the personable nature of Pewdiepie—then you’re off to a good start.
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