The changing platform for YouTube stardom
YouTube is growing up, and the line between YouTube stars and celebrity is becoming blurrier. Thousands of screaming fans are out in force at VidCon, a conference for online video makers in Anaheim, California, on Thursday.
Freddie Wong will be among them. His YouTube channel, RocketJump, has more than 7 million subscribers, and he is one of the latest YouTube stars looking to move their production off YouTube.
Earlier this year, Wong signed a deal with Hulu for a half-hour comedy. He says the business of making video content is one that involves doing a little bit of everything.
“We produce and create, write, shoot, direct, edit, post production — everything is sort of all done in house,” Wong says.
So, when you’ve got 7 million YouTube fans, why move to a different platform?
“It doesn’t really affect what we do on our end,” Wong says. “At the end of the day, we still make the things that we make. And we found that the best strategy in this very fluid marketplace is to not be tied into any given platform, but to be able to make good content, and good content will be able to live anywhere.”
Wong says it’s a whole new world for content creators today. Back in the day, content creators had to ask big companies to fund their project and give them a platform. Now, you build your own audience — and people with money come to you.
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