Why so many Millennials didn’t know John McCain had died

If you’re under the age of 35, you are growing up in an entirely different way to look at making money.

Case in point, two YouTube stars (yes, that’s a thing) just boxed each other in a grudge match and made $8.3 million dollars over the weekend. Over 20,000 fans showed up in person and another 784,000 people streamed the event online.

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They aren’t professional boxers, they are professional YouTubers. And they made over $8 million dollars in a weekend.

Believe it or not, the top grossing YouTube personalities are making about a million dollars a month. Yes you heard that right — a  month. From comedians to gamers to pranksters, it’s a whole new world out there.

This new media landscape is probably why a few people I spoke to this weekend did not know that Senator John McCain had died. They just don’t consume media in a traditional way anymore. The idea of picking up a newspaper and reading the A-Section has never occurred to them. But being a subscriber to a hundred or so YouTube channels has.

To put this in perspective, let’s look at some of the top rated-television shows on network TV. “The Big Bang Theory” pulls in around 14 million viewers. “This Is Us” has an audience of a little over 10 million, and “The Voice” is currently at 9.9 million sets of eyeballs.

Now, over to some YouTubers you’ve probably never heard of. Video game streamer Felix Kjellberg, also known as PewDiePie has a subscription base of over 58 million viewers. Dude Perfect, the college buddies that do sports trick shots have over 34 million. Now that doesn’t mean that each subscriber will watch every video, but it’s not uncommon for their more popular uploads to get over 100 million views online.

They can run ads at the beginning, middle, and end of the video and make a significant amount of cash. Add to that a new subculture of
YouTube conventions and live events, and there’s a whole new online universe of content providers that are not beholden to any corporation — except maybe Google and YouTube.

This ecosystem is just like any other. It’s a steep pyramid where only the top echelon makes the lion’s share of the money, but that means for every Dude Perfect making millions, there are a bunch of people making six figures or even $50,000 a year streaming online.

If you haven’t checked it out yet, find a 12 year old, and have them explain it to you. You’ll be surprised.

You can hear “What are we talking about here?” everyday at 4:45 p.m. on 97.3 FM.

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