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With this influx of viewership and activity, advertisers are willing to pay popular YouTube stars to endorse and feature their products in their videos. Forbes now puts out an annual list of the Top Earning YouTube Stars, most of whom earn money not only from advertising, but also from book deals, preview launches, and product lines—all stemming from their online video popularity. At the top of the list is PewDiePie, a 26-year-old Swedish comedian-slash-video game reviewer with a whopping 40 million subscribers who pulled in $12 million last year.Viewers are the new studio bosses, and Google analytics dictate stardom. Justin Bieber, for better or worse, was discovered via his YouTube videos. So was comedian Bo Burnham, who went from making YouTube videos in his room to doing international tours and starring in his own Comedy Central special. And with the sudden fame and money comes managers, agents, and overprotective publicists, who try to mold YouTubers—many of whom are young, inexperienced, and unprepared—into something beyond the video-sharing site that made them famous.StreamCon is where some of the top YouTube stars converge and meet their fans. It's modeled similarly to VidCon, an Anaheim-based convention for YouTube celebrities, which almost 20,000 people attended this year. At StreamCon, which launched this year (attendance numbers have not been released), tween girls shriek when they spot a girl who films cupcake videos in her basement; when another viral star walks by, they collectively screech and quickly pull out their cameras in unison.
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The YouTube stardom approach is kind like throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. Who the fuck knows what makes a video suddenly go viral and hit 2 million views? Neither Graceffa, nor anyone else I spoke to at StreamCon, had a clear answer about how or why they became famous. And yet, everyone in the audience was there to learn how they could do it too."How many of you guys want to be creators or already are?" the moderator asked. All of the hands went up.