Nick Gillespie: The Web’s Biggest Stars

Johnny CarsonBack in his
day, Tonight Show host Johnny Carson bestrode the small
screen likea
late-night colossus
, pulling in audiences that were massive and
persistent for 30-plus years at NBC.

But the future (or even the present) belongs not to broadcast
networks or even cable—it belongs to the Internet and a host of
personalities and creators that you’ve probably never heard of
unless you have teenagers or gamers in the house.

Founded in 2005,YouTube reaches
a billion unique visitors a month all over the planet. “100 hours
of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute,” claims the
service’s stats page, and “over 6 billion hours of video are
watched each month on YouTube—that’s almost an hour for every
person on Earth.”

In 1981, the music-video network MTV famously launched by airing
a short video for the two-year-old
Buggles
 song “Video Killed the Radio Star.” These days,
online video is slowly killing old-style TV stars and replacing
them with people who gained their fame in the new medium of online
video. Here are some of the biggest and most interesting phenoms of
that burgeoning world.

View this article.

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