, who was born in Texas in the United States, started unboxing toys on YouTube when he was just three.Five years on, Ryan is earning millions.
There is little publicly available information about the YouTube industry in Singapore, except that the hours of content uploaded from YouTube channels here increased by over 50 per cent between 2018 and last year. Having built a brand on YouTube, many of them have established presence on other social media platforms as well.
Clients are turning to them, instead of traditional production houses as the YouTubers offer quick turnarounds and “guaranteed” views. With 581,000 Instagram followers in September 2019, he charged S$4,400 per photo post and S$10,000 per video post, up from S$1,800 and S$4,500 respectively in June 2018.
At that time, the world’s most-subscribed YouTuber, PewDiePie, had fewer than 60,000 subscribers and Ryan, the top earning YouTube star globally, was not even born yet. The university dropout - who was reading economics and sociology at the University of London - and her husband, a former restaurateur, started taking a more active approach towards growing NOC’s business from around 2015.
She pointed out that there is “no shortage of money” in the industry, given that many multinational corporations have their headquarters in Singapore.When Wah!Banana started out in 2012, 90 per cent of its audience were from Singapore. The proportion has dropped to less than 40 per cent today, as they gain audiences in Malaysia, Indonesia, Australia, India and the Philippines.
A popular episode saw DJ and social media personality Jade Rasif, 25, letting her co-hosts try her breast milk. “When we first started, there were a lot of cowboy players who were charging stupid amounts of money that was very, very hard to justify. There was no sense of normalisation,” said Mr Chua, who was previously from social media agency Gushcloud.
In the middle of last year, content creator Sneaky Sushii sought to enter the industry with a splash, by putting up a video roasting some of Singapore’s most prominent YouTubers. Ms Chan pointed out that the top shows produced by NOC were “not the trashy talk shows” but “legit talk shows” - such as her recent interview with a tech entrepreneur on how he built his business.
However, junior college student Jamie Lynn, 17, who has stopped watching Singapore YouTubers even though she used to as a child, said she is “disgusted and disturbed” by the use of sexualised images to draw viewers. In his early days, he had thought that he should be part of the group and he did hang out with the “cool kids”.
In 2017, YouTuber-turned-actor Noah Yap spoke out against this clique, after they posted a “Smash or Pass” video, in which they go through a list of other well-known influencers and declare if they would consider him or her attractive enough to sleep with. “It is true that in this day and age, you’re gonna need to be careful and, in some sense, be politically correct and responsible, even when it comes to comedy. But that is not me,” he said.
“If a client is particularly rich, I’ll say: ‘You know what, bro? How about a video on Jianhao’s too?’ And the same thing he does for me and Dee Kosh,” she said.On whether such a culture could be a detriment to smaller players hoping to break into the scene, Mr Marc Lefkowitz, head of creator and artist development for YouTube’s Asia-Pacific operations, reiterated that “everyone has an opportunity to be successful on YouTube on their own”.
“I find the YouTube scene in Singapore a bit one-dimensional… I might as well do what I like,” she said. So rather than focusing on producing branded content, it started exploring alternative sources of revenue by going into producing original content - at a time when big names such as Netflix and HBO were growing such offerings.