Intelligent Social Media Marketing 1 | Page 53

massive spectator sport, now known as E-Sports, with a fan base approaching 100 million people.( Amazon recently bought the E-Sports network Twitch for $ 970 million.)
In E-Sports, broadcasters provide play-by-play narration of video games. PewDiePie and his comrades riffed on this commentary, turning it into a potty-mouthed new form of sophomoric comedy. Other gamers who film themselves, such as VanossGaming( YouTube rank # 19, 15.6 million subscribers), elrubiusOMG(# 20, 15.6 million), CaptainSparklez(# 60, 9 million), and Ali-A(# 94, 7.4 million), are also influential members of this tribe. The crowdculture was initially organized by specialized media platforms that disseminated this content and by insider fans who gathered around and critiqued it, hyping some efforts and dissing others. PewDiePie became the star of this digital art world— just as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Patti Smith had done in urban art worlds back in the analog days. The main difference is that the power of crowdculture propelled him to global fame and influence in record time.
Gaming comedy is just one of hundreds of new genres that crowdculture has created. Those genres fill every imaginable entertainment gap in popular culture, from girls’ fashion advice to gross-out indulgent foods to fanboy sports criticism. Brands can’ t compete, despite their investments. Compare PewDiePie, who cranks out inexpensive videos in his house, to McDonald’ s, one of the world’ s biggest spenders on social media. The McDonald’ s channel(# 9,414) has 204,000 YouTube subscribers. PewDiePie is 200 times as popular, for a minuscule fraction of the cost.
Or consider Red Bull, the most lauded branded-content success story. It has become a new-media hub producing extreme- and alternative-sports content. While Red Bull spends
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