A Halo pro from the Chicago suburbs picked up a new battle-royale game in late 2017, then played it on stream with Drake — breaking a Twitch viewership record and becoming the platform's first 3-million-follower streamer within months.
A former student hospital chaplain whose debut novel won an award in 2006 went on to sell 50 million books worldwide — and to spend nearly two decades mailing video letters to his brother that became one of YouTube's longest-running channels.
A Lady Gaga eye-makeup tutorial that BuzzFeed picked up in 2009 turned a Florida art-school dropout into Lancome's first Vietnamese-American spokesperson, and then the co-founder of a $500 million beauty company.
A military kid who moved every few years landed a Katy Perry music video, then a Marvel film role, then turned her younger sister's death into a memoir that made mental health the throughline of her career.
A rough, self-shot Pilates video posted in 2009 so her students wouldn't lose touch became YouTube's top fitness channel, then a patented activewear line worn by Taylor Swift and Lizzo.
A homeschooled kid who saved up for a Mac at fourteen to teach himself Final Cut Pro now holds a Guinness World Record for the most-viewed video in TikTok history — over 2.2 billion views for a six-second-style illusion.
An overweight kid from a Minnesota YMCA swim team who dropped out of college in 2014 to chase YouTube in Los Angeles — sixteen years and three published books later, he's still posting.
A biomedical engineering dropout whose horror-game Let's Plays built one of YouTube's largest channels, then turned charity livestreams honoring his late father into millions raised for cancer research.
A 13-year-old's first haul video, filmed to cope with being bullied, helped invent a YouTube genre — and led to her own Aeropostale clothing line and a seat across from President Obama.
A Duke valedictorian who spent two unemployed years auditioning for acting jobs in New York before a single video essay about Chrono Trigger grew into a five-channel, 40-million-subscriber media company.
Told by an America's Got Talent judge she wasn't good enough for a solo Vegas show, Lindsey Stirling uploaded a self-produced violin video the next year that became one of 2012's most-watched on YouTube — and built a Billboard-charting career out of it.
A bartender-turned-UCB sketch writer who built a decade-plus YouTube show around an original cocktail and a comic monologue every week — then co-owned an actual Los Angeles bar.
