Posted 27 July 2024 - 11:43 AM
A Jay Leno’s Garage video popped up on my algorithm, so I gave it a watch. It was just ok, actually kinda boring, so it got me thinking about how much influence and reach someone traditionally famous has compared to other YouTubers.
Jay Leno’s Garage - 3.68M subscribers, 1100 videos, and his most viewed video (Batmobile) has 19M views. An average video has around 200k-500k views.
Compared to another random Car-niche YouTuber, Scotty Kilmer, an old mechanic who yells a lot, he has 2x as many subscribers, 5x as many videos, and his most viewed video has 22M views (5 things to never do in an automatic).
Sure they’re slightly different niches within the automobile category, but they’d have a lot of target overlap.
It was surprising to see how much mainstream media celebrity influence has dropped off, and how YouTube has made celebrity and influence truly democratic. It took Jay Leno a long while time and lots of luck to make it where he is. It took this Scotty guy a lot of hard work, some marketing and video production skills, and a platform. Pretty unreal.