According to the Wall Street Journal, Ray William Johnson may be the first YouTube millionaire that isn’t already a famous musician.
Under the name RayWJ, the 30-year-old now has 1.5 billion views of his videos on YouTube, and is expected to be bringing in about $1 million per year from YouTube’s ad revenue share and from sales of his merchandise.
Johnson is famous for ranting about other videos (somewhat like the shows “The Soup” or “Tosh.0″) and for bringing in famous comedians to guest star in videos. The viral star’s twice-weekly show averages around 10 million views per week.
Because of his popularity, RayWJ is a YouTube partner that makes somewhere between $3000 and $9000 per every 2 million views.
For now, Johnson still calls his videos a “hobby.”
Result for: popularity
Sony looks like it is about ready to shut down its failed “Dash” experiment.
The “personal Internet viewer” alarm clocks saw some popularity when they were released but horrible reviews nailed the coffin.
Reads Sony’s site: “Beginning February 29, 2012, the Sony dash developer website (http://dash.sonydeveloper.com) will close and no longer support development of new applications. This closure includes the dash developer forum and dash developer support email address (dash-support@sonydeveloper.com) which will close on March 31, 2012. Sony dash applications will remain available. Thank you for your contributions and we encourage you to continue your development activity on Sony’s other platforms available at SonyDeveloper.com.”
The original Dash machine has a 7-inch touchscreen, 800×480 resolution, a 500Mhz processor and 256MB DDR2 RAM.
What makes the alarm clocks popular is access to 1500 apps for weather, traffic, social networking, movies, music and games.
Result for: popularity
According to analysis from Ancestry.com founder Paul Allen, Google’s Google+ social network will hit 20 million users by this weekend.
Allen says the 10 million mark was hit Tuesday afternoon, and the overall user base has increased 350 percent in the last 6 days.
Using “surname-based analysis,” Allen used U.S. Census Bureau data about last name popularity and compared it to Google Plus users with the same last name. The researcher used similar tactics for the international markets.
RWW explains that “Allen used a sample of 100 to 200 surnames to estimate the total percentage of the U.S. population who has signed up for Google Plus. He then used that number and a calculated ratio of U.S. to non-U.S. users (one U.S. user for every 2.12 non-U.S. users) to generate his worldwide estimates.”
On July 4th, the model had user count at 1.7 million, and by July 9th that had jumped to 4.5 million.
Google+ is available to all Gmail users, and on Android. An iOS app is awaiting Apple approval.
