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.”
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RedLynx, a Finnish video game developer that was purchased by Ubisoft last year, has denied this week that it leaked its own game to torrent sites.
Their latest game, Trials Evolution, recently made its public debut via The Pirate Bay, and immediate blame was thrown back on the developers, who have been known to be pirates.
In 2009, CEO Tero Virtala admitted that the company put the first “Trials” game online, “taking advantage” of piracy: “What we did actually, on day one, we put [the PC edition of Trials] immediately on all the torrent networks ourselves.”
Virtala was quick to deny this leak, however: “We want to be clear that [leaking Trials Evolution] is not something we did ourselves.”
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Last year stories started circulating about a Microsoft plan to integrate pay TV into Xbox Live. Reports claimed they were close to finalizing deals with companies including Time Warner, the BBC, and HBO.
However, it now appears they weren’t as close as originally reported and their plans have been put on hold indefinitely. It seems TV executives weren’t impressed enough to offer terms acceptable to Microsoft, and the deal fizzled.
Citing an unnamed media executive personally involved in the negotiations, Reuters says Microsoft got so far as demonstrating their TV platform in action, but ultimately decided the price of programming was too high. Their source reportedly said, “They built Microsoft TV, they demoed it for us, they asked for rate cards but then said ‘ooh ah, that’s expensive.”
Combining this new information with previous reports about Microsoft TV, it appears their plan was to provide both Netflix-style video on demand, but with more current content, and a traditional (but web-based) pay TV service. In addition, they seemed to be considering producing exclusive content of their own.
Of course this is nothing new or shocking. Like so many other industries built around legacy technology, they have fought nearly every attempt to develop new business models.
Network executives have licensed TV series to Netflix with key episodes missing, demanded Hulu block viewers who chose to watch their free shows (and commercials) on TVs instead of computer monitors. On the other side of the equation, cable providers are punished if they help paying customers extend TV service beyond the living room.
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