Meet Comic RayWJ - YouTube Star

(The Wall Street Journal) - It doesn't take the media to make a media star any more.

The new economics of entertainment have enabled a foul-mouthed performer working on his own to carve out a very lucrative business. He doesn't have the backing of a traditional media conglomerate. He's a lone comic with a YouTube channel.

Ray William Johnson curses constantly, often gives his audience the finger and sometimes dresses up as a penguin, but he is attracting more than five million regular viewers to his twice weekly video commentaries, making him the biggest draw at Google Inc.'s online video outlet.

Known as RayWJ, the 30-year-old has morphed into an idol of the teen set at home and abroad by ranting about others' viral YouTube videos on subjects ranging from a hippopotamus defecating to people who staple the heads of co-workers.

These days, YouTube's audience easily dwarfs the viewership for traditional TV networks, drawing more than 780 million unique visitors a month globally, according to comScore's most recent data. That audience is fragmented among 30,000 channels and millions of videos, but a handful of personalities like Johnson are drawing significant audiences, according to traditional media benchmarks.

Johnson, who spikes his dark-brown hair two inches high, is the poster child for how some performers can harness the viral power of the web to build a career, bypassing traditional media. The Oklahoma native earns an estimated annual income of around $1 million, say two people familiar with the situation, partly by participating in YouTube's Partner Program, which gives him a cut of the ad revenue generated by his video commentaries.

In addition, he sells merchandise like Ray William Johnson bobbleheads and mobile applications for the iPhone. His "Pimp Hand Strong" app, for example, sells for 99 cents on iTunes, where it's described as "your chance to finally slap Ray."

"I produce a few shows. I'm also sexually attracted to women who look like Abraham Lincoln," Johnson's @RayWJ Twitter bio informs his more than 800,000 followers. Recently, one of his 2:26am Facebook posts notched more than 42,000 likes. "LOL," it read. "TRY THIS IT ACTUALLY WORKS! :) 1. Hold your breath for 20 minutes. 2. Die."

Thirteen-year-old Bliss D'Andrea of Adelaide, Australia, says she has never missed Johnson's YouTube show. She especially enjoys it, she says, when Johnson says "Geezus!" or "Zing!" during his raunchy riffs. "He may be inappropriate at times, but that's what makes it funny," she says.

Johnson has been reluctant to confirm or deny information about himself. Some media outlets have described him as 23 years old. But he admitted that he is 30 after The Wall Street Journal confirmed he graduated from Norman North High School in Oklahoma in 1999. He later attended Columbia University's School of General Studies, where he was a history major, but didn't graduate, Columbia says.

Johnson, now based in Los Angeles, declined multiple requests for an interview, but he did respond to some emailed questions. Asked about his career, he wrote, "Maybe someday, if I work hard enough, entertainment will be a career for me, but right now making videos and uploading them to the internet is just a hobby."

He also disputed the idea that he is making a lot of money. "I run advertisements and sell T-shirts to cover overhead costs and pay the few people who help me out behind the scenes," he says. "Anything left over is spent on production costs, animation costs, etc."

People associated with YouTube, who have signed nondisclosure agreements, are tight-lipped about how much top performers there are paid. But people familiar with the matter say that for every two million views, performers who have partnered with YouTube receive $3,000 to $9,000, depending in part on the country and the platform where the video is viewed. To put that in perspective, Johnson has more than 1.5 billion total views.

Read more: The Wall Street Journal