Meet the Top Earning Stars — YouTube Millionaires

The Forbes list is composed of ten publishers running YouTube channels that range from entertainment to do-it-yourself content. Comedic acts Smosh and the Fine Brothers, for instance, got $8.5 million each for their antics. It was topped by Swedish video game commentator Felix Kjellberg, aka PewDiePie, who makes around $12 million a year thanks to his almost 40 million-strong “bro army” of followers. It says it measured earnings before management fees and taxes and came up with the figures based on data from online sources such as Nielsen, IMDb and interviews with managers, lawyers, industry insiders and the stars themselves.

With this in mind, the new Forbes rich list of YouTube stars shows the amount of money the top stars are actually generating, but there is no denying that PewDiePie is the most successful of them all.

The musician is also a fan of the YouTube world in general. According to a recent Forbes analysis, other stars – including makeover maven Michelle Phan and dancing violinist Lindsey Stirling – are pulling in millions as well. In a three-way tie for eighth was comedian Lilly Singh, otherwise known as Superwoman, who earned an estimated $2.5 million. “It wasn’t a few big radio station or record label that shoved art down someone’s throat and said, ‘This is what’s cool'”. This means there are bound to be a few discrepancies (previous calculations of Kjellberg’s earnings, for example, have pegged the figure at $7.4 million a year).