What do Yahtzee, a girl teaching you how to put on Lady Gaga’s makeup, and a dad in Seattle have in common?
If you’re a regular visitor to The Escapist, you may have noticed that the site tends to be a bit sluggish every week at noon EST, and it doesn’t take Albert Einstein to figure out why. It always feels like half of the internet shows up week after week to watch Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw tear into the latest and hottest games with his trademark caustic wit in Zero Punctuation, but is it true?
The number-crunchers at Advertising Age assembled a list of the hottest stars on YouTube – the ones whose messages in bottles have actually been noticed – and we thought it’d be interesting to see how our very own Yahtzee measured up.
As it turns out, he’s right up there with the best of them. Since Zero Punctuation first kicked off with “Heavenly Sword and Other Stuff” three years ago, internet viewers have tuned in over 218 million times to watch the sharp-tongued Brit with the sweet hat shred their favorite (and not-so-favorite) games. Only a handful of YouTube’s most popular come close to that number – let alone surpass it.
The numbers are impressive on their own, but it’s even more interesting when you think about the audiences. Sure, Zero Punctuation is hilarious, but it’s also aimed squarely at core gamers, an audience that many would still call “niche.” The YouTube series, on the other hand, have a much broader “mainstream” appeal. What does this mean? Perhaps gamers are simply more devoted to things than the Average Joe, or perhaps gaming is simply more mainstream than most of us might believe.
Either way, beyond everything else, these numbers just go to prove how much people love Zero Punctuation. (Hint: They love it one hell of a lot).
