One of the best tools people can use to make a living is YouTube. There are a plethora of YouTube Channels that have been able to do this, however, one in particular stands out. Mark Fischbach, called Markiplier on YouTube, has one of the fastest growing YouTube Channels, and has over 15.5 million subscribers. He is known for many of his gaming videos, where he plays many different kinds of games and records his reactions to them, the majority of which being of the horror genre. He has been able to make a healthy living off of YouTube advertisement revenue, allowing him to increase the quality of his videos. Recently, he has been involved in many small voice acting projects, and continues to create videos for his fans.
Author Archive for Aresman MacLaren
Elon Musk is a Canadian-American entrepreneur who is the CEO and CTO of SpaceX, the private space company tasked commercializing space and getting a colony on Mars, the CEO of Tesla Motors, and co-chairman of SolarCity. Elon was born in South Africa and lived there until the age of 19, when he went to Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. After two years, he transferred to University of Pennsylvania where he received his Bachelors of Science in Physics and Economics. Eventually he went on to pursue entrepreneurial ideas for space and renewable energy, becoming an American citizen in 2002 to help achieve these. Currently, Elon Musk has a net-worth of about $11.5 Billion, and is still aiming high towards space. SpaceX has become known for successfully launching the world’s first reusable orbital rocket in history, known as Falcon 9.
Christopher Wratten isn’t a well known entrepreneur, but rather a rising one. He is the owner of a small company known as Ballahack Airsoft. Ballahack is an airsoft field located in in Chesapeake, Virginia, and spans over 100 acres of playing area consisting of forested areas, swamps, a small village, bunkers, barriers, and makeshift structures. It is the largest airsoft field on the East Coast, and has grown to be one of the best nationally known fields in the United States.
Christopher started Ballahack with his father. It was a small family venture that was hosted on their own private property. Throughout the years, it steadily grew in size and recognition as more people from all over the country came to play airsoft there. It wasn’t until a few years ago that Christopher’s father officially passed the business over to his son. Christopher has always been an upstanding man, and has done his best to make sure every player has an enjoyable experience in a safe environment. Because of this, many of his constant customers exhibit his same qualities, doing their best to be polite in an environment that is usually highly competitive. 
Ballahack Airsoft averages around 150 people per game day, and has been known to average around 500-800 people per large-scale event. As an airsoft player who has gone to this field on several occasions, I can definitely say that Christopher Wratten and Ballahack Airsoft are on their way to become one of the best fields in the world.
In the video game world, a game has to be able to capture its player-base and offer them hours of enjoyment in order to be successful. Many people, not necessarily gamers, have heard of such behemoth titles like Call of Duty and Battlefield, as they are the cash-cows of the gaming industry. These games offer the typical excitement associated with video-games, and it isn’t unusual to see other companies try to recreate these tried and true methods. Warfare, racing, and sports are usually the most popular kinds of gaming genres, so it takes a special kind of creativity to try and become known in the gaming world. Eric Barone had that creativity.
Eric is a video-game developer that was making his very first attempt at making his own video-game. He created a game known as Stardew Valley; a simplistic farming/role-playing game that has the player leaving the complexities of corporate life to pursue the simplicity of farming. This formula is nothing new, as there’s been a few other games that explored this genre with some success. Mr. Barone’s Stardew Valley was met with incredible success, selling 550,000 copies of his game in about two weeks, earning him $8,250,000. With this single game, Eric Barone changed his life completely. He could have followed what was popular, but he instead decided to go with what he himself wanted to make, and because of that, he created a creative little masterpiece that no one saw coming. As of April of 2016, Stardew Valley has sold more than 1,000,000 copies, and doesn’t show signs of stopping anytime soon.
Whenever someone wants to search for something on the internet, they use something called a search engine. Nearly everything posted onto the internet needs one of these search engines in order to be used. One in particular has seen so much popularity, that its very name has become a verb. That search engine is called Google.
Google is an American technology company that specializes in internet related services. It was founded on September 4, 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. It has since grown to become an almost undisputed behemoth in not only the search engine industry, but also most of the internet in general. Nearly every aspect of the internet reaches back to Google. Although not every venture Google has undertaken has seen success, it still remains to be one of the most successful companies in the world.
Evan Spiegel, born on June 4, 1990, is the co-founder of Snapchat, and is among the wealthiest of young men in the United States. Snapchat was created in September of 2011, and is a mobile picture and video chat messaging application. Many users enjoy the app because it allows people to communicate and send pictures and videos to one another without filling up the storage of people’s devices, as the app deletes them automatically. The idea of Snapchat wasn’t anything new, but the execution was something that other companies had never explored before.
As stated before, Evan Spiegel has become one of the youngest billionaires in the United States, achieving a net worth of over two billion U.S. dollars. The reason Mr. Spiegel stood out to me is because of my belief that it only takes one good idea to become successful. The idea of Snapchat that Evan helped create wasn’t something incredibly ground-breaking, in fact, it was simply an augmentation of already existing messaging applications. It became successful because it found the issue of messaged pictures and videos taking up too much space, and fixed it with a simple to use application. This single idea not only changed the way people communicate with one another, but also allowed Mr. Spiegel to be able to comfortably retire on the massive success he helped create.