The ongoing docuseries created by Shane Dawson focused on Jake Paul is smashing viewing records – and not just on YouTube, but in the mainstream too.
Shane Dawson is a YouTuber with over 17 million subscribers, and recently has done a number of documentary style videos focused on other creators.
His eight part series about Jake Paul is Dawson’s biggest undertaking yet, with each episode lasting over 40 minutes, and focusing on different facets of Jake Paul’s life and personality.
The professional editing style and length of each episode has drawn comparisons to professional TV documentaries – but the numbers show that Dawson’s videos are actually outperforming the biggest mainstream equivalents.
YouTuber, comedian and rapper Elijah Daniel, compared the numbers of Dawson’s Jake Paul series to that of Netflix’s ‘Making a Murderer.’
According to Daniel, Dawson is getting the same number of views per episode as the entire Making a Murderer series, and in less time too.
Making a Murderer, one of the biggest, most talked about docuseries to come out in the past few years, got 19m viewers in 35 days across all episodes. @ShaneDawson is getting almost that per EPISODE in less than a week w a homemade series & if that isn’t inspiring idk what is
— lil phag (@elijahdaniel) October 1, 2018
Daniel also compared it to the immensely popular ‘Stranger Things’ series, which had a budget of $8 million, and yet couldn’t accrue anywhere near the viewership figures of Dawson’s series.
To compare, the episode ‘The Family of Jake Paul’, has over 12 million views in only two days, a figure which Stranger Things almost never managed for an episode after a whole week.
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But like, actually lmao. Stranger Things s2, w an $8m budget per episode got around 350k views/episode first day. He’s getting better ratings than the biggest mainstream shows out rn. Even their first week numbers pale in comparison to his homemade series ratings. It’s nuts pic.twitter.com/q9SmdS0J2Y
— lil phag (@elijahdaniel) October 1, 2018
It is not an entirely fair comparison however, as the shows Daniels mentions require service subscriptions to Netflix, which are costly, whereas watching Dawson’s YouTube series requires nothing more than an internet connection.
Regardless, the level of interest and general fanfare around Dawson’s series, proves that YouTube and other user created online is no longer playing catch up to huge budget productions of TV and Film.
Another YouTuber, Daniel ‘KEEMSTAR’ Keem, also boasts about the viewing figures that his $20,000 budget Fortnite tournament would achieve, beating out a major production like AMC’s The Walking Dead.
I ran a Fortnite tournament earlier this year that was getting more viewers n a Friday night (live viewers) than the Walking Dead. Forbes wrote a article on it. My budget was $20k a week lol
— KEEM (@KEEMSTAR) October 1, 2018
The latest episode of Shane Dawson’s series, ‘The Enemies of Jake Paul’, has accrued over 9 million views in less than 24 hours.
With three episodes still remaining, the total view count will easily hit over 100 million. At the time of writing, the series has over 72 million total views, after only five episodes.