Just for laughs, Dylan Hart and a college friend posted a video on YouTube in 2007 about charging an iPod using an onion and a bottle of Gatorade.
More than 9 million views later, that video marks the start of YouTube becoming Hart's meal ticket, the home of his popular "Household Hacker" videos that are often a cross between "Mr. Wizard" and "Jackass: The Movie." It's a winning formula: Household Hacker has more than 1.1 million subscribers to its channel on YouTube.
It's also a winning formula for YouTube. Household Hacker is one of more than 20,000 YouTube "partners" -- the number doubled over the past year -- whose videos attract an audience large enough to generate significant advertising dollars. Although Household Hacker may sound like a more polished version of the amateur videos that made YouTube a cultural phenomenon, it and other YouTube stalwarts are also a key piece of Google's plans to transform the video platform it bought for $1.65 billion in 2006 from a money pit into a cash cow, making it into more of an entertainment destination like a TV network.
"We're very excited in terms of the growth and the talent that's emerging," said Tom Pickett, director of content operations at YouTube. "In the U.S., in the last year or two, we started hitting thresholds where people started making serious money, and that has caused a lot more attention to be paid to a lot of our top partners."
Fans of Household Hacker connect each week to see everything from magnets made from neodymium -- a rare earth element -- that defy gravity, to game reviews by Hart's co-founder, to hidden-camera pranks like the shampoo-bottle ketchup bomb, powered by the chemical reaction between vinegar and baking soda, Hart planted in his unsuspecting brother's shower stall.
"We have a very high level production-wise, but we're not trying to be the Discovery Channel," said Hart, 28, a Californian who took the plunge into becoming a full-time YouTube producer after he got laid off from a job as a graphic designer for a large Silicon Valley company in 2009.
Household Hacker is among hundreds of YouTube partners that receive more than $100,000 a year in ad revenue from YouTube, with the most popular personalities now cashing checks of more than $1 million a year, according to YouTube.
Fans can subscribe to their favorite YouTube channels, where they can exchange comments and watch the latest video. Channels like 2 million-subscriber Mystery Guitar Man, a musical performance artist whose identity is hidden by wraparound sunglasses, and fast-growing Canadian newcomer Epic Meal Time, which turns huge quantities of red meat into a comedy prop for 1.4 million subscribers, now feature ads for everything from Miracle Whip to iTunes to Nordstrom. Mystery Guitar Man, whose offscreen identity is Joe Penna, has even done commercials for Coke and McDonald's.
