The Untold Truth Of Jacksepticeye
Jacksepticeye — known to friends, family, and now you as Sean McLouglin — is a popular YouTube creator who hails from Ireland. He's well known for video-game-focused content, in which he plays a title while cracking jokes.
And lately, he's been pretty, pretty huge.
As of August 2018, he's a Disney partner, making content for the company on Twitch. He's a confirmed act for a comedy festival called "HowTheLightGetsIn.". And he's been lucky enough to play the Deadpool video game with the guy who plays Deadpool in the movies, Ryan Reynolds. That's pretty awesome.
Those are some of the more well-known facts about Jacksepticeye. But there are a bunch of things most people don't know about this famous YouTube star. Those are the facts we're going to hit on today.
Get your notebooks, grab your pencils, and get ready to learn. This is the untold truth of Jacksepticeye.
In 2014, his YouTube channel took a *massive* leap
Success on YouTube rarely happens overnight. Some put out great content and don't noticed for years, if at all. And some simply don't get the reception they were hoping for and eventually trail off.
Jacksepticeye, though? He's a pretty special case. Because he certainly didn't enjoy overnight success in the literal sense, but he experienced quite the jump over the course of a year.
Jacksepticeye started uploading videos to his YouTube channel back in 2012. By September 2013, he'd gathered around 2,500 subscribers. But after entering a competition run by YouTube star PewDiePie, Jacksepticeye's channel experienced explosive growth. By the time October 2014 rolled around, he had far more eyes on his content, and his subscriber count had leapt to 1.5 million. And just like that, he was the owner of the most-subscribed-to channel in Ireland.
"I always say that PewDiePie was turning on the engine and I was the one who hit the accelerator," Jacksepticeye told Irish news site The Journal.
He's dating a digital artist who goes by Wiishu
Wondering if Jacksepticeye is single? Sorry to burst your bubble, but he's not. Jacksepticeye is currently dating and living with a Danish digital artist who, like her boyfriend, seems to have some skill when it comes to building an audience online.
She goes by Wiishu — but much like Jacksepticeye, that's just a stage name, of sorts. Her real name is Signe Hansen.
Now, you won't find a whole lot online about Signe under her real name. But she does quite a bit as Wiishu. She runs a YouTube channel with over 450,000 subscribers. She also posts on Twitter, where she has 258,000 followers. And she publishes content to a website as well as a Tumblr.
Amusingly, the FAQ on her Tumblr blog answers several questions about Jacksepticeye, including whether or not she's still dating him (she is) and if she'll relay hello's or show Jacksepticeye anything sent to her (she won't).
He's been on American and European live tours
Big YouTube stars have wisely learned that they can't just be one-trick ponies. There are other earning opportunities out there besides the internet — so why not tap into them? After all, pop stars don't just release albums. They tour. And now YouTubers are, too.
Jacksepticeye, for example, has gone on two tours to expand his reach and, subsequently, pull in more dough. One in Europe, and one in the United States. The first tour, called Ready Player 3, saw Jacksepticeye team up with two other YouTube creators: Arin Hanson and Dan Avidan, who run the "Game Grumps" channel. That tour hit several cities in Europe, including Amsterdam, London, and Dublin.
The second tour? That's the American one, which is called "How Did We Get Here?" And it's a lot more intense. From August 23, 2018 through September 3, 2018 alone, Jacksepticeye's tour will hit Los Angeles, Phoenix, Albuquerque, Denver, Salt Lake City, Boise, Portland, and Seattle — followed immediately by a second swing through Europe.
That's a pretty packed schedule.
He's featured on a single by the Gregory Brothers
The Gregory Brothers may not be a household name, but there's a very good chance you've heard some of their work. In the early 2010s, they created a bunch of viral YouTube content, including "Autotune the News," and perhaps more famously, the "Bed Intruder" song. You know, the one that made "hide your kids, hide your wife" a thing.
Things have been a bit more quiet the past couple of years, but they've still been at it, sourcing online content to create comedic YouTube videos and music tracks. And one such project in 2016 starred Jacksepticeye.
The song, which credits both Jacksepticeye and the Gregory Brothers, is called "All the Way (I believe in Steve)." It takes pieces of Jacksepticeye playing various games and splices them together with a musical track, autotuning the famous YouTuber's voice to provide a melody. You can find a video for the song on YouTube, but if you're someone who wants to appreciate the music alone, fear not: there's also a single you can purchase on iTunes.
He voiced characters in two video games
If you play video games, you've probably taken to a character or two you've played as. You may have even thought, at one point, that it would be cool to voice a character in a game. But that's a pretty tough gig to lock down unless you're a professional voice actor.
Or if you're a YouTuber with a huge audience.
Jacksepticeye has had the pleasure of voicing characters in two different video games. The first game was Bendy and the Ink Machine, a multi-chapter, multi-platform survival horror game that first released in April 2017. In that title, Jacksepticeye voiced Shawn Flynn, a toy maker of Irish descent.
The second game he voiced a character in was called Pinstripe, which also released in April 2017. That title was a puzzle and adventure game that originally launched as a Kickstarter project, and in it, Jacksepticeye played two characters: someone aptly named Jack, and a more anonymous character billed as "Drunk Man 2."
No word on whether or not Jacksepticeye will voice more video game characters in the future.
He was a playable character in The Escapists 2
Here's a fact that might not be apparent to the non-famous, but those on YouTube are well aware of: having millions of followers or subscribers can certainly mean you have a lot of fans, but that doesn't mean there aren't large swaths of people who don't like you. And those people tend to make it known at times.
Nowhere is that more clear than in the story of The Escapists 2, a game that chose to include several popular YouTubers as playable characters. One of those characters was Jacksepticeye.
The move seemed to be a pretty small deal at first. On July 28, 2017, news broke that Jacksepticeye, DanTDM, and InTheLittleWood would all appear as characters in The Escapists 2, a sort of prison escape crafting game. And not much was said about it. But the release of the game itself came with a huge backlash against the addition of the YouTube stars. Players flooded the game's Steam page with comments like, "Please give me an option to disable cancerous YouTube screamlords from my prisoners." And, eventually, the team behind the game had to add a feature so the characters could be disabled.
You can still use Jacksepticeye if you want. But those who feel wronged by his inclusion can now take him out of the game.
He could have been a hotel manager
Not every big YouTuber or Twitch star grew up with online stars in their eyes. And even if they dabbled in making videos, they were at least realistic about their prospects, going to college or holding jobs down in the meantime. Ninja, the huge Twitch streamer famous for his Fortnite play, worked at Noodles & Co. before he broke out. And famous YouTube creator VanossGaming felt it was important to stay in college until he was sure YouTube could be a career.
Jacksepticeye didn't intend to be a YouTube sensation at first.
He started off attending college for Music Technology and Production. Unfortunately, things weren't going the way he'd hoped, and he dropped out and moved back home. From there, he started dating a girl in Korea, and began studying hotel management at a new school. His plan was to "get a degree in anything" so he could go live with her and become an English teacher.
Needless to say, things changed yet again. His YouTube channel took off, things fell apart with that girl, and along the way, he met a new one. Which brings us to the Jacksepticeye you know today.
His income was estimated to be as high as $9.1 million in 2015
As you can imagine, having an enormous online presence can make you a whole lot of money — and not just through the earnings you make on your main platform. Sure, YouTube stars rake in revenue from ads on their channels, but there are other opportunities, too. They can go on tour, like Jacksepticeye has done. They can take money from sponsors and give them a shout in videos. And they can write books, sell music, and more.
Jacksepticeye currently has almost 20 million YouTube subscribers. So you can bet he's making bank.
But how much, exactly? That's an unknown at this point. We don't have any recent news on his income, but there was a report compiled by the Huffington Post in 2015 that ran down the estimated earnings of many YouTube stars. On that list, Jacksepticeye's ballpark earnings were somewhere between $586,000 and $9.1 million. So, a lot.
And that was a few years ago. He's probably making a lot more now than he was then.
He raised over $200,000 for suicide prevention in a charity stream
He may be making millions of dollars. But, fortunately, that hasn't put Jacksepticeye out of touch. He's still one of the more down-to-earth creators on YouTube, and in no place is that more apparent than in the way he reacted to the poor actions of another YouTuber.
Logan Paul is a YouTube star known for his controversial content. But he took his behavior to a whole new level during a visit to Japan in early 2018, where he was disrespectful in pretty much every way imaginable, and caused an uproar by filming a dead body inside the country's Aokigahara forest — better known as the "suicide forest."
Jacksepticeye wasted no time responding. He organized a charity stream to benefit the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. And when all was said and done, he and his community had raised over $200,000 for the organization. A worthy act that brought some good back to the conversation surrounding such a sensitive and sad topic.