Who Is RayWJ? YouTube's Top Star

It doesn't take the media to make a media star any more.

The new economics of entertainment have enabled a foul-mouthed performer working on his own to carve out a very lucrative business. He doesn't have the backing of a traditional media conglomerate. He's a lone comic with a YouTube channel. Ray William Johnson curses constantly, often gives his audience the finger and sometimes dresses up as a penguin, but he is attracting more than five million regular viewers to his twice weekly video commentaries, making him the biggest draw at Google's online-video outlet. Known as RayWJ, the 30-year-old has morphed into an idol of the teen set at home and abroad by ranting about others' viral YouTube videos on subjects ranging from a hippopotamus defecating to people who staple the heads of co-workers. These days, YouTube's audience easily dwarfs the viewership for traditional TV networks, drawing more than 780 million unique visitors a month globally, according to comScore's most recent data. That audience is fragmented among 30,000 channels and millions of videos, but a handful of personalities like Johnson are drawing significant audiences, according to traditional media benchmarks.