Billions of views is just the start – meet the Aussie content creators building global empires

Wendy Huang was working as an accountant until the make-up and beauty tutorials she started making for YouTube in 2013 opened up a spectacular new career.

The thousands of videos she has created since then for her channels on the platform, including life hacks, crafts and music videos, have attracted more than 13 million subscribers around the world and have been viewed 1.9 billion times.

“It was very interactive and fun,” Huang, 40, said of her early days building an online community from her bedroom in Sydney. “I had no idea you could make money. I had no idea it was a career path. I had absolutely no clue.”

Known online as Wengie, her nickname, the Chinese-Australian digital creator and musician has also released singles in English, Mandarin, Korean, Filipino and Hindi.

At her most prolific, Huang was creating 25 videos a week, earning a percentage of the revenue from the ads that YouTube ran. “I was making six figures a month at one point so it was pretty lucrative,” she said.

Now Huang is among 10 YouTube creators who are being honoured by the National Film and Sound Archive for their contribution to the country’s cultural heritage.

At an event at Parliament House in Canberra on Monday evening, the archive announced that 300 of these creators’ videos, oral histories and related material would be added to its audiovisual collection.

YouTube creators are increasingly jumping to mainstream cinema success, including Australia’s Danny and Michael Philippou (Talk To Me, Bring Her Back) and Michael Shanks (Together), Sweden’s David F. Sandberg (Shazam! Fury of the Gods) and Americans Bo Burnham (Eighth Grade), Dan Trachtenberg (10 Cloverfield Lane), Curry Barker (Obsession) and Kane Parsons (Backrooms).

Despite huge viewing numbers, videos on the free platform tend to be regarded as ephemeral and niche.

“Culture is always shaped by people who, in their day, are ephemeral and niche,” archive chief executive Patrick McIntyre said. “They’re still critical to collect for an understanding of culture across time.”

The best-known of the archive’s creators are maths teacher Eddie Woo (2 million subscribers, 188 million views) and musician Tash Sultana (1.3 million subscribers, 424 million views).

But the Creator Capsule also recognises the phenomenal success of little-known Thai-Australian brothers Kevin and Luke Lerdwichagul, who created the animation studio Glitch Productions (23 million subscribers, 3.9 billion views).

They have gone from making videos in their bedroom to employing about 200 people full-time to create six animated shows, including The Amazing Digital Circus and Murder Drones, in their main studio in Parramatta and others including Melbourne CBD, Brisbane and the ACT.

Kevin, 32, said the brothers played a lot of video games out the back of their parents’ fruit and vegetable shop in Bondi Junction when they were growing up. That led to Luke, now 27, posting videos online that had him voicing characters over captures of gaming screens about 2010.

By the time Luke was finishing high school, he had almost a million subscribers. Kevin, who had studied software engineering at uni, joined him to write and produce these videos.

“We loved watching anime,” Kevin said. “We always wanted to get into animation so we were like, ‘okay, let’s just give it a go’.”

They learnt how to animate largely from online tutorials and collaborating with other creators. While they lost money for five years, they kept going – using the YouTube ad revenue they managed to earn to help fund their shows – because they loved the medium.

“The main way we make money now is through merchandise,” Kevin said. “We create plushies, toys, collectibles and apparel, and we sell them online alongside our episodes.”

After racking up more than 25 million views on YouTube, The Amazing Digital Circus, about humans trapped inside a circus-themed virtual reality simulation, became a worldwide hit on Netflix in 2024.

That success encouraged the brothers to release the final two episodes in cinemas in June. Distributing it themselves in Australia and teaming with partners elsewhere, The Amazing Digital Circus: The Last Act took a stunning $US40 million ($56 million) globally.

“We created our community through the YouTube platform,” Kevin said. “They were all the fans that went to watch it in theatres.”

The brothers, who also have Murder Drones streaming on Prime Video, want to move more into cinemas but plan to keep making shows for YouTube.

“It used to just be cat videos but over time it’s evolved,” Kevin said. “Now we’re seeing serious productions like what we’re doing – creating studio-level quality pieces of content.

“It’s a great platform for creators to just start uploading stuff, get immediate feedback from an audience, hone their craft then scale up and create more.”