YouTube is holding its first FanFest this year and has chosen Toronto as its inaugural host city – the one-day event, which will be free to the public and held next May, will feature YouTube sensations like Jenna Marbles, VSauce’s Michael Stevens, Bethany Mota and Brampton, Ont.’s Lilly Singh, who goes by the name IISuperwomanII online.
The guys behind Montreal’s “Epic Meal Time,” a series of YouTube vids revolving around some extreme eating, will host FanFest.
According to The Star, the six creators who are participating in YouTube’s FanFest have a combined total of nearly 40 million channel subscribers, which has drawn in tens of thousands of admirers to previous FanFests that were held in India, Singapore, Thailand, Korea, Australia and Japan.
“Canada is a rock star country for YouTube because Canadians are always ahead of the curve. I like to say Canadians were two to three years ahead of the curve vis-a-vis the U.S. audience in terms of broadband adoption years ago, and (now) consumption of YouTube content,” said Laura Lee, head of North American content partnerships for YouTube, to The Canadian Press. “Toronto’s a very unique creator base … there’s a huge amount of top creators (there). Bringing FanFest to Toronto is a good signal to them that YouTube has noted that, Toronto and Canada are important to us and we’re going to continue to have a presence (there).”
