Meath twins paid €5m after YouTube success
Twenty-something YouTube twin millionaires, Ryan and Scott Fitzsimons have paid themselves a whopping €5m over the past three years.
The bumper pay the 27-year-old Co Meath brothers have awarded themselves comes from their massively popular YouTube Minecraft channel.
New accounts filed with the companies office show that the twins last year shared €1m made up of €968,424 in pay and €70,000 in pension payments.
This followed the twins paying themselves a total of €4.1m over 2016 and 2015 made up of pay of €2.2m in 2016 and €1.8m in 2015.
The pair only uploaded their first Minecraft video in June 2012 and today their Littlelizard & Tinyturtle Adventure channel boasts 3.8 million subscribers and has been viewed a staggering 2.3 billion times.
The two only turned 27 at the end of March this year and at the end of last year, the brothers’ Little Lizard Ltd firm was sitting on accumulated profits of €444,610.
The boys’ younger sister Kelly is also carving out a highly lucrative career on YouTube.
Aged 23, Kelly’s ‘Little Kelly Minecraft’ channel has 2.65 million subscribers and 1.42 billion views. She paid herself almost €350,000 from the success of her channel.
After the Fitzsimmon brothers decided to give themselves a significant pay-cut last year, the size of their company’s cash pile soared from €4,421 to €295,846.
The company recorded a modest profit of €12,316 last year and this followed profits of €80,552 in 2016.
The brothers’ working lives involves playing modified versions of the Minecraft game with friendly and humorous voice-overs that started out as a hobby for the two.
They make most of their income from advertising on their channel and direct payments from YouTube based on the number of views of their videos.
In the Minecraft world they inhabit, Ryan’s character is known as Little Lizard while Scott is Tiny Turtle.
The brothers tend to play modified versions of the mega-selling Minecraft based on popular games, TV shows, movies or sometimes original ideas.
The rapid growth in popularity of the Fitzsimons channel shows no sign of slowing down as in the past year, they have added 617,000 subscribers.
After the channel debuted on YouTube in 2012, it took nine months for the venture to gain 10,000 subscribers. The brothers only had the one laptop to use between them when they started off.
In a previous interview, Scott said: “At the start, it was just a hobby. We played it, we enjoyed uploading it and some of the stuff clicked more and people started enjoying it. You could easily notice what people wanted to watch rather than just what you wanted to play so if you got a good combination of both.”
