Jared Shaw photo / supplied
A year ago Hamilton News reported on Jared Shaw, who left school at 17 to devote his full attention to his YouTube channel.
A year on and Jared has been asked to feature on television and continues to make $4000-$6000 a month via his YouTube channels The Gamers Joint and The Big 10.
The biggest pay cheque to date came in at $10,000 - a figure reached after a Big 10 video on body modifications grossed more than 8 million views.
Jared was also able to join his YouTube network group in Boston for the PAX East gaming convention, where he was able to meet fans of his channels from around the world.
"The main thing I did was meet and greet. I met mainly Americans and a lot of people from Europe. It was really cool to talk to people from all corners," he said.
Filming for TV took place in September last year, when Jared worked with TVNZ's Nigel Latta on a programme about self-employment using technology.
"That is set to air next month," Jared said.
The Big 10, which explores top 10 countdowns of weird and wonderful things, used to be the big earner for Jared.
Nowadays it is The Gamers Joint which attracts the highest hits, a shift which Jared attributes to a growth in the number of players of Kingdom Hearts, the game which the channel focuses on.
"A lot of people have been waiting years upon years for the third game to come out, that's what I mainly centre myself around - doing news for the third game."
"At the moment Big 10 is kind of on the back burner for me."
Each of his Gamers Joint video reaps roughly 20,000-30,000 views.
"It is my job so it has to be profitable to do what I do. With YouTube the more views you get the more money you get paid out."
A normal day for Jared begins at 10am when he spends two hours live-streaming himself gaming on Twitch.tv.
"It's essentially playing games live and the audience can watch you and if they want to donate to you they can, and because there are ads on the livestream I am getting paid through that as well."
After this Jared brainstorms new videos, edits and uploads to YouTube.
"I spend anywhere between five to 10 hours working a day," he said.
Jared first began on YouTube in 2011 and said for the longest time he couldn't find an audience.
"The most important thing to think about is trying to do something that not many people are doing. YouTube is a platform where anyone and everyone can do whatever they want and a lot of people are doing the exact same thing," he said.
Whatever the future holds for Jared, he said video editing was something he would want to be involved with.
"I would love to do something with TV and that's the thing with YouTube - you never know where it might take you. The thing about YouTube is that it's entirely dependent on people watching your videos, so tomorrow you might wake up and no one would be interested and that would be me over. Then I would have to go and find a job."
Jared said it took a while for his parents to come on board, but now both are fully supportive.