How vlogger Wengie gained over 8 million YouTube fans

At Husskie, we love hearing about how people got their career start – especially when that person is YouTube sensation Wendy “Wengie” Huang. Amassing 7.3 million subscribers on her Wengie YouTube channel, while her WengieVlogs channel has 1.4 million subscribers, the 31-year-old claims the second top spot for most watched YouTube channels in Australia (with How To Basic claiming the first).

Chatting to Huffington Post journalist Mat Whitehead at the recent VidCon conference in California, the vlogger revealed how she first began on her path to online stardom: “Remember Geocities? I had my own Geocities page that I’d deck out with really bad midi music and pictures. That’s how I got started.”

First an accountant before moving into marketing, Wengie was also involved in doing some social media consulting for a few brands. To help better understand the social media space (as it was still early days and there wasn’t as much info around as these days), Wengie ran her own blog in which she would test various strategies before pitching the idea out to brands.

She went on to reveal: ”After someone asked me how I did my makeup, I did a tutorial post. It took 12 hours having to take and edit each photo step-by-step. It didn’t even make sense because it wasn’t happening in real time. So I decided to use YouTube as a platform to host videos for my blog. It was just to give content to my blog readers, but my YouTube ended up doing a lot better.”

From there, Wengie’s inner digi geek started kicking in, with the vlogger embracing the online tech world of YouTube… “What people don’t know about me is that I’m a huge nerd. I would code whole websites in HTML just for fun, and I really fell in love with the editing process. So I started doing these makeup tutorials as a way to go through the editing process.”

After that, it was only a matter of time before Wengie’s YouTube channel began to take off – and she bid her adieus to her traditional marketing gig for full-time vlogger.