This year has been an incredible year for giving back in unique and big ways for the digital community. YouTube star Tyler Oakley raised half a million dollars through his #TeamInternet fan base for The Trevor Project, Arrow Actor Stephen Amell partnered with Fuck Cancer to sell t-shirts on Represent.com through which they raised hundreds of thousands of dollars and the list goes on and on.
John and Hank Green's Project For Awesome combined the web's biggest stars and their audiences to raise over 1 million dollar's on Indiegogo for charities over 48 hours.
I've had the honor of putting together an annual variety show fundraiser called Tubeathon with What's Trending where we bring together the biggest online influencers to tweet for a cause. For the 2nd year in a row, Ford joined forces with us to power the event with musical acts like Karmin, 7EAST's Pia Toscano and Jared Lee, Drea de Matteo; YouTube and Vine Stars Trevor Moran, DeStorm, King Bach, Glozell, Brittany Furlan, Jessie Smiles, Logan Paul and many others who helped tweet for a cause.
It was also amazing to see support online for stars and leaders who couldn't be there like Mark Cuban, Dave Navarro, Juliette Lewis, Jay Mewes, Smosh, Stan Lee, and Zachary Levi's Nerd Machine also joined forces online supporting the event on Twitter.
I like to describe it as a telethon for the digital age, inspired by the Jerry Lewis fundraising holiday specials back in the day. For every tweet with the hashtag #Tubeathon or #GoFurther, What's Trending donated $1 to Covenant House. We also partnered with Tiltify and Twitch to raise money through a gaming stream that helped the event gross 53,364 Tweets up from the 41,777 last year (an increase of 27.73%), with a global impressions reaching 197,521,960, surpassing last year's total of 167,000,000 impressions by 18.28%. While that's a great result, I know with all these new digital fundraising models we can raise even more next year.
You can enjoy the 2 hour livestream on demand HERE. Tubeathon will also make it TV debut on December 21 with a one-hour edited special on AXS including all the highlights from the live event.