Thursday, February 08, 2018

17-year-old from rural southeastern Kentucky has a popular hunting and fishing channel on YouTube

A 17-year-old teen from Knox County, Kentucky, has translated his love for hunting and fishing into a wildly popular video channel. Kendall Gray "started making videos of his outdoor adventures in the summer of 2016 to pass the time, but his YouTube channel has since blossomed into a dedicated online community with nearly 190,000 subscribers and 34.5 million views," Will Wright reports for The Lexington Herald-Leader. "His fans even sport their own hashtag, #GrayGang." And he gets fan mail from people all over the country, mostly from tweens and teens.

It's helping him learn more about business: Gray says he spends up to 35 hours a week shooting and editing his videos as well as managing merchandise. He's sold more than 3,000 pieces of branded merchandise to fans all over the country; his mother Brenda helps him manage the orders. He shows no signs of stopping any time soon. "I’ll take it as far as it wants to go. I’m going to have fun and let other people have fun through my videos," he told Wright, who also works as a journalist for the Ground Truth Project in Central Appalachia

One of Gray's most popular videos, with more than 1.5 million views, shows his efforts to catch a red fox that escaped from one of his snares. Check it out:


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