While you may not hear from her much these days, Jenna Marbles was the earliest and most renowned female YouTubers in the past decade. She has inspired countless other female YouTubers, such as Lilly Singh, to start their own YouTube channel and make funny skits.
Her success was a combination of luck and a humorous personality. Firstly, she started at the correct time, when YouTube was starting to take off. Also, at the time, there werenโt very many female YouTubers who were making comedy skits on YouTube.
Having started her channel in 2010, her YouTube career spans a decade, and she has received many accolades for her channel. She currently has just over 20 million subscribers and total views of 1.6 billion on her videos.
Unlike others, this YouTube star has turned down a lot of sponsorships and brand deals. So, despite having millions of followers and billions of views, she is not as rich as she could be for that level of viewership.
In July of 2020, Marbles announced that exactly a decade after starting out on YouTube, she would be leaving the platform after receiving backlash for racially insensitive material in her old videos. So, after all this, how much money does Jenna Marbles make?
Early Life
Jenna Marbles was born Jenna Nicole Mourey on September 15th 1986 in Rochester, New York, where she also spent her childhood. She attended Brighton High School, where she graduated in 2004. She has one brother, and her father is a successful chemist who owns several patents.
Mourey moved to Boston for college, pursuing a Bachelorโs degree in Psychology from Suffolk University. She later attended Boston University to complete her Masterโs degree in sports psychology and counseling.
While attending college, she was living in a 3-bed apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Here, she was doing all kinds of odd jobs to support herself and pay her $800 rent. She took up bartending, was a blogger and dancer, and worked at a tanning salon.
She wrote for Bar Stool Sports, in their female-centric publication StooLaLa. So, she was clearly ambitious and entrepreneurial even before her YouTube career started.
YouTube Beginnings
While in Cambridge, she starts uploading small funny commentary videos on YouTube about random topics. Her channel started to blow up after one of her most famous videos โHow To Trick People Into Thinking Youโre Good Lookingโ started getting millions of views. The video had over 5 million views in the first week alone. As of now, that video has over 60 million views on YouTube.
She continued making viral videos, such as โHow To Avoid People You Donโt Want To Talk Toโ, which was a funny instructional video on avoiding talking to people, and she was featured in the New York Times in 2011. Her YouTube pseudonym Jenna Marbles was inspired by her dog, Mr. Marbles, and the fact that using her real name may deter potential employers for her mother.
Going Viral
She continued to make a slew of YouTube videos that went viral and gained her millions of subscribers. So, how much money does Jenna Marbles make at this point? Within two years, the New York Times estimated that her annual income was around $346,000 in 2013.
What drew a lot of people towards Jenna was that she wasnโt making videos for the sake of making videos. She actually enjoyed what she was doing and it showed through in her videos, making her seem more authentic than others.
She has mentioned several times that she never accepted brand endorsements or sponsorships despite her soaring popularity because she wanted to make genuine content. She also works on her videos by herself, whereas others would have a team of assistants and producers. Jenna once said in an interview with Larry King that she enjoys her freedom a lot.
At this point, she also collaborated with various other viral YouTube channels. For example, she appeared in an Epic Rap Battles of History video, where she played Eve in their โAdam vs Eveโ video. She also made cameos with the Annoying Orange and played Miley Cyrus for YouTube Rewind 2013. She also played herself in Smosh: The Movie.
Jenna states that she actually has not hacked the YouTube algorithm and doesnโt know what or when one of her videos would go viral. Much of her popularity was due to the fact that she was on the right platform at the right time.
She joined YouTube at the start of the 2010s, where there werenโt many content creators, particularly female ones, and YouTube videos were just taking off. At the time, YouTube was one of the few social media platforms where videos could go viral. Now, this attention is spread into different platforms like Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.
She has been dubbed the โQueen Of YouTubeโ, and has received many social media awards. She was also the first female YouTuber to have her own wax figure at Madame Tussaudโs in New York.
Side Ventures
Marbles is a huge dog lover, as many can tell from all her dogsโ cameos in her videos. She has her own line of dog toys called Kermie Worm & Mr. Marbles. She also sells merchandise with her famous quotes printed on them.
Jenna was also quite savvy with her newfound YouTube fame, parlaying her popularity into podcasts with her boyfriend and hosting a weekly pop countdown on SiriusXFM.
How Much Money Does Jenna Make?
Unlike other YouTubers, she doesnโt accept brand deals to make sponsored content. However, her videos do earn YouTube ad revenue if people watch ads in her videos. So, this means her income comes entirely from her YouTube channel, as well as her other side projects.
Even then, it is hard to speculate exactly how much Jenna earns because it depends on the number of views of her videos which fluctuates a lot, where her audience is located, etc. We can, however, get a ballpark figure if we look at her YouTube stats.
It is speculated that a YouTuber, especially one like Jenna with millions of subscribers, can earn $3-$5 per 1000 views. Considering her most famous video has 60 million views, this comes to around $300,000 for that video alone.
She currently has around 3.3 billion total views on all her videos. This would amount to about $9.9 million in total from her YouTube videos. Several websites such as Celebrity Net Worth and Wealthy Gorilla put Jenna Marbleโs net worth at $8 million.
How much money does Jenna Marbles make per year? This is very hard to speculate because YouTubers don’t always have a consistent video schedule. Jenna has also recently announced a permanent hiatus, so this would affect her annual income.
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Frequently Asked Questions About Jenna Marbles
Who is Jenna dating?
Before her YouTube fame, Jenna was dating Max Weisz. They dated from 2008 until their breakup in 2012, which they announced in a video called Drunk Christmas Tree Decorating. He has his own YouTube channel called MaxNoSleeves.
Their split seemed mutual until Jennaโs tweets hinted at infidelity on his part, and she accused him of using her for his own YouTube fame.
Jenna started dating Julien Solomita in 2013. They have their joint YouTube accounts and podcasts they do together. They also bought a house together and live together currently. They both feature in each otherโs videos, along with cameos from their famous dogs, and they also have a large following on Twitch. They are currently not married.
What does Jenna do now?
Unlike a lot of other YouTubers, Jenna decided to pursue her college degrees and not rely completely on her YouTube fame. As a result of pursuing other projects and life goals, Jenna has appeared more low-key on her YouTube channel.
In June 2020, during the protests in the aftermath of George Floydโs death, Jenna uploaded a video to apologize for racially insensitive material in her past videos, which included videos of her doing blackface. She and her boyfriend also announced their hiatus from the platform.
Where does Jenna live?
Jenna previously purchased a beautiful 5-bedroom, 5000 square ft property in Sherman Oaks, California for a cool $3 million in 2018, and she sold it for $2.8 million in 2020. She still lives in California with her boyfriend Julien.ย
Will Jenna Marbles return to YouTube?
In her apology video, she announced that her hiatus from YouTube would be indefinite and she didnโt know how long it could beโweeks, months, years.
Considering the fact that she has accomplished her life goals of getting a college degree, owning a property and having her own media projects, it seems Jenna is busy and content with her life outside of YouTube.
Though it seems unlikely, only time will tell if Jenna will come back to the platform that catapulted her into fame.
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