Is WorldStarHipHop Preying on YouTubers? Stevenjotv Thinks So …

Now this is grounds for a true Epic Rap Battle …

YouTuber Steven Jo of Stevenjotv has serious beef with website WorldStarHipHop (yes, that WorldStarHipHop). For those that don’t know, WorldStarHipHop (WSHH) is a video aggregate site that predominantly features hip hop videos, street fights caught on camera and general urban entertainment. In fact, WSHH has been voted the “top hip hop and urban culture website” multiple years by Black Entertainment Television (BET), so it’s safe to say that the hip hop musician, comedian and motivational speaker has picked himself one hell of an opponent.

The shit started over the WSHH “big box” — the larger-than-the-rest video spot featured at the top of WSHH’s main page. It’s the premium slot on a website that Wikipedia states brings in over 1.1 million viewers a day. Alexa has them ranked as the 180th most visited site in the U.S., so getting your video on the top box is no small accomplishment. It’s also not free.

“I saw the amount of views that videos were getting on their website. I thought since they only put up a few videos a day, I would be guaranteed a big audience by having my video up there,” says Steven Jo in an email to NMR. He paid $4000 to be featured in the “big box” for a day — steep money, but if it pays off on views and subscribers, which relate back to his YouTube account, it can be well worth it. And with WSHH’s demographics meshing perfectly with Steven’s burgeoning hip hop career, Steven had a good shot of pulling in some serious new fan numbers.

Posting a music video entitled “Go Dum” to the site, he was initially thrilled when he saw the apparent numbers the video had pulled down — 4,374,059 total views. That’s a lot of exposure for a performer whose videos on YouTube typically seem to range in the low hundreds of thousands (still impressive!).