Alumna is a YouTube star

Jenny Hoyos ’24 makes going viral sound easy. She usually gets five to 10 million views on each YouTube video she creates. Combined, all her videos have received about two billion views to date. And her channel has more than six million subscribers.

She is only 19 years old — and already a force to reckon with.

She has worked with small businesses to grow their social media reach. She’s taken film and acting classes. She’s learned coding. As a kid, she played professional-level chess. She skipped eighth grade and earned a wealth of college credits through her high school’s AICE program. She launched her YouTube channel when she was 16.

Hungry to deepen her business and entrepreneurial skills even more, she chose FIU as her university a year later. She was a fully online, first-generation student who threw herself into her studies. This past summer, she graduated from FIU with a bachelor’s in business administration in only two years. 

She’s using her degree (and her concentration in finance) to continue expanding her full-fledged career as a content creator and entrepreneur.

“I’ve always been a passionate content creator,” Hoyos says. “Since I was eight years old, I would do daily vlogs on YouTube.”

Today, Hoyos creates videos that share lifehacks, budgeting tips and funny entertainment with children and teens. She says that being a positive role model and making good content for youth is her priority.

“This is the content I wish I had when I was young,” Hoyos says. “I want to be a good influence for the youth while still being entertaining.”

Hoyos recently gave a TED Talk at TEDNext, which will be released soon. Her speech was called "How to Tell a Story in 60 Seconds."

Journey of a creator

Hoyos initially created content surrounding budgeting tips and her own business ventures. “I was making videos about me trying to make money,” Hoyos recalls.

“My audience was teens, mainly young adults, who have traditional afterschool jobs,” Hoyos says. “I would always get recognized by teens working at McDonald’s, Chick-fil-e and Walmart. They are teens who are working hard for their money but don’t have enough of it to buy what they want.”

She loved being able to offer them some budgeting ideas. Then, she realized she could reach even more people if she expanded her content strategy.

“I decided to make general entertainment content where the main character is a cheapskate,” Hoyos says. “That’s how I gained my now current audience, which is elementary school through high school students.”

Hoyo’s most viral video is one featuring how she tore down a little wall in her house and created a “secret room” for herself without spending a dime. It has more than 168 million views.

Hoyos’ favorite video features her cooking in the back seat of her mom’s car while waiting in line at a McDonald’s drive thru. The goal: to see if she could cook a burger faster than it took to pick up her order at the final window. The video garnered more than 48 million views.

Hoyos says she’ll often get comments from viewers (including an eight-year-old girl) who appreciate her tips on finding coupons and budgeting. 

By far, however, what viewers love the most is not the information or the laughs, but Hoyos’ relationship with her mom, who features in many of Hoyos’ videos and adds a particularly warm and very real quality to the videos.

Mother and daughter are close in real life, and it comes through in the content.  “I started incorporating my mom in the videos within the last year,” Hoyos says, “and there are a lot of kids that are really resonating with that dynamic because it’s really relatable.”

“When I will prank her and do crazy things [for videos], she pretends to be mad at me,” Hoyos explains. “But I never get in trouble. My mom lets it be for the most part. There was one video…I broke a hole in the wall. We put a picture frame over it. Viewers love that my mom’s not actually mad at me.”

Fun fact: Hoyos' mom started her own YouTube channel, and Hoyos has helped her garner more than one million subscribers. 

Advice from an influencer

Hoyos is not only a content creator. She is a businesswoman. When she’s not creating viral videos, she works as a freelance consultant for up-and-coming content creators eager to learn her tips for breaking into the industry.

She says finding your niche is key to success. “Create your blue ocean market,” Hoyos says, referencing a marketing strategy laid out by business scholars W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne. “A red ocean is where everyone is fishing [a saturated market]. A blue ocean is where you’re the only fisherman. All the fish are yours to take. That’s what you want to do.”

She recommends thinking of how you can add new perspectives to a traditional market or how you can utilize your knowledge as an edge to offer something interesting in your content.

The biggest takeaway of all: Don’t quit.

“I know everyone says it, but it’s true. You can’t give up,” Hoyos says. “It took me one year to get my first 1,000 subscribers. But the way this works is that the next month I got 100,000, and the next month I got 300,000. A few months later, I had a million. The next year, I had five million. It’s a snowball effect. Once you have one video that blows up, they all take off. You have to play the long game. If you have not posted at least 100 videos, you cannot give up.”

As to what keeps Hoyos going? That’s simple. “Creating content is just incredibly rewarding to me.”