Taken from the list of the top 20 most influential new media figures under the age of 30 this year, CBR has compiled the top 10 who are directly involved with technology. After a survey of Birmingham University students, it was revealed that the founder of Snapchat, Evan Spiegel, came out on top.
Spiegel, 24, co-founded Snapchat in July 2011 while studying at Stanford University. In August 2014 the company was valued at $10 billion.
The founder of micro blogging site Tumblr David Karp was the second most influential figure according to the audience of 15-24 year olds polled at a Gadget Show event hosted by the University last month. UK YouTubers Tanya Burr, Zoella and Alfie Deyes – with more than 12 million subscribers combined – also made the top 20 of the poll but trailed behind Jamal Edwards, the 23-year-old owner of online music video company SBTV.
1. Evan Spiegel (24) – An American internet entrepreneur who is CEO and co founder of Snapchat, a photo messaging application. According to Snapchat, in May 2014, the app’s users were sending 700 million photos and videos per day, while Snapchat Stories content was being viewed 500 million times per day.
2. David Karp (28) – Founder and CEO of Tumblr, a microblogging platform and social networking website which allows users to post multimedia and other content to a short-form blog.
3. Jamal Edwards (23) – The owner of SBTV, a broadcasting company that makes music videos featuring rap and pop stars, before putting them on YouTube and attracting millions of hits.
4. Felix Kjellberg (24) – Better known by his online alias, PewDiePie, Felix is a Swedish video game commentator on YouTube. PewDiePie has 30m YouTube subscribers and had 449m video views in August 2014 alone.
5. Sean Rad (27) – Founder and CEO of Tinder, a matchmaking mobile app which connects with users’ Facebook profiles to provide pictures and ages for other users to view. Tinder is available in 24 languages. As of April 2014, Tinder is rumoured to have more than 10 million active daily users.
6. Tom Cassell (21) – Known as TheSyndicateProject, Tom Syndicate is a British gaming commentator and vlogger. Tom’s channel opened in September 2010 and he quickly grew to be one of the biggest gaming channels on YouTube. He received media attention due to leaving his school and job in order to become a YouTuber.
7. Pete Cashmore (29) – CEO and Founder of Mashable, a news and advice blog about social media. Mashable draws 7.8 million unique visitors and has become one of the web’s most popular blogs.
8. Mark Turpin (29) – CEO of Yogscast, a group of YouTube broadcasters who produce gaming-related video content focused on World of Warcraft and Minecraft. YOGSCAST Lewis & Simon became the first channel in the United Kingdom to reach one billion views.
9. Xavier Damman (29) – Co-founder of Storify, a social network service that lets the user create stories or timelines using social media such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
10. Steffan Aquarone (28) – CEO of Droplet. A UK entrepreneur and film producer Steffan is the co-founder of mobile money app Droplet, which lets you load money onto your phone and send payments to anyone for free.
