YouTube star Mark Fischbach, aka “Markiplier,” just became the largest single shareholder in GoPro with an 8.5% stake, Bloomberg reported on Sunday.
GoPro is not doing well. Or at least it was not doing well. The company’s auditor, PricewaterhouseCoopers, recently said it had “substantial doubt” about GoPro’s future. When news broke that Markiplier had taken a huge stake in the company, the stock soared, ending the day up more than 46%.
Markiplier told Bloomberg that he was making the investment because he loves GoPro cameras and wants the company to succeed.
“I saw the stock and where it was, I was like that seems undervalued,” Markiplier told Bloomberg.
Besides his own personal affinity for the brand, the decision was also driven by Markiplier’s professed desire to make filmmaking more accessible to the average content creator. Proper filmmaking shouldn’t have to be restricted by costly equipment like cameras and the necessity to surrender creative control to large studios, Markiplier argues.
“One of the things I want to do is push my audience to the risky world of trying to make feature films and higher-end productions,” Fischbach told Bloomberg.
Markiplier himself has built a career following a version of the trajectory he’s advocating. The content creator and filmmaker accumulated nearly 40 million subscribers on YouTube before making his big foray into filmmaking with the release of his self-financed and self-distributed horror film, “Iron Lung.”
The movie, based on the 2022 video game with the same name by David Szymanski, was completely self-funded by Fischbach after several studios passed on the idea. “Iron Lung” managed to beat the odds regardless, and despite some mixed reviews, the movie scored a $50 million box-office success, finishing second behind Sam Raimi’s “Send Help” on its opening weekend.
Markiplier has been vocal about his desire to help others achieve the same success, telling IndieWire earlier this year that he wants “to help other creators to make their projects.”
“It feels great to kind of be in a position where I can affect change,” Markiplier told IndieWire.
Fishbach says he only used GoPro cameras for the behind-the-scenes footage of “Iron Lung,” not the actual footage used in the film. But the YouTuber claimed that might change with the company’s latest Mission 1 Pro ILS release, which GoPro is marketing as a “compact cinematic camera system.” Just last week, before the news dropped that he was now GoPro’s largest single shareholder, Markiplier posted a rave review video on YouTube praising the new GoPro camera and comparing it to the cinema cameras he did use to film “Iron Lung.” In the video, Markiplier praises the camera’s quality and price tag thousands of dollars cheaper than the competitor he compares it to, saying that he will use it “extensively” in future movies.
“Sometimes this footage looks better. I’m not blowing smoke, I’m not paid to say that,” Markiplier said of the camera, and to be fair, he might actually truly believe that to be the case, regardless of any payout he receives. But even though Markiplier did give an affiliate discount code in the video review, he did also fail to mention that he was soon to become the company’s largest single shareholder.
