Zoie Burgher gamed the YouTube celebrity system hard. It took her just a few months to rack up her first million subscribers, something that has taken other aspiring YouTubers years. Burgher’s next challenge will prove a bit more difficult: becoming a successful media CEO. She’s launching a new company that will be part gaming team, part media brand, and part talent agency. She’s got a lot more riding on this one, too: she’s convinced a group of women to drop everything and join her, and she’s thrown her own money behind it.

So far, Burgher’s company, Luxe Gaming, has one main project: Luxe House. Team members (right now there are six of them, including Burgher) live together in a house and post episodic vlogs of their daily lives to YouTube. While many reality shows sequester their contestants away from the outside world, on YouTube, Luxe offers the opposite approach: constant, real-time fan feedback.

Basically, Burgher says, Luxe House will be like The Real World, but populated only by young women, with a little bit of Call of Duty.

“Social media stars are made from reality TV shows,” Burgher said. “We decided that [making our own reality program] would be the best way to showcase ourselves and draw attention to our personal brands and help us gain recognition.”

This isn’t Burgher’s first shot at fame. Before YouTube, she was a Twitch streamer, where she had thousands of followers and was frequently banned for her semi-provocative videos. (Wearing bikinis. Twerking.) In August 2016, she was suspended from the platform for what she said was the fourth time for “sexually explicit or pornographic content.” Burgher claimed she was being targeted by Twitch, whose community guidelines vaguely prohibit “inappropriate broadcaster behavior and attire,” because the company was embarrassed to be associated with her.

A Twitch spokesperson told The Verge the company doesn’t comment on terms of service violations.

In retaliation, Burgher moved her show to YouTube, where she posted captured footage of the Twitch stream that had previously gotten her banned. That video earned her an immediate following, and an interview on the popular YouTube gossip show DramaAlert. The host, Keemstar, asked her how she managed to get 650,000 subscribers in less than a month. Rather than talk about hard work or the importance of good lighting, Burgher demonstrated her twerking technique. As it had on Twitch, Burgher’s trade-off of skin for views irked other YouTubers, several of whom tried and failed to get her banned from the platform.

When she wasn’t banned, many YouTubers turned to “call out” videos to air their grievances to whoever would listen. In a video called “Zoie Burgher is destroying YouTube,” 20-year-old gamer Pyrotechnical says, “If you guys haven’t gotten it already, I’m trying to make the point that no one would give a shit about [Burgher] if she didn’t show cleavage.” The video responses were seething and bitter. Kotaku reporter Patricia Hernandez wrote in 2016 that the negative reactions were likely “a misplaced jealousy” over Burgher’s meteoric rise, as viewers felt like they were being “tricked into watching Burgher’s content or that she’s cutting corners to get a fame she does not ‘deserve.’”

On a video about Burger from the gamer TBets, a commenter going by Noah wrote: “Man fuck all u haters, u just mad she gained more subs than u. She’s not a bad streamer.”

In the Luxe Gaming announcement video, Burgher and her friend Abigale Mandler go over some hazy details about the project: from now on, the two announce, they’ll be going by “Luxe Zoie” and “Luxe Abigale,” adopting their brand’s name as their own. The backyard that they’re standing in — situated somewhere between Los Angeles and San Diego, with views of pristine suburban homes nestled among foggy mountains — is where the members of Luxe Gaming’s reality show will live.

“We like to tell people we’re from Los Angeles,” Mandler says. “But we just couldn’t find a big enough house [there] to fit all of the girls without paying an extreme amount of money.”

Mandler has known Burgher for a few years now. They were roommates in Utah when Burgher first began to earn a following on Twitch and YouTube. Eventually, Burgher helped Mandler start her own YouTube channel, teaching her how to set up a greenscreen and where to stick the “10 million wires” required for shooting and streaming.

When Burgher pitched Luxe Gaming to her last fall, Mandler was working as a medical transcriptionist, and she was nervous to ditch her steady paycheck to chase the whims of a content-hungry internet

[Source”timesofindia”]