With more than 1.5 billion lifetime views, Penn State grad Justin Leusner is measuring success through trust, positive influence, and human connection
By Mark Brackenbury
YouTube content creator Justin Leusner, a Penn State grad and State College resident, was down to the wire in his 10-day video quest to trade up from a paperclip to a ticket to the final match of this summer’s FIFA World Cup (youtube.com/watch?v=4c2JoCpmeOQ&t=659s). With prices approaching $10,000 for the cheapest seat at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium, he needed a “hero.”
Enter social media influencer, WWE Superstar, and entrepreneur Logan Paul, who made the trade that secured the ticket — and a full-circle moment — for Leusner.
“I love what you’re doing. I love up-and-coming content creators,” Paul said after Leusner made a pitch to him as he moved through the crowd at New York’s Fanatics Fest, which gives fans a chance to mingle with top athletes and other celebrities.
Paul purchased a $9,785 ticket for Leusner in exchange for a handful of less-costly-but-still-coveted collectibles that Leusner had accumulated through 14 prior trades up from the paperclip. Paul then gave those collectibles to kids at the event.
“Logan Paul was the last trade of the series, which was a really cool full-circle moment for me, as I grew up as a little 12-year-old watching his content,” Leusner says. “He very much inspired me to continue making videos.”
Through his growing online presence (more than 1.5 billion lifetime video views), Leusner, 23, is working to inspire the next generation. His goal is to become the most trusted sports creator by 2031.
The journey has not been seamless. But Leusner is on his way.
“Super-introverted” as a boy, Leusner started his own YouTube channel in 2013 when he was 10 years old, posting videos from the basement of his parents’ home in Moorestown, New Jersey.
“I would get off the school bus, quickly do my homework, and then all afternoon, all night, I would just be making one video every day, one 10-minute video a day, edit it myself, film it. They weren’t great videos, but I just posted one every day. That was all I knew.”
His following grew steadily to 30,000 YouTube subscribers in 2018, with money rolling in. By his junior year of high school, in 2019, Leusner expected to be a full-time YouTube creator once he graduated. But that year, what Leusner describes as “the rocket ship of exponential growth” for his viewership on YouTube slowed down before flatlining and then falling.
“My audience grew up a little bit. The content wasn’t connecting with them.”
“I’ve never experienced this before,” he says of that time, adding, “My state, my happiness each day [was] determined by the number on the screen of how many people saw that video, how much money that video made.”
As the COVID pandemic took hold in March 2020, Leusner pivoted to helping edit videos for other creators. He was earning money again. But for the first time since he was 10, he had stopped making videos, and he knew, “This is not what I want to be doing. I want to be making content.”
A feeling that his “dreams were over,” along with a mix of other pressures, including the pandemic and the process of applying for college, sent Leusner into “a mental health spiral.”
That summer, a friend invited Leusner to church. Initially reluctant, Leusner eventually agreed, thinking, “This depression is not going away. Maybe this will help.” It did, he says. He began reading the Bible. His faith grew, and he became “a different person. I couldn’t stop smiling.”
Leusner’s test scores weren’t quite high enough for his top college choice, the University of Southern California. He ended up at Penn State, a twist for which he is now “so grateful.”
“I started studying entrepreneurship in the Smeal College of Business,” he says. “Through that, I learned about the Happy Valley LaunchBox and Invent Penn State, got plugged into all their programs.”
The LaunchBox provides early-stage startups with support and resources to build a sustainable and scalable business. Leusner was making videos again, and he says the LaunchBox team encouraged him to turn his efforts into a media startup. He says he received more than $35,000 of equity-free grant money from Invent Penn State.
In 2022, Leusner founded what became known as TDAY Sports — a short-form sports social media company that he labeled “Gen Z’s ESPN.”
“Three, four years into it, it was working. We were making half a million dollars in revenue. We had a team. We had people on payroll. We had clients with Gatorade, the NBA. But it wasn’t what I wanted to do. … I didn’t want to be the CEO of a media company. I didn’t want to just chase money. I was 21 years old. I wanted to do my passion, which is making videos.”
Leusner, who graduated from Smeal’s Corporate Innovation and Entrepreneurship program in December 2024, shifted gears last year to go “all in” on his personal brand, youtube.com/@JustinLeusner. There, he produces family-friendly sports videos. He also invests in some other startups.
“TDAY Sports is just a thing, but Justin Leusner is a human that you can talk to on Google Meet, you can hang out with in person,” he says. “We’ve been able to really connect with our audience on a much deeper level.”
Leusner leads a team of seven people, but it’s just him and two others working full-time.
Before trading a paperclip for a World Cup final ticket, Leusner set a Guinness World Record this spring by attending a game at all 30 National Basketball Association arenas in just 31 days (youtube.com/watch?v=PMOuW62AMlE). He raised $100,000 for the Make-A-Wish Foundation along the way.
He has all 30 Major League Baseball stadiums in his sights next year, if the plan is not derailed by a baseball labor dispute. In the meantime, look for Leusner to do something special to celebrate NBA superstar LeBron James joining his favorite team, the Philadelphia 76ers.
Here’s more from our conversation:
You want to be the most trusted sports creator by 2031. How do you get there?
Leusner: It’s going to be a mountain to climb if we want to get to that. But I think we can do it based on the trajectory that we’re on. When we talk about trust, we’re talking to the parents. Our demographic is 8- to 13-year-olds. So, their parents influence a lot of what they can and, more importantly, what they can’t watch. I’ve talked to dozens of parents and dozens of kids within that range trying to understand, what are their viewership habits and how do we fit into that and meet their needs? And most parents are vetting and giving their kids a list of like four creators that they can watch: Dude Perfect, Jesser, Mark Rober, etc. It’s a very limited and a very exclusive list. We want to be in that category of, “These are the five creators that my kid can watch.”
How do we get there? We connect with the parents. How do we connect with the parents? We stand on strong values that parents can get behind: No sports betting, no gambling, no alcohol, no drugs. That shouldn’t be mind-blowing. But you’d be surprised how many creators, knowing they have kid audiences, push sports betting down their throats. It’s unbelievable, just because the sports betting companies are willing to offer so much money to advertise for them.
Step two is we continue to build and deepen our audience. Hence the rebrand. We’re deepening the trust with our audience by connecting to my face rather than a logo. And just continuing to show up both digitally and in person with content that makes them really think about life, not just brain rot, where they watch it, it hits their dopamine receptors, they get all excited in the moment. Then after the content, they’re like, “Wait a minute. What did I just watch? I don’t remember what I watched. Let me scroll to another thing.” We want to create content that leaves them clicking off the video, thinking about their life in a deeper way, making them think about, “Wow, relationships with my parents really do matter,” or, “Wow, the way I treat someone else really can change their life.” A lot of very simple but deep concepts that we want 8- to 13-year-olds to be thinking about.
This spring, you visited 30 NBA arenas in 31 days and you raised more than $100,000 for Make-A-Wish. What was that experience like for you? I assume it was both exhausting and exhilarating at the same time?
Leusner: You nailed it. By day 15, we were getting no sleep every night because we would literally go to the game, 7 p.m., get to our hotel at 10:30 p.m. Then we have to upload the files and coordinate with the editors who are in California, so with a three-hour time difference. We’re doing that for an hour, hour-and-a-half. And then it’s shower, eat dinner, just be a human. We’re going to bed at 1, 2 a.m. every single night. And depending on where the next game was the next day, we’d either have to wake up anywhere from 5 a.m. to 9 a.m. to fly or drive or take the train to the next city. We were averaging 3, 4, 5 hours of sleep each night. We were exhausted. We were averaging one meal per day. We were starving. I think I lost 20 pounds during the journey.
But it was so worth it. It was exhilarating, like you said, knowing that we were not only raising money for Make-A-Wish and helping them out with all the amazing work that they’re doing, but we were connecting with an audience, both digitally and in person.
How do you come up with these ideas?
Leusner: I would be a really good accountant. I have an accountant brain, which does not make sense for YouTube, right? So, I really do struggle, transparently, with coming up with creative video ideas. But I’ve read books about this; I’ve listened to podcasts. I’m not an artistic, creative person where I just think of these things on the fly. I do a daily exercise, 10 minutes a day, where I have one big document. It now has thousands and thousands of ideas. I started this in April.
And every day, I come up with 10 ideas. And sometimes I do it for longer because I’m just flowing, and I have 30 ideas that day. And I just type them down. And 80% of them are garbage, and I’ll never use them. But that helps me get to the good ones.
What gives you the most satisfaction in the work you do?
Leusner: I think it’s got to be whenever we’re able to meet someone in person or on Zoom that has been influenced positively by our content. For example, especially at Penn State, there’s a lot of Penn Staters that see our content, and it inspires them to start a business or it inspires them to start making videos, start making content, and being able to talk to that person about their journey of entrepreneurship or content creation that was partly sparked by watching our video, that’s really, really satisfying.
What advice would you give young creators who are interested in following in your footsteps in some way?
Leusner: I think the best advice is, don’t take anyone’s advice. Just go learn it yourself — I guess that’s kind of advice. But I do think that’s true. We take things in and we apply them when we learn them ourselves. That does go with what I tell everyone: “If you want to be a creator, if you want to be an entrepreneur, then give yourself 100 days and do one thing each day for 100 days.” So, maybe it’s make three videos a day. Maybe it is reach out to 10 people a day to be a client of your business. Whatever that is, do it every single day for 100 days. If you want to take off one day, great, do it. Rest up. But that’s what I did.
Note: Leusner speaks about his journey and the Gen Z struggle to find work-life balance in a 2025 TED Talk. Google “Justin Leusner TED Talk” (youtube.com/watch?v=wmbZS-Ic5sk). T&G
Mark Brackenbury is a former editor of Town&Gown.
