Who is Ryan Higa?
Ryan Higa, also known as nigahiga, was born on June 6th, 1990. Ryan grew up in Hilo, Hawaii, USA. He is of Okinawan (East Asian) descent and was born to parents Wendell and Luci Higa. Ryan also has an older brother Kyle Higa.
Ryan Higa attended Waiakea High School and graduated in 2008. Ryan is a Judo black belt holder and also competed for his Wrestling team at Waiakea High School.
After his graduation, Ryan moved to Las Vegas and studied nuclear medicine at the University of Nevada. He didn’t finish his studies and dropped to create online videos.
Ryan Higa, aka nigahiga, is an internet personality. He is known for his comedy content on YouTube. Ryan was there in the early days of YouTube, posting videos in early 2006 and was one of the greatest content creators on the platform.
Nigahiga was the most popular channel on YouTube for almost 700 days between 2009-2011. This achievement was surpassed by only one person, the YouTube superstar himself, PewDiePie.
Ryan Higa also holds the achievement of being the first content creator that reached 2 million and 3 million subscribers.
Ryan Higa’s personal life
It’s kinda crazy to imagine Ryan doing something else these days, but he always wanted to be a doctor. He got to YouTube when he was just goofing around with his friend but took the opportunity and made something bigger.
Ryan never shared any regrets he didn’t become a doctor. He is happy with what he has become. Ryan shared that he faced racism during his school days. Because of that, he remains reserved for any kind of criticism. He takes all kinds of criticism positively and believes that one should not let criticism be a detractor.
Luci Higa, Ryan’s mother, works as his manager from the bare start.
Ryan Higa used to be in a relationship with Tarynn Nago since 2006, but the couple broke up in 2010.
The career of Ryan Higa
Ryan started posting videos at the very beginning of YouTube. His first video was of him lip-syncing a song by Freddie Mercury which the video was called “The Great Pretender.” Some honourable mentions are “Mind Geek”, where Ryan and Sean do different “magic” tricks, including forcing a garage door up and down or creating a fire or first video in his “How to be …” series called “How to be a ninja”. This series included tips on how to be different characters like nerd, ninja or gangster and became top-rated amongst his videos.
Ryan never planned to become this huge on the platform. He started creating these various goofy videos to amuse his friends and family. These videos caught the eye of the general audience, and people posted a lot of encouraging comments. Ryan realized the reach of YouTube and started posting more often.
YouTube regulations and Ryan Higa
When YouTube started growing rapidly, it started introducing the concept of monetization and also new rules. This affected many content creators, including Ryan Higa.
In 2008, Ryan’s two most popular videos, “How to be Emo” and “How to be a Gangster”, were removed from his channel due to copyright violations. Both of these videos returned on the channel in August 2009 for a few days only to be removed once again, along with “How to be Ninja” and “How to be Nerd”. All these four videos made their comeback in Spring 2010.
Another major complication happened on January 21st, 2009. YouTube temporarily deactivated “Nigahiga” and demanded all the videos with copyrighted music to be removed. That meant most of Ryan’s lip-syncing videos. This was a major hit for the channel, but Ryan took it as a lesson and started composing his own music for his future videos.
Even though Nigahiga went through all of these major setbacks, it became the first channel on YouTube to reach 3 million subscribers.
Ryan Higa and Sean Fujiyoshi
Ryan and Sean started Nigahiga together, and Sean stars in the majority of Ryan’s videos, and they have known each other since they were 4 and 5 years old.
In 2008, Richard Van Vleet offered to this duo their first feature-length movie. “Ryan and Sean’s Not So Excellent Adventure” was released on November 14th, 2008, and it sold out in theatres in California and Hawaii.
The DVD got released on July 14th, 2009, in the US.
“Ryan and Sean’s Not So Excellent Adventure” is about a movie producer who is hitting rock bottom played by Michael Buckley. He is about to be fired and needs to make a hit movie in 30 days. He decides on Higa and Fujiyoshi after finding out about their popularity on YouTube. He invites them to Hollywood to shoot a movie. They accept his offer and run into some amusing situations on their way.
After a really long absence, Ryan stated that Sean is moving on to different things, including mostly university. Sean had no longer time to star on the Nigahiga channel, and he was missed by the whole fanbase. He made his return in March 2013 in “The Ryan Higa Show - Sean.” Sean was back with his crew between 2015 and 2018.
Sean Fujiyoshi officially moved to California with his girlfriend (now wife) and no longer appeared in Ryan’s videos. Many fans had compared this event to when Anthony Padilla left Smosh in the previous year.
Ryan Higa K-pop career
Ryan Higa is not only a talented content creator. In 2016, Ryan created a K-pop band along with Jung Sung Ahn, Justin Chon, Philip Wang and David Choi. “Boys Generally Asian” started as a half-joke parodying the all-female band Girls Generation.
BgA created their first song “Dong Saya Dae”. This song got over 16 million views on YouTube, featured joke lyrics and was basically a parody of all K-pop songs. It peaked as a no. 2 on the official iTunes K-pop chart. BGA released their second song in 2017. “Who’s It Gonna Be” was still a parody, but it was trying to play on a more serious note. This song was doing even better and reached no. 1 on the K-pop charts.
Ryan Higa’s romances
Ryan Higa has been dating Tarynn Nago since 2004, but they broke up in 2009.
In 2015, Ryan started dating Arden Cho, one of the “Agents of Secret Stuff” co-star. This fact was revealed in the 4th episode of his podcast “Off The Pill” and confirmed later in his video “Revealing My Not-So-Secret Gf”. This couple also stated that the photos and videos they posted together in February 2019 were from Valentine’s Day.
Ryan uploaded a video, “My Midlife Crisis”. In this video, he explained that he and Arden had mutually broken up sometime before he created this video.
How much does Ryan Higa earn on YouTube? Net-worth!
So how did Ryan Higa reach $10,000,000 net worth? Well, he was there from the dark times of YouTube where it wasn’t that popular and worked hard to get where he is now.
He created a massive fanbase of more than 20 million subscribers on his main channel Nigahiga, posted over 400 videos and accumulated more than 4 billion views.
Ryan created another channel called HigaTV which currently has over 4 million subscribers, and posted 650 videos. His videos get around 300,000 views per day on all of his content altogether.
Ryan Higa should be generating around $2,000 per day from YouTube. This number might seem huge, but it’s only a small fraction of Ryan’s earnings. He gets money from advertising brands like Lenovo and also launched a mobile app Teehee (which is no longer available).
Ryan Higa’s as a writer
Ryan Higa spent 2017 making a considerable amount of money by converting his comedy skills into a more literal form. He created a “How to Write Good”, which capitalized on the popularity he gained in the past 10 years. Pleasing his existing fans and pulling in quite a few new ones to boot.
Ryan Higa and Giant_Hugs
Ryan’s wealth also consists of raking his official store Giant_Hugs. He also has his own brand of energy drinks. The store pulls in the punters with its extensive range of Higa branded t-shirts, hoodies, and beanies.
Interesting facts about Ryan Higa
- He has ADHD and created two rant videos, “On the pill” and “Off the pill.”
- Nigahiga consists of ‘Niga’, meaning ‘rant’ in Japanese and Ryan’s surname ‘Higa.’
- Ryan Higa appeared in the 2016 horror film Tell Me How I Die and in the 2021 Netflix film Finding ‘Ohana.
- Ryan has also guest-starred on an episode of Supah Ninjas, playing DJ Elephant Head, a criminal mastermind that uses his hypnotizing electronic music to make people fall asleep to commit robberies.
- Even though Nigahiga might sound offensive, Ryan refuses to change it because it was never meant to be used as a racial slur.
- Higa published his memoir, Ryan Higa’s How to Write Good, in 2017.
- In 2017, Forbes magazine listed Ryan Higa in their list of 30 under 30 most influential men.
- Ryan Higa revealed that he often overuses the dancing-girl-in-red-dress-emoji and that he is more of a night owl than an early bird.
- His zodiac sign is Gemini.
- He is 5’8’’or 173cm.
- His weight is 152lb or 69kg.
- Ryan’s first couple of videos included him lip-syncing, which are now removed.
- While he streams almost daily, Ryan Higa refuses to partner with Twitch.
- In 2021, Ryan Higa will have 5,548 average viewers whenever he goes live on Twitch.
- On March 25th, 2021, Ryan Higa got banned on Twitch for almost 20 minutes. The streaming platform quickly reversed their decision and revealed that he was banned by mistake.
- Ryan Higa is one of the original YouTubers, along with Cinemassacre, Onision and Shane.
- Ryan won the Gold Creator award for YouTube creators in 2012.
- Ryan won the Diamond creator award for YouTube creators 2016.
- Nigahiga is one of four channels to be number one most-subscribed on more than one occasion. The others are PewDiePie, Smosh & YouTube Spotlight.
- Ryan Higa has been nominated several times for Steamy Award but didn’t win any trophy yet.
- His background channel pictures lamps because he used to call his fanbase “Lamps”.
- Ryan Higa cried in his “Dear Mom...” video released in 2015. He mentions how happy he is she is in his life. This is the only time we’ve seen Ryan crying on the camera.
- Ryan’s most violent video is when he was bleeding from his nose and left side of his head. He needed to get to the hospital to get bandages when he cut himself with a sword when he was creating the “Fruit Ninja” scene in a video back in April 2013. This accident was widely discussed and made it into some articles.
- Ryan has a different schedule throughout the year but almost always posts at least 2 videos per month.
- Zayn Malik, a former One Direction member, was subscribed to Ryan’s channel before he got famous with One Direction.
- Ryan Higa has a business email, [email protected], and PO Box: 232355 Las Vegas, NV 89105.
- Ryan has a metal bar in his arm from when he broke his arm.
- He is an anime fan, and his most favourite one is Naruto.
- Ryan’s content is mostly children friendly, and he doesn’t like to censorship his videos.
- Nigahiga holds the record for being the most subscribed channel for 650 consecutive days.
