Alia "Lia" Shelesh (born October 22, 1992), better known as SSSniperWolf, is an English-American YouTuber. According to British Vogue in 2020, she was one of the most recognisable social media personalities associated with online video games.[4]
| SSSniperWolf | |||||||||||||
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 SSSniperWolf in 2022 | |||||||||||||
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| Born | Alia Shelesh October 22, 1992 Liverpool, England | ||||||||||||
| Nationality |
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| Occupation | YouTuber | ||||||||||||
| Organization(s) | Channel Red, LLC.[2] | ||||||||||||
| YouTube information | |||||||||||||
| Also known as | sexysexysniper | ||||||||||||
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| Years active |
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| Genres |
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| Subscribers | 34.4 million[3] | ||||||||||||
| Total views | 24.8 billion[3] | ||||||||||||
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Last updated: April 5, 2024 | |||||||||||||
In 2013 she started out with gaming videos but in 2017, she shifted her focus from video game-related content to reaction videos.
Early life
Alia Shelesh was born on October 22, 1992 in Liverpool, England.[1] She is Turkish through her mother and Greek through her father.[1] Her family moved to the United States when she was six, at which age she started playing video games.[5][6] She attended community college to become a pharmacist. However, she decided to drop out and concentrate on her Youtube career.[7][8]
Career
2011–2022: Early content and rise to prominence
Shelesh started uploading videos to her YouTube channel "sexysexysniper",[9][video 1] consisting of Let's Plays of games such as Call of Duty.[9] This channel was active in 2011[video 1] and 2012.[video 2] She moved to the SSSniperWolf channel in 2013,[9] on which her first video was a compilation of fails in Call of Duty: Black Ops II.[video 3] She derived her handle from Sniper Wolf, a character from the Metal Gear video game series.[1]
In 2016, she featured on Day of Doom, an event that was hosted by id Software.[10][11][12] In 2017, she hosted the show Clickbait in which social media influencers competed in unusual challenges.[13][14][15] The show aired on the subscription service Fullscreen.[16] She also made an appearance on FANtasies, an anthology series.[17][18]
In early 2017, the genre of her content changed from entirely gaming-oriented to primarily reaction videos.[19][20] That year, her channel grew to over five million subscribers, and she was among the ten entrants in Forbes' "Top Influencers" list in the "Gaming" category for 2017.[21][22] In 2018, she appeared on an episode of Fear Factor[1] and on an episode of Ultimate Expedition.[23][24][25] In 2019, she was nominated in the 2019 Teen Choice Awards in the category "Choice Gamer"[26] and won the "Favorite Esports Star" award in the 2019 Kids' Choice Sports.[27][28] In 2019 and 2020, she won the Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Awards in the category "favorite gamer".[29][30]
In 2021, YouTube ranked Shelesh third on its "US Top Creators" list.[31] In the same year, she won the Gaming Influencer of the Year Award at the American Influencer Awards.[32]
2023–present: Disputes and conflicts
On August 1, 2023, it was reported that Shelesh was one of the highest-paid YouTubers with a net worth of US$16 million.[33] On August 17, 2023, Evan Young filed a lawsuit against Shelesh for breach of contract and financial misdoings in relation to content produced by Channel Red, their joint company. He accused her of not paying him for work he did for Channel Red.[34] Young also claimed he curated and scripted her content for years.[9] Shelesh filed a motion to dismiss on October 5, 2023, claiming the accusations were "vindictive". In the dismissal, attorneys claimed that not long after filing for divorce, Young locked Shelesh out of several YouTube channels they managed together, including the main SSSniperWolf channel and her personal channel Little Lia,[35] on which she uploads beauty-related content.[36]
Conflict with jacksfilms
YouTuber John Patrick Douglass, known as jacksfilms, accused Shelesh of profiting from other creators' work through monetizing her reaction videos, while frequently not providing proper credit,[33] and characterized her content as rudimentary and not transformative enough for fair use.[33] In 2022, he began using the "JJJacksfilms" account to parody Shelesh's videos.[37][38] In response, she made several social media posts accusing him of sexism and plagiarism.[33]
On October 13, 2023, Shelesh, while filming near Douglass's house, asked her followers if she should pay him a visit, stating that he lives near Shelesh's studio. She showed his house in an Instagram story[39] captioned "let's talk like adults",[37][40][41] which was quickly removed, but her followers shared screenshots.[37] Douglass responded by accusing Shelesh of doxing him,[39] called her actions "creepy, gross, violating",[42] and asked YouTube to demonetize her.[40] In response, Shelesh said that she find his home address on Google and she doesn’t know how to dox. Douglass had registered his LLC to his home address and it was available publicly.[43][44] Shelesh also said that Douglass was "creating drama to pay their bills", and called him a "creep".[45][46] Shelesh discussed seeking a restraining order against Douglass, whom she called "obsessed" over the matter.[47]
On October 18, YouTube's Twitter account posted "would it be too meta to do a reaction video to a reaction video", which multiple users interpreted as an offhand comment on the situation, causing a backlash.[48] By October 19, a Change.org petition to remove SSSniperWolf from YouTube gathered 13,000 signatures.[49] The next day, YouTube temporarily demonetized her channel,[50] while expressing disapproval of both sides' behavior.[39] Multiple YouTubers saw the latter as unfair.[51] Shelesh subsequently apologized to Douglass in a tweet, saying that her actions were "inexcusable" and that she respects YouTube's decision.[52] She continued to upload videos on her "SSSniperWolf Top Videos" channel, but it was later also demonetized.[53][54][55]
Conflict with AzzyLand
On November 10th, 2023, YouTuber Azzyland, came forward to voice her issues with SSSniperwolf. In a collaborative video on Nerd City’s channel titled ‘SSSniperwolf stole her life’, Azzyland alleges that SSSniperwolf has been copying her content.[56][57]
In response, SSSniperwolf posted on Twitter that the opposite is the case and that AzzzyLand has been copying her thumbnails and video formats. She shared some screenshots as proof, which showed that Azzyland posted a video with a similar title 10 minutes after hers.[56][57]
Personal life
In 2019, Shelesh and Evan Young, her partner at the time, bought a house in Henderson, Nevada,[58] which they sold in 2022,[20] after which they moved to Mummy Mountain, Arizona.[2][20] In September 2023, they were reported to be legally married,[20][34] though they had separated in September 2022[9] and filed for divorce in late 2022.[34]
Reception
In a review of her main channel, Kennedy Unthank from Plugged In commended her for seeking to "make people laugh through daily uploads" and the quantity of available videos. However, Unthank voiced concern that she "may be profiting from someone else’s work" with her reaction videos through YouTube's monetization system. According to Unthank, while some of her reactions provide additional insight or have a transformative nature, many of her videos did not offer anything substantial over the original clip that was being reacted to.[59]
Linguist John McWhorter of the New York Times commented on her use of Black English words and idioms, using her language as an example of "effortless infusion of Black English expressions".[60]
