Simon Desue

Through quite a few questionable videos, he didn’t really make a good picture of himself in the recent past. At the latest after his “counterfeit money” video, in which he goes shopping with alleged counterfeit money, he also achieved a rather negative publicity boost through numerous conventional media. The talk is of course of the Inluencer and YouTube star “Simon Desue”. But is there more to the art figure he creates in his videos on YouTube or is his content the bitter reality?

That he has clearly created an artificial figure on YouTube with “Simon Desue” is already shown by some biographical data. His real name is Joshua Weißleder and he was born on 20 August 1991 in Hamburg. This means that he is now already 27 years old. Besides his main activity as a web video producer, he is also active as a book author, musician and actor. His father is originally from the Ivory Coast. At the age of five he also lived there for a year, but was then forced to move back to his mother in Hamburg.

On 02 July 2009 he opened his YouTube channel, which at that time was still called “HalfcastGermany”. The main reason for this was that he was already running the channel “Halfcastkid” at that time, on which he published exclusively English-language videos. Already on the day of the foundation of the channel “HalfcastGermany” he published a video with the title: “Simon Desue – Announcement No. 1”. In this video he explained why he is now also running this channel. Because of his prior knowledge, he was able to grow this channel quite quickly. However, his first video which really went viral was published on January 10, 2010 and was titled: “SCHÜLERVZ IST SINNLOS!”. In terms of content, he criticized the platform SchülerVZ. Furthermore, in the years 2011 to 2013, several TV appearances such as on ZDF, RTL or Sat1 helped him to further fame. Furthermore, he appeared in the film “Kartoffelsalat – Nicht Fragen!” (Potato Salad – Don’t Ask!) in 2015 and took on one of the leading roles there.

At that time he had already renamed his channel to “Simon Desue”, because this was the artificial character he embodied there. But this is by far not the only movie he starred in. Furthermore, he had a role in the 2014 film “3 Turks and a Baby” and the 2015 film “Brother Before Slut”.

Then in 2016, the 27-year-old decided to relocate to Miami. There he also met his current girlfriend. However, he left the land of opportunity again in 2017 and moved back to Hamburg with his girlfriend.

In the course of time, he has published four books as well as some fun songs on YouTube.

If you take a look at his channel today, you will find exactly what you would expect from him. Videos, which usually have a clickbait title and mostly show fictional actions. But that’s exactly what his viewers want to see. He now has well over four million subscribers on his channel “Simon Desue” who watch and celebrate his regular content. With this very considerable number of subscribers, he is clearly one of the biggest German YouTubers.