A young man from St. John's is living the dream — he's a YouTube celebrity making a living playing video games.

Matt Shea has more than 370,000 subscribers on his YouTube channel, which features funny, conversational videos of him playing games and sharing tips.

Shea loves what he does, and so does his audience. Some of his videos have been viewed more than 500,000 times.

Matt Shea makes about two YouTube videos a day. This popularity allows Shea to actually support himself through his YouTube channel. Every time he gets a view, Shea gets a small amount of revenue from advertising.

"It definitely pays the bills," he said.

Shea always dreamed of YouTubing for a living, but never considered it as an actual possibility.

"I've always had it in the back of my mind that I'd love to do this as a job," he said.

"The people that I'd watch before I started, they did it as a job and I was like, this is so cool. Imagine doing this as your job. But I never really thought it would happen to me."

Shea has been making around two videos a day since April 2013. People started watching and loving his videos, and the number of channel subscribers has continued growing.

Many of Matt's fan send him fan art, like this.

Shea has attracted fans from all over the world, many of whom send him fan mail and fan art.

"I've had people say, 'I was having a bad day and then I watched your video and felt better.' It's pretty profound actually," he said.

Hard work involved

However, Shea's job isn't all fun and games. A lot of work goes into editing, marketing and researching his work.

"People log on and just watch a video, but really it's me putting hours and hours a day not only recording and editing, but also putting the proper tags on a video, the descriptions, and whatever it takes to get people interested in the videos."

He loves what he does, but says it took him some time to figure out his style.

- Matt Shea

"If you have a good time in a video game, people are going to have a good time watching it," he said.

"I got more enthusiastic as I went. I understood what people wanted to see."

Shea works in a small office with a video camera, microphone, and a computer program that records his screen while he plays.