The Youtube thundering Greek
Matt Kovalakides –best known as Matt Koval- has gained worldwide popularity via Youtube. He’s the creator and director of videos uploaded to his personal Youtube channel and he was hired to work with the major video-sharing website. He is currently YouTube’s Lead Creative Strategist.
Kovalakides’s roots are in Thessaloniki. His grandparents migrated to the United States and resided at New Jersey. He graduated the Film Studies Faculty of the University of Towson and he later relocated to Los Angeles and Hollywood to pursue his dreams to build a career.
“I grew up outside Washington D.C. My grandparents came over on the boat from the Thessaloniki area. My grandmother was from a small town called Neos Skopos, in Northeast Greece. They met in the United States and started a grocery store in Princeton, New Jersey.”
He started out as a Hollywood screenwriter, director and filmmaker and decided to make his videos public via Youtube, in an effort to experiment beyond the limitations of cinema. He uploaded short comedies on Youtube that earned him huge popularity.
Matt has worked with television networks, like Discovery, CMT and GAC. His Youtube channel has over 130,000 subscribers and several of his videos exceed 1 million views! The Fuplers became an extremely popular series with thousands of hundreds of views on Youtube, initially created by Koval for a film contest without earning him back the expected success.
“I decided to enroll as Matt Koval rather than Kovalakides, my proper last name. I thought that Koval is easier to remember and that it would protect my identity during the competition”, he mentioned in a former interview.
Together with producer Robert Green, Koval created the web series 8 Dates, telling the story of a girl pursuing true love.
In 2012, Koval finished off Subscriber Magnet, an educational series about turning the Youtube uploaded material into an effective tool, where he offers viewers the experience and techniques he used to become popular, successfully managing to appeal on Youtube management that hired him to work in the Department of Strategic Planning.