MTB

Fabio Wibmer's journey to become a YouTube millionaire

How did a kid from Tyrol become a mountain biking YouTube sensation? Checkout the videos that earned Fabio Wibmer one million subscribers.

Written by Christoph Berger-Schauer and Ric McLaughlin

3 min readPublished on 25.04.2018 · 15:50 UTC

Fabio Wibmer is now part of an exclusive club – one million subscribers on YouTube. The multi-talented rider from East Tyrol has out in nine years of work and countless daredevil stunts, but all that hard graft looks like it's paying off.

To celebrate, he's released his most high octane thrill ride yet.

Check out Fabio's latest must watch release, Fabiolous Escape 2:

Here's how Fabio went about becoming a YouTube millionaire:

Backflip in the snow

Everyone starts small. Wibmer's beginnings were no exception. Backflip im Schnee (Backflip in the Snow) is a 12-second clip and the very first video he uploaded to his channel.

It took an entire year until more bike-related video material appeared. In an edit simply named MTB fails, his wheels are decorated with reflectors and slow-motion shots juddered quite badly. It was a start nonetheless!

Millionaire

Get Creative Street Trial in 2013 was Fabio’s first video to crack a million views. In five minutes, and in an admittedly pretty modest setting, he showed off a staggering array of incredibly innovative tricks. The edit was followed by Osttirol Is My Playground a year after, which clocked 4.8m views.

Fabio-esque chase

Danny MacAskill’s Drop and Roll Tour colleagues provided a real breakthrough with a complex chase scene through Fabio's hometown. Fabiolous Escape has been viewed 11.4m times so far and it was crowned GoPro of the World – Best Line Contest winner in 2016.

By this stage, channel subscriptions had reached 100,000. After his daredevil ride with an old city bike on downhill slopes in Out of Mind and a ride along a rail 200 metres high above a dam, that number soon doubled. To keep the newly-accumulated masses entertained, he introduced the weekly webisode Sick Series shortly after.

City freeride

Urban Freeride Lives is a brutal ride through the city of Salzburg, including huge stair sets and some seriously big jumps. With 23 million views, it’s Fabio’s most popular video to date. A few days after the release, the number of subscribers broke through the 300k mark and prompted the Austrian to backflip into a river wearing a penguin suit. Naturally.

After releasing Urban Freeride Lives In Vienna and reaching 700,000 subscribers, he said thank you by doing a double backflip on his street trials bike.

Fabiolous Escape 2

Nine years and four months after he started, Fabio Wibmer finally has a million YouTube subscribers. He had to watch the historic moment alone in hospital, as he'd suffered a broken collarbone during his latest project: a very special release filmed to thank his followers – Fabiolous Escape 2.

Check out some behind-the-scenes shots from Fabio's smartphone snapped during the shooting of Fabiolous Escape 2: