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>> V/O: It’s hard to believe that just over a decade ago, YouTube didn’t even exist,
yet now it’s the second largest search engine in the world, with over one billion users,
and creators everywhere trying to turn video sharing into full-time careers.
>> JOSH: My YouTube channel is Josh Rimer.
>> SHANNON: Baker Twins.
>> RYKER: High On Life.
>> NADINE: Hey Nadine.
>> DEREK: David Brown TV
>> SARAH: The Domestic Geek.
>> V/O: Most people think it’s as easy as posting a video online and letting the views--and
dollars--roll in. But is it?
In this episode of SHIFT, we meet successful YouTubers
to learn what it takes to make it online...and start a YouTube channel from scratch
to find out if there’s a formula to becoming a popular YouTuber and prove if anyone can really do it
[main title music]
>>V/O: Questions. Once they get in you, they can take you almost anywhere. And when you
start searching for answers, you realize that other people are looking for the same things.
>> V/O: We are spending the next year taking a closer look at the things we do and say
every day without questioning why. This is our way of exploring all the big and small
questions that shape our lives and we want you to join us.
>> V/O: A recent study in the UK by Tesco Mobile discovered that over 40% of young adults
under 25 would choose a career as YouTube personality over becoming a doctor, lawyer,
or even a pop music star.
>> PEWDIEPIE: Can someone explain to me what is happening?
>> V/O: Which isn’t surprising because YouTube is big money if you know what you’re doing.
The company earned 3.5 billion dollars of revenue in 2013. Two billion dollars of that
went to content creators around the world.
[choking]
>> V/O: And that’s just ad revenue - YouTubers are also making big money from sponsorship
deals, brand partnerships, signing bonuses with Multi-Channel Networks, and appearance
fees for various events. Make no mistake, this is a multi-billion dollar industry and
with numbers this big it’s easy to see why so many people are trying to make a career
on YouTube. And anyone can do it--which includes us, right?
>> SEAN: Hi, I’m Sean.
>> STEVE: Hi, I’m Steve.
>> SEAN: This week, we’re launching a brand new YouTube channel called The Big Shift and
we’re using it to answer three questions: how difficult is it to become a successful
YouTuber, can anyone do it, and how much money will we make off our brand new YouTube channel.
>> STEVE: I might be the stupidest idea we’ve ever done or the most genius...
>> V/O: If you want to start a YouTube channel properly you’ll basically be starting a
new business. First things first: we need to choose a name and start a channel.
>> STEVE: Each week we’ll be uploading a different video to see what people like watching
and what they don’t.
>> V/O: Then we need to build a brand, design a logo, shoot and edit a channel trailer,
shoot promo photography, create channel art, develop a website and create new social media
channels. All this and we haven’t even posted our first actual YouTube video yet
>> SEAN: So...
>> STEVE: Join us.
>> V/O: YouTuber Austin Pamaj has over 1.5 million subscribers and 170 million channel
views. He’s turned his channel into a full-time business over the past four-years.
>> AUSTIN: This should not be allowed. No. This should not be allowed! This shouldn’t
be allowed. No way.
>> STEVE: He is a gaming YouTuber. So he basically plays video games and comments on them. He
has a huge subscriber base and we’re excited to find out a little bit more about what he
does.
>> V/O: Austin’s YouTube channel falls in the “live-play” genre of gaming. He records
his comments and reactions to games, while also telling stories or anecdotes about his
life.
>> AUSTIN: When me and my brothers moved out uh my mom wrote all of us letters. I figured
I would share it with you guys. Kids write to you and say: you saved my life. This is
a gift son and a responsibility. I love you Austin forever now and forever tomorrow.
>> AUSTIN: Whenever I say I do YouTube for a living, they’re always like, what’s
that? What do you mean? We’ve never heard that before.
>> SEAN: This is your full-time job?
>> AUSTIN: This is the full-time. I’ve been high-school for six months.
>> V/O: Austin is originally from Perry Sound, a small town of 144 people in Northern Ontario.
He started making videos when he was 14.
>> AUSTIN: Back then not a lot of people weren’t uploading every single day. Being the first
person to upload every single day in the community I’m in is the reason I blew up.
>> AUSTIN: It all started off on ... about three or four months before BlackOps came
out cause that’s when I first started sniping.
>> SEAN: A lot of people wonder how do you make money. You do this full-time so how is
it that you make money off videos online?
>> AUSTIN: So there’s affiliate codes, there’s sponsorships, there’s potential product
placements and the there’s the merchandise and the ad revenue made off of videos.
>> SEAN: So way more complex than just making a video.
>> AUSTIN: Yeah it’s more than just making a video. There’s so much more around it.
>> V/O: Austin’s first channel has been so successful that he started a second channel
to earn even more money.
>> AUSTIN: People would rather hear you talk about a story or something embarrassing that
happened about you or something that happened with your family. They want to know more about
you rather than just watching the game play with music and syncing behind it. They would
rather talk to people and watch people that they can relate to.
>> AUSTIN: My grandma called me awesome. And you know what? At the time, I thought it sounded
like Austin. It was pretty close. So you know I carried on.
>> AUSTIN: As cheesy as it sounds, there’s really only one of you on there. So if they
relate to you a lot more than anyone else, then they’ll watch you. People expect it
to happen overnight.
>> STEVE: Mmm
>> AUSTIN: It happens over time. You’ve got to be patient. Patience is probably the
biggest thing with YouTube.
>> SEAN: This week we decided to pull the trigger and start making our YouTube videos.
>> STEVE: We’re ready to go. We’re making a lot of content.
>> SEAN: Guess these celebrity eye bags!
>> STEVE: The first web hit for this search is this photo of Adele.
>> STEVE: Every week on our channel, we’ll be posting two videos: one YouTube experiment
modeled after popular YouTube content and one explainer video to recap what we’re
doing and why we’re doing it.
>> SEAN: And our experiment this week is a celebrity list video.
>> STEVE: That’s low-level genius.
>> SEAN: Genius!
>> SEAN: We’re now in the second week of running our YouTube channel and the amount
of work involved so far is astounding. >> STEVE: A little tired. Lots going on. We
haven’t stopped.
>> STEVE: This week on SHIFT, we’re giving you your daily dose of science with “Eye
Bags vs Eye Circles: What’s The Difference” experiment.
>> STEVE: Seeing how much time it’s taking up it’s getting a little daunting to think
of putting this out consistently every single week.
>> SEAN: Will we be able to double our views from 130 to 260?
>> STEVE: Ah I think it was 154. Maybe we can double our subscribers from...
>> SEAN: 16 to 32.
[laughter]
>> SEAN: YouTubers are crazy.
>> V/O: YouTube regularly puts on events in cities around the world so YouTubers can meet
each other and increase their followings, increase their video views, and in the end,
increase the amount of money they’re making from their channels...and for YouTube.
>> DAVID: Mingle, meet with one another and definitely just enjoy yourself.
>> V/O: This morning they’ve assembled the most successful YouTubers in Vancouver to
give advice to up-and-coming talent...including us. This is a really small event in comparison
to events like Playlist Live, VidCon and the Buffer Festival...but our channel is brand
new, so we’re lucky to be here.
>> SEAN: Something weird happened over Christmas. We had the viral video of Christmas 2014.
>> DAVID: My name is David Brown. I lead Canada for YouTube. We spend a lot of time trying
to help creators grow their audience, grow their channels, develop their channel strategies
on YouTube and ultimately we want to support creators that are really leaning into YouTube
as a platform for their careers.”
>> SEAN: Let’s say hypothetically we are going to start a channel right after talking
to you from scratch with nothing and make a go of it...is it still possible to become
Jenna Marbles?
>> JENNA MARBLES: Welcome to my tutorial on how to trick people into thinking you’re
really good looking. Before I go to work I like to pump myself up by crying over my master’s
degree.
>> DAVID: Yeah you know I think fundamentally our platform needs to be the place where anyone
can get started. One of the misconceptions is that this just happens, this just you know
is a magically thing that I went to bed one night and I uploaded a video and the next
morning I woke up and I was a YouTube celebrity.
>> DAVID: These creators work very very hard at their craft. Ultimately what we want to
do is give creators the opportunity to be the best version of themselves or create the
best versions of their content. And so rather instead of a couple hit series, we want thousands
or millions of hit series so stats is stuff like more people watch Vice on YouTube than
the Colbert Report on TV, more people watch Rosanna Pansino in a given month on YouTube
than Giada At Home on the Food Network.
>> DAVID: So stories like that get us really excited about the potential of these kinds
of creators, so we really want to double down on those creators.
>> CBS: We’ll have more news in 90 seconds but first let’s get you in the holiday mood.
You’re going to absolutely love this.
>> ABC: Finally a YouTube video of a dog dressed like Santa riding on top of a Roomba.
>> FOX: This is Five, the Boston terrier. But he goes by Santa Dog at this time of year.
>> KRON4: It’s a hard-hitting story. Look at that cute dog!
>> FOX: It’s simply irresistible folks!
>> ABC: For some reason this is blowing up the Internet.
>> SEAN: We had a really crazy Christmas. Our YouTube video the “Dog on a Roomba Experiment
#3” video exploding on the Internet.
>> STEVE: We had a Christmas sensation.
>> MUSIC: Oh Pancho! Oh ***! Oh Pedro! Oh Blitzen! Ole! Ole! Ole! Santa Claus!
>> SEAN: It was actually one of the viral videos of Christmas 2014.
>> V/O: We learned at the YouTube meetup that seasonality is a huge strategy when it comes
to viral videos. We decided to put our dog Five on a Roomba as an experiment modeled
after YouTubers like TexasGirly1979.
>> V/O: We then we sent it out to big blogs like Mashable, Laughing Squid and Buzzfeed
to see if they would run it. In the end, it was covered by all three of those blogs, along
with E! Online, CBS News, Fox, ABC, The Today Show, and a few others.
>> SEAN: Would’ve you guessed three weeks into our experiment that we would’ve hit
a million views?
>> STEVE: Never. >> SEAN: We had 500 channel views for everything
that we had posted so far.
>> STEVE: Yeah. It was just kind of like one of those a bit of a downer moment. Of course
it can’t just happen right away. Of course we’re going to have to give it some time.
>> SEAN: But then it did happen right away.
>> STEVE: I know.
[laughter]
>> SEAN: Geniuses.
[music]
>> V/O: Today we’re meeting up with IFHT to talk about their channel and their next
video shoot. We met IFHT at the YouTube Does Vancouver event. They started their channel
in 2010 and make short-form comedy videos including list videos, how-to videos, and
comedy music videos.
>> JASON: Oh my god is that Matt?
>> MATT: Oh god is that Jason?
>> JASON: This is going to be just awful.
>> MATT: I wonder if he’s going to notice my new sweater.
>> JASON: Damn that’s a nice sweater!
>> MATT: Who’s starting?
>> JASON: We just rehearsed!
>> MATT: Oh. Okay.
>> JASON: I’m just saying I’m Jason.
>> MATT: I just want to say I’m Matt.
>> JASON: That’s all you want to say?
>> MATT: Yeah.
>> JASON: No.
>> MATT: That’s all you want to say!
>> JASON: I don’t want to say I’m Matt. I’m Jason.
>> V/O: And if you’re wondering what IFHT stands for...
>> JASON: “We did a rebrand a couple years ago to just IFHT and I think we’ve ran into
a couple of on-air interviews where they’re like IFHT and if you’re wondering what that
stands for, look it up online.
[music]
>> MATT: You know we had our first viral video called “All About the LGs” that went viral
over night got maybe a 100,000 overnight and that was something we hadn’t experienced
yet. On the other spectrum we’ve done videos that get over 10 million in a week or so.
There’s all these moments that’s like whoa maybe we have something. Now we have
a series called How To Be.
>> V/O: How To Be A Vancouverite...follow these steps and you too can be like us.
>> MATT: That was only a couple years ago and we realized maybe we can do a successful
series and keep getting hits.
>> STEVE: Yeah.
>> MATT: A lot of YouTubers make videos every week.
>> STEVE: Or every day.
>> MATT: Or every day. With just us two most of the time doing most of the work. It’s
quite hard to make a video--two videos a month even.
>> STEVE: Do you have plans beyond what you’re doing right now to take the channel?
>> MATT: We’re really interested in doing branded content. In the past year we’ve
done videos such as How To Be A Skier for companies like Mountain Equipment Co-Op.
>> JASON: Thanks to our friends at MEC for all the help with this video.
>> MATT: Most of the gear you saw in this video can be found at MEC stores or MEC.ca.
>> MATT: And that’s what we really want to get into. We want to combine our brand
with other brands and make viral content.
>> JASON: We put certain elements into these videos that are sharable. Like with the How-To-Bes
there’s a quote in it that’s going to resonate with someone, they’re going to
be like LOL on Facebook, this is totally me. Or tag their friend and it’s totally them.
So that’s sort of how we target our audiences and make it spread it themselves. We don’t
put any money into advertising or anything like that.
>> MATT: The people that people starting YouTube need to realize is that sites they’re always
looking for content. >> STEVE: Totally.
>> SEAN: We’re just leaving Matt’s house in Richmond to head back downtown to Vancouver.
We’re going to meet them in a couple hours for when they film their next video. One of
the things that really struck me about those two is that they work really *** the distribution
side of their videos. So not only do they make them but they make sure there’s an
audience waiting to watch them by reaching out to blogs, sending them out to Twitter,
Facebook, through Reddit. They’re cool guys.
>> MATT: We’ll probably shoot it from there. Towards me. And then we’ll just get people
walking by with the stands or whatever.
>> MATT: It’s what we like to do. It’s fun. When you have the final product and you
can share it with everybody and make people laugh, make yourselves laugh and be proud
of something, it’s a really great feeling.
>> SEAN: We are on set for IFHT’s latest video. They are just about to start filming.
It looks like it’s going well.
>> STEVE: Yep. It’s crazy. I mean they’re jumping from scene to scene. There’s a ton
of people involved. But it’s going well.
>> SEAN: Matt’s directing.
>> STEVE: And Jason seems to be a little more actor.
>> SEAN: They make a good team.
>> MATT: That’s great. Perfect. We don’t need another one.
>> SEAN: Great to join IFHT behind the set for their latest video, but I think our channel
needs a lot of work.
>> STEVE: Yeah. I would like to pull a script or do something like this that has a little
more production value to it and make something that I think would be funny and has a little
more character to it rather than the things that we have to slug away and get out once
a week.
>> SEAN: We have a little work to do.
>> STEVE: Totally. We need to pull up our socks.
>> V/O: It’s been a few weeks since our Dog on a Roomba video went viral and we’ve
had several Multi-Channel Networks (or MCNs) reach out to us about our channel. We’ve
also released two new experiments that haven’t done very well, so maybe this interest is
coming at a good time. We’ve managed to set-up a call with BroadbandTV, the 3rd largest
MCN in the world, to get some more info on how they can help us grow.
[phone ringing]
>> SEAN: Hey, Adam.
>> ADAM: Hey, Sean. How are you? Thank you so much for getting on a call with us.
>> V/O: MCNs are...complicated. From what we’ve heard, they’re the YouTube equivalent
of a television network. They acquire YouTube channels and sell advertising around the content.
>> V/O: During our call with Adam, we also found out that they also help creators with
sponsorship opportunities, collaborations with other YouTubers, legal issues, and with
promotion and distribution through their YouTube network collaborators.
>> ADAM: Talk to you guys soon.
>> SEAN: Sounds good. Thanks, Adam.
>> STEVE: Thanks. Bye.
>> STEVE: It seemed a little too good to be true, so we’ll read through the contract
and see what that is like. But I don’t know. I’m a little on the fence.
>> SEAN: I’m a little like let’s go for it. They are one of the biggest...like one
of the biggest MCNs in the world.
>> STEVE: I know they are. I have my reservations. And we’ll see what happens. But I’m kind
of with you as well. We’ll see.
>> V/O: This afternoon, we’re heading out to the suburbs to meet the guys from Convos
With My 2YR Old. Convos is a scripted comedy series that features two men reenacting conversations
between a father and his 2-year-old daughter.
>> DAVID: You can’t talk to her right now.
>> MATT: Okay. Well that’s my wife.
>> DAVID: No. She’s not your wife. She’s the princess.
>> DAVID: Look at how much fun we’re having.
>> STEVE: It’s a YouTube that has a fairly big subscriber base, quite a few views. I
remember watching the very first video. It was just one of those viral sensations that
showed up in my newsfeed on Facebook, on Twitter, and then just kind of took off from there.
So I’m really interested to see who they are and what are the people like behind the
actual channel and see where they’re heading with the channel.
>> SEAN: Matt and Dave have invited us to an improv session for a show they’re making
for television and I think web. So they’re waiting for us behind stage. I’m pretty
excited to meet them finally.
>> STEVE: Yeah yeah. It’s going to be a good time.
>> SEAN: Let’s go.
>> SEAN: These guys hit it big with their first video and were an overnight success.
Which got us thinking, maybe it is possible to make it big-time with just one video?
>> MATT: Hello I’m Matt.
>> DAVID: I’m David.
>> MATT: And we’re from the hit YouTube show, Convos With My 2yr Old.
>> DAVID: I though he was going to forget the title of his own show.
>> MATT: No. It was a dramatic pause.
>> DAVID: It sounded like you were forgetting.
>> MATT: No I had it.
[music]
>> MATT: Ah so. Where are you going?
>> DAVID: I need to go to the store to get some gas prices. I need to go to the store
to buy a harmonica. I need to go to the store to buy some celery. Okay?
>> STEVE: And so you watched that first video climb, what was happening?
>> MATT: What was the progression? It hit 301 and it stalls out...and I was like what’s
going on. This is broke. And I think next it was 64,000. And next time I checked it
was 300,000. And it was about four million within the week. It took about a week. And
that first week was about four million views.
>> MATT: It was crazy. All of the sudden we were getting emails from press outlets from
all over the place and doing interviews.
>> DAVID: Huffington post. They were fans right away.
>> MATT: We really did not expect that. It was the silly kinda fun side project.
>> David: Now it’s taking up all our lives. And we’re completely miserable.
[laughter]
>> MATT: Alright. Let’s snuggle in and go to sleep.
>> KID: I don’t want to go to sleep.
>> DAVID: I’m just not sleepy. I’m bored.
>> MATT: You’re supposed to be bored. It’s bedtime. My goal is actually to bore you asleep.
>> DAVID: Fine.
>> DAVID: We have a very wide demographic. Networks you should be all over us.
>> MATT: We communicate to the heart of humanity.
>> DAVID: To everybody.
>> MATT: We transcend demographics.
>> STEVE: Is that where you want to take this if possible like something like Netflix maybe?
>> DAVID: Absolutely. It would be great to do longer medium I think. I mean we like short-form
stories but we would also like to tell longer stories. Whether they be in a TV format or
in film.
>> STEVE: Do you have plans to do that?
>> DAVID: Yeah. This would be one of those ideas. Improvisors judging improvisors in
the Roman Improv games. There are a couple of movies we’re going to try to produce.
We’ve got that in the bag and we’ve got some TV show ideas.
>> STEVE: Cool.
>> DAVID: Wait.
>> MATT: What?
>> KID: My tummy’s ticking and I’m so hungry.
>> STEVE: Do you guys have a Multi-Channel Network that you work with right now?
>> MATT: We do. We work with Maker Studios.
>> SEAN: And what sort of stuff have they done to help you develop your channel and
sort of your brand?
>> MATT: They’ve really helped us sort of optimize the channel and the platform of YouTube.
>> STEVE: Do they bring you funding at all?
>> MATT: Yeah. They bring us sponsorships. Geico sponsored the Season 4. And that was
through them.
>> DAVID: Which was great.
>> MATT: Which was awesome. A bit of a dream come true. You know. In the sense that there’s
people who actually care about what we’re doing. We have an audience. We have this subscriber
base and this fan base. What’s really great about web and digital content is that your
audience can find you.
>> SEAN: Maybe we were wrong all along. It’s as easy as posting a video and the next day
having a million views.
>> STEVE: Totally. It upsets our whole vision of having to do it for three years and doing
it consistently. Where they just uploaded it once and bam, they had magic. Kind of funny.
I want to have some of that magic.
[laughter]
>> V/O: Matt and Dave have made us reconsider signing with an MCN. Our experiments aren’t
going as well as we hoped and we need some expert advice on what to do next. Today we’re
meeting with Curtis Davey, BroadbandTV’s VIP Manager, to find out if working with an
MCN is right for us.
>> CURTIS: Have you already gone through the YouTube playbook more or less?
>> V/O: Curtis is giving our channel a once over...or maybe a twice over\. We’ve been
so focused on content, that we’ve neglected basics like video titles, thumbnails, descriptions,
and commenting on other YouTubers’ videos. It turns out that our channel isn’t as good
as we thought.
>> CURTIS: I find that people attach themselves to personalities or sort of building a rapport
with personalities is the biggest thing. Brands they’ll find affinity with, but really,
it’s the people behind that brand that people want to connect with on YouTube.
>> CURTIS: Now that as a title itself YouTube experiments I get it because it fits with
the concept of the channel, but the videos themselves are all so sporadic in there that
it’s tough to figure out what the channel is about. You’ve already had that one video
on here and it’s not even on any of the recommendations on the front page.
>> SEAN: Okay.
>> V/O: Clearly we’re a long way off making any money off Shift.
>> V/O: Especially the kind of sponsorships that Austin Pamaj, IFHT and Convos told us
about. Still, we’re impressed with Curtis and we want to work with him to grow our channel,
so we’ve decided to join BroadbandTV.
>> CURTIS: Stoked about working with you though and I’m really excited to see how this goes
and helping out.”
>> SEAN: Awesome.
>> STEVE: Thank you. >> CURTIS: My pleasure. So would you like
to sign these?
>> SEAN: Steve and I had a list of goals when we started our YouTube experiment that were
pretty ambitious.
>> STEVE: And what we realized after the first couple videos that that took a lot more time
than what we thought it was going to.
>> SEAN: We had a video hit one million views, which is incredible. That’s our first officially
viral video. >> STEVE: We had 1.5 million views. We had
this viral hit. People were paying attention and we thought that would kind of kickstart
the whole channel. And really it was just fifteen minutes of fame. Everything dropped
off after that and every video we’ve been uploading since seems to get less and less
views.
>> SEAN: We’ve joined an MCN for better or for worse. We are part of BroadbandTV for
the next year and I still don’t really know what that really means, but I’m excited
to find out.
>> STEVE: In addition to having good high-quality production value, we need to be more a part
of the videos so people can begin to understand who we are, like us, if we are likeable, and
see where we can go from there.
>> SEAN: So two months in. This experiment has been great. We have ten months to go.
I’m still not really sure what we’re going to be creating for our channel or if the way
we’ve built it is the proper way, but we’re going to figure it out and keep posting videos
every Thursday. So we’ll see where this takes us.
>> AUSTIN: What is going on guys? It’s Austin Pamaj here. And today we’re playing Advanced
Warfare.
>> MATT: I’m Matt.
>> JASON: And I’m Jason.
>> MATT: And we’re IFHT on YouTube.
>> MATT: Hello I’m Matt.
>> DAVID: I’m David.
>> MATT: And we are from the hit YouTube show Convos With My 2yr Old.
>> STACEY: I’m Stacey Roy. And I have a YouTube channel called RP WhaBam.
>> RYKER: My name’s Ryker.
>> PARKER: And I’m Parker.
>> SARAH: Hi, I’m Sarah.
>> DEREK: Hello, my name is David Brown.
>> JOSH: Hi, I’m Josh Rimer.
>> SHANNON: Hi, my name is Shannon.
>> NADINE: Hello everyone. My name is Nadine Sykora. Or you may know me as Hey Nadine.
That is my YouTube channel name.
>> JOSH: My YouTube channel is JoshRimer.
>> SHANNON: YouTube.com slash BakerTwins.
>> RYKER: And our YouTube channel is called High On Life.
>> DEREK: David Brown TV and David Brown TV2.
>> SARAH: CoralTV and the other is called The Domestic Geek.
>> JOSH: Why should people watch me?