I’m 27, from Carlow, and I have a really good skill in making videos go viral. I’m a YouTuber first and foremost, and I’m what you would call a YouTube strategist. We plug in my team into a YouTube channel and aim to work and grow with them. My rate would typically work out at more than $1,000 (€900) an hour. I’m very lucky and privileged, because I am, in my opinion, the best at what I do.
I’ve worked with about 300 channels over the years and recently calculated that the videos I’ve directly worked on with other channels have accumulated in the region of 10 billion views.
Where I grew up in the countryside, I was a little isolated from where a lot of my friends were. I got a camera when I was seven or eight years old, and immediately started shooting and editing videos. I’d make little compilations and montages and show my brother, my family, my grandad. Then I saw this thing called YouTube pop up.
I posted a video in 2007 and it ended up getting 15 views, one like and two dislikes, but I just thought it was amazing. From there I just got obsessed with the idea of growing YouTube channels. I made all these different channels over the years, most of which I’ve now folded (although there’s probably some embarrassing content there – I had a video where I was just wrestling my brother and putting in WWE title cards).
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I have all these pages of notes from 2008 where I would just track the views of the most-viewed videos on the platform every day. I still have them somewhere. I remember going away on holiday one year and Linkin Park just uploaded a song for a Transformers movie. I remember tracking the views before my holiday and then making a prediction for when I came back. I’ve just always geeked out about this stuff.
I looked at the numbers with my YouTube business and realised I would make more working for myself on the thing I love
Making videos has been my lifelong passion. The average views per video on my channel, which analyses viral videos, is about one million. The average views for The Late Late Show is about 500,000. I’m not by any means saying I have a bigger influence than The Late Late Show, but when you think about how much resources that has, it’s an interesting thing to compare.
In January 2020, I had just been given a job offer in a large tech company in Dublin. I was interested, but I looked at the numbers with my YouTube business and realised I would make more working for myself on the thing I love. I thought it would be crazy not to pursue it.
I started to realise there was a real bigger industry behind YouTube. It surprises people when I say that a lot of the teams I work with have 20 to 50 people on just the YouTube channel. YouTube gives you all this data about how videos are performing; for example, exactly where people leave your video. I can go in, see that, and using my experience in data analysis, I can help YouTubers predict videos that are going to work well and videos they should avoid. It started as a freelance side-gig and now is a full-time business with three employees.
A YouTube channel will come to us and they’ll be like, “Hey, we’re doing a million dollars a month. We’re doing ‘this’ many views. How can we scale it up?” I’ve worked with MrBeast, Red Bull, Jesser (the biggest basketball creator in the world), Noah Kagan, and one of the biggest kids’ channels, Rebecca Zamolo. I’ve had people that paid me $50,000 to $100,000 in fees that have generated an extra $2-3 million in revenue.
If anyone reading this has clicked on a video and felt disappointed, I don’t think it’s a video I’ve worked on
I was talking to someone a while ago – a middle-aged Irish person – and I said I have a business that works with YouTubers. They said to me: “Oh wow, that’ll look great on the CV.” I’ll never forget. Growing up, people said: “Stop that. That’s stupid. That’s not going anywhere, do a proper job.” Now, very much the conversation has shifted.
When making a video, I consider the topic first, then the packaging and how it’s presented in its title and thumbnail image. Only then do I script out and shoot a video. I’ll YouTubify it by cutting out any areas that feel too lengthy, keeping it easy to understand and digestible. I’ll record my voiceover with my microphone. I’ll put the voiceover in my editing software and I’ll start animating scene by scene with a mixture of software.
There’s a stereotype that YouTube is clickbait. It can definitely fall into that category, but my approach has always been to use the packaging to entice a click – and then overdeliver. I think exaggeration to an extent is fine, but it has to deliver. If anyone reading this has clicked on a video and felt disappointed, I don’t think it’s a video I’ve worked on.
The people who have been in this industry for 10 to 15 years are very like me. Even someone like MrBeast – I’ve known Jimmy for quite a while – and he has a similar personality: just very analytical and very into this “mad scientist approach” to making content.
I have a long waitlist of people who want to work with me. My thing right now is making sure I keep scaling, because there’s enough demand here to build a very large company. – In conversation with Conor Capplis