Becoming a Youtuber

W

Wrathcaster

I'd take a thousand Pewdiepies over angryjoe, and I don't even like Pewdiepie. Angryjoe comes off as a spoiled child to me. He made a video about the new ContentID bullshit, and although I agreed with pretty much all of his feelings on the topic, his rant made me feel almost more sympathetic to even the false copyright claimants than him. I guess I just don't like getting angrily screamed and hear constant moaning and complaining from a guy who plays video games for a living.

I'm honestly surprised you guys haven't heard of Jackfrags or FrankieonPCin1080p. They're by a wide margin my favorites, but I suppose I'm more clued into them because of DayZ. Still, both strike me as being much more agreeable, and at least in Frankie's case, mature than a lot of gaming Youtubers out there. He doesn't put a huge effort into trying to be hilarious in his commentary and I enjoy the videos all the more for it. I often get the impression from people like Tobuscus and Pewdiepie that they're just doing anything they can to make themselves appear funny, whereas the humor seems to come more naturally from the events in videos themselves from the Youtubers I like the most.

The quality is also flawless in Frankie's case, and I really want to know exactly what his method is for getting Youtube to cooperate and not horrifically degrade the video. I use the same recording and editing software as him and a lot of other Youtube gamers, but not getting anything near to the same end result of uploaded videos.

To give an example, check out the beginning to this video from Frankie. He's using the same codec and program (Dxtory) as me, with the same editing software (Vegas), and playing on a game with basically the same engine as the one I'm working with, or in the case of newer videos, the exact same engine. This example shows a nighttime shot, which seems to be the most telling aspect of the quality of my uploads- it's damn near unwatchable at night, just a pixelated mess. It looks as good as it can get in his, even when it's not being played in 1080p.

 
xrg

xrg

Golden Squire
180
59
Frankie is the only one I watch. He has a cool voice, and his videos play out like movies. The Altis Life one awhile back where they get harassed by the cops and by the end have a rebel army bankrolling their equipment to wreck the cops shit is hilarious.

 
W

Wrathcaster

xrg_sl said:
Frankie is the only one I watch. He has a cool voice, and his videos play out like movies. The Altis Life one awhile back where they get harassed by the cops and by the end have a rebel army bankrolling their equipment to wreck the cops shit is hilarious.

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The Altis Life videos are some of the most hilarious material I've seen in anything, period. I loved Frankie's perspective, but Jack's coverage of the whole series of events just reduced me to tears. Absolutely priceless.

It's a shame those two don't work together nearly as often anymore. Frankie's videos featuring Jack are my favorite of his channel, and likewise with Jack's stuff.

 
Lanx

Lanx

<Prior Amod>
60,510
132,407
Wrathcaster_sl said:
I'd take a thousand Pewdiepies over angryjoe, and I don't even like Pewdiepie. Angryjoe comes off as a spoiled child to me. He made a video about the new ContentID bullshit, and although I agreed with pretty much all of his feelings on the topic, his rant made me feel almost more sympathetic to even the false copyright claimants than him. I guess I just don't like getting angrily screamed and hear constant moaning and complaining from a guy who plays video games for a living.
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i think you should watch the video again and understand why every youtube partner(ppl who make money off youtube from ads) are now preparing exit strategies to jump ship (many looking to twitch).

i mean you did want to eventually monitize your "hobby"? right there's only 3 ways.

1.sponsorship
2.youtube partner
3.kickstarter

it goes deeper than just google implementing contentid, it's that google can just make generalized wide sweeps of change that directly affect this tiny niche industry and they can just say "fuck it, somehow it'll sort itself out". while my experience isn't with youtube partnership(basically google), it is with google adwords/adsense/search and just the shitty shit google does.
 
W

Wrathcaster

I'm already on Twitch. I stream regularly, but it doesn't give me the ability to edit the way I'd like. Until Twitch is more than just a streaming site, I'm pretty much stuck with youtube. I am monetizing, but it's not that important to me. I don't expect this to be a stream of revenue, instead it has a lot more to do with my desire to do something with all the time spent gaming.
 
mkopec

mkopec

<Gold Donor>
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I like the dude from LevelCap gaming. I enjoy his style of youtubing. Of course its mostly for military type shooter crap, but he really does it well, IMO.

No swearing, no stupid humor crap, just infos from a dude which is exceptionally good at shooters.

For humor I really like robbaz. I like his style of humor and of course his accent really adds to it, IMO.
 
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Syringed_sl

shitlord
104
0
lanx_sl said:
i think you should watch the video again and understand why every youtube partner(ppl who make money off youtube from ads) are now preparing exit strategies to jump ship (many looking to twitch).

i mean you did want to eventually monitize your "hobby"? right there's only 3 ways.

1.sponsorship
2.youtube partner
3.kickstarter

it goes deeper than just google implementing contentid, it's that google can just make generalized wide sweeps of change that directly affect this tiny niche industry and they can just say "fuck it, somehow it'll sort itself out". while my experience isn't with youtube partnership(basically google), it is with google adwords/adsense/search and just the shitty shit google does.
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Also, as people like Totalbiscut have pointed out with Garry's Incident, copyright claims are often used to censor people from speaking out about shitty music/games/movies/media. There's basically zero penalty for the person throwing out the copyright claim and it can be for virtually anything. Some media moguls are far worse than others. I got dinged with a copyright claim on youtube for using the 1960s Batman transition sound effect (A 1 second Mp3) by Warner Bros Studios. Those guys really don't put up with anyone using anything from Batman at all if you plan to monetize it. Now, you can get away with using some copyrighted music in youtube if you're willing to put the mp3 into audacity and tweak the pitch/speed/tempo by a few points as the contentID bots are looking for wavelength matches when it comes to music. This is probably old news now because I hear their contentID bots are on to this which makes for more false positives of course.

Seconded for having a backup plan that isn't youtube. I've noticed a lot of people moving towards Dailymotion/Twitch.tv as their backup plan. What's great about Dailymotion is while they're slow as fuck sometimes, they almost never remove your videos. The other options are much more difficult. More so if your youtube channel is gaming/Let's play formats. Blip.tv pretty much only accepts webseries, serial content, and live action reviews. They *love* to remove content that doesn't fit that bill like Let's Plays or your cat videos (Angry Joe can get away with a Blip.tv account because his videos fit more of a TV Show appearance in content. Robbaz, unfortunately, wouldn't make it). Vimeo, Viddler, and Veoh won't allow gaming related content for the most part and are heavily slanted towards short films, documentaries, or businesses advertising themselves. What's sad is a lot of these guys had a chance to come forward as a viable youtube alternative after the Google+/ContentID fuck ups but they chose to grab their dicks instead.
 
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Prime_sl

shitlord
71
0
How many views/subscribers do you generally need for this to be a real gig? If you see someone that puts out a video per day that gets 100k views, what kind of cash does that relate to?
 
V

Valos

Golden Knight of the Realm
604
13
A good deal of subscribers and views on a few videos to hit the good payouts. The likelihood of you getting 100k views on every video you throw out is very small as everyone and their mother is trying to be a youtube video game star and most have zero hooks. Gaming collectives with a good variety of personalities and chemistry playing co-op games will get you into the door easiest.

If you get into any exclusive alphas/betas and are allowed to put out content you'll have a easier time of it. But seriously, go look at how many people are out there doing this now. When starting up an account your location matters too. One of the reasons pewdiepie got so big so quick is because he started out in Sweden, with english videos. And moved the Italy, with english videos. This helped promote him in those parts of the world due to youtubes algorithm for localized content appearing to peoples "what to watch/whats popular". Now he travels around for a few months at a time and gets even more promotion from youtube for this. He has been in the US and UK as well, I believe.

It might be a moot point, as mentioned, with the content id crap. As alot of the big name guys are trying to go elsewhere. Twitch is a easy site to monetize your gaming, as you basically dictate how often you want a ad to play. 4 times a hour @ 500 viewers minus the adblock and you're left with about 200-250 viewers. Lets do a 4 hour block of gaming time, with 4 adverts an hour @ 15 minute intervals or 2 ads per 30 minute gaming block depending on what you're playing. So 16 x 200 for 3200 add views, and lets say you do it 5 days a week, 16000 add views a week. So then its basically 16000/1000 = 16 * $3.50 or 56 dollars a week. For 500 viewers a day, no subscribers added in, those numbers are harder to digest. To partner with Twitch I believe the number is still 350-450 viewers average.

As for youtube, I remember seeing people saying they got about 2 bucks for a video with 700 views. But it takes abit more to reach partner status, normally a single video hitting 15,000 will get you the foot in the door. The first video you cash in on will take the longest, past that you're trusted and can monetize other videos super easily.
 
Noodleface

Noodleface

A Mod Real Quick
37,961
14,508
Dude you want to know how to be a youtuber? Go to the video thread and watch all of Waffles videos he's been posting. Don't do any of what he does. Even the looks.
 
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Syringed_sl

shitlord
104
0
Valos_sl said:
A good deal of subscribers and views on a few videos to hit the good payouts. The likelihood of you getting 100k views on every video you throw out is very small as everyone and their mother is trying to be a youtube video game star and most have zero hooks. Gaming collectives with a good variety of personalities and chemistry playing co-op games will get you into the door easiest.
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QFT. Just like how many MMOs are trying to be the next big thing by copying WoW, you get a lot of derps like Waffles copying Pewdiepie. And just like those MMOs, those people happen to crash and burn just as bad. You are dead on about "zero hooks", sometimes people post stuff that gets zero hits until they find their gimmick. (SeaNanners used to do solo Call of Duty videos that were boring as hell until he started playing with his friends who could do a ton of impersonations on que.)
 
D

Draegan_sl

2 Minutes Hate
10,034
3
Your best bet is to just get on to Twitch, play games, try to build a follow. Get someone with tits to sit behind you. Use your youtube channel to dump videos to that are fun.

Consistency is key to this unless you are funny/charismatic/creative where you are a natural hook to your audience.
 
Vlett

Vlett

Lord Nagafen Raider
817
69
mkopec_sl said:
I like the dude from LevelCap gaming. I enjoy his style of youtubing. Of course its mostly for military type shooter crap, but he really does it well, IMO.

No swearing, no stupid humor crap, just infos from a dude which is exceptionally good at shooters.

For humor I really like robbaz. I like his style of humor and of course his accent really adds to it, IMO.
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Agreed about Levelcap. He's very niche, but he has a 680k+ following. Uploads at least a video a day and by the evening has 50k views on the average video. I use him for information instead of reading the shit from Dice's website for BF4 updates because he translates the bullshit really well.

I also listen to most of my music via youtube now too, from bands like walk off the earth or just completely uploaded albumns. I've heard of people getting into this using other famous youtubers to help develop background music and effects to get their names added in the about information box for cross linking.
 
C

Corndog

Lord Nagafen Raider
517
113
For monetizing you're going about it all wrong. Go find youself a local game store. Aka, a store like say gamestop except a non chain. Then strike up a deal where they pay you to produce content. You get to say this wrathcaster297 reporting for the store lame gamez. You let them have the monetizing money as you're just producing and uploading to their youtube channel.

Then when you want to move to the next project you show people what you've done over at lame gamez and tell them how you could do it so much better for their xyz company etc. People like who own a business would pay a hefty sum for someone who could churn out content on a weekly basis in the name of my business.
 
W

Wrathcaster

TBH I know I've mentioned monetization in virtually every post, but it's not actually my endgame here. I don't expect that I'll ever earn much off my channel, especially with the direction Youtube is heading. I did want to monetize, however, because why the hell not? There's ads on every damn thing out there, and a lot of gamers who would actually care about ads interrupting content already use adblockers/noscript plugins.

That said, I wouldn't mind making money off the content. I'm not going to pretend that it's not a horrible thing to gain revenue from doing something I already enjoy, especially when I put a decent amount of effort into producing the material.

I know the legal hurdles, and I know those hurdles will become steeper as Youtube continues to settle with labels, megacorps, and businesses at the behest of interest groups. I do have to admit part of the attraction was seeing just how quickly I would get smacked with ContentID claims.

It took two videos. My first was content created entirely by myself (with music created by a friend) aside from the game itself. That one was fine, no problem at all. I monetized that one to test the waters

The second video was another test. I did a Let's Play of Burial Under Sea DLC and didn't turn off background music, but I didn't monetize. Slapped with copyright claim immediately from what likely amounted to a brief selection of background music. I wasn't completely surprised, but I was a bit taken aback that a channel from a guy with less than 300 views, on a video that wasn't monetized got flagged and actually claimed. I immediately took it down, of course, but it really does confound me how I got hit when so many other non-partner channels managed to stick up Let's Plays of essentially the exact same content, running ads, and not getting hit. Weird. Maybe it was just a fluke, or some sort of error? No idea.

I appreciate all the suggestions, though. I used to stream all the time, but as I said before Twitch kind of lost me because of my inability to get creative with editing and the lack of control over the end product. There's also the fact that I get a rather nasty performance drop running OBS and Dxtory at the same time. I know that there's support for using Dxtory to stream, but I've been a lazy ass about it. I suppose I'll have to work that out if I want to grow my channel.

The channel is here, if anyone cares to have a look. Would love suggestions if you guys think the channel artwork or video quality looks particularly crappy.

JendrykGaming
 
W

Wrathcaster

If you like being harassed by 12 year old pretend police officers who shoot you for driving a mile over the speed limit (how do they even fucking know?) or frame you by planting $500,000 worth of LSD on your handcuffed body, then yeah. It's fun. Altis Life for Arma 3 is supposed to be a blast though and my friends play it pretty much exclusively, but I'm loathe to buy Arma 3 since every time I buy a game that they play because they have a horrible track record of quitting within 2 weeks of me making the purchase.

Assholes.
 
Gnomedolf

Gnomedolf

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Only tip I can give you is to have big tits. If you don't have big tits, get them. If you're a guy, you should still get big tits.
 
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