My latest interviewee is a YouTuber and director, he was among the earliest to adopt the platform and has been posting his videos online since before YouTube even launched.

Some of the highlights from our interview include:
– What the early days (ie 2006) of YouTube were like
– Why it’s best to use YouTube to build a career off platform
– What it was like being an early employee at an MCN

The Confessional is a series of anonymous interview with influencers, brands, marketers, agencies and MCN executives to get honest, no-bullshit opinions on working in the space – the biggest gripes, the toughest lessons, the most valuable advice.

The following has been edited and condensed for clarity.

You were among the first crop of creators on YouTube to actually build a following, back in 2006. How did you get into it? What was your very first video?

Well, my friends and I, we all took drama class together and started making videos together before YouTube existed.

So when YouTube came around, we decided to start posting there. And honestly it was slow for all of us at first.

What was YouTube like back then?

In the early days of YouTube the popular videos were lip-syncing videos or people that did their own parody songs. That was the big first thing on YouTube. You do one of those and doing well on YouTube.

YouTube was never supposed to be anything but fun. It wasn’t even supposed to be a launchpad for a career, which it ended up being (I always wanted to make movies).

You had one of the earliest ‘viral hits’, what was that like?

Well, when we first uploaded [Redacted – name of video] no one really cared.

It was probably up for a month before it got big, and then [Redacted – name of site] featured it, and just like that it was literally overnight. We went from nothing to millions of views.

How did that hit impact things for you and your friends?

So that landed me a meeting with pretty much every single major studio. It landed me meetings with Warner Brothers and Paramount. Everywhere.

But, this was 2006. It’s not like now where you can just take whatever you learn on YouTube and transfer it to some other medium and people understand the business and are ready to cut checks. People didn’t know what they were doing yet.

I had all these meetings and they weren’t quite sure what to do with me. I did get a small production budget from one of the traditional studies and got to direct, but that didn’t quite pay the bills so I went back to YouTube.

Were you guys making any money back then or was this all for fun?

When we started there was no partner program, so there really wasn’t a future, we weren’t making any money. There was no possibility of even thinking about making money on YouTube.

Companies didn’t know what to do with YouTubers.

Now companies, they’ll start you off with a Web series and the start to build you from there. We’ll do a Web series, we’ll put it on YouTube, and maybe we’ll build from there, do a Netflix series or a Yahoo series.

I started getting offers to do random Web commercials, and I did a bunch of them to help pay the bills.

All the friends you started with have gone on to be among the most famous YouTubers out there. How has your relationship with them evolved or changed?

I remember when they all really just started blowing up. They were focusing on their channels and developing their personas, and then almost out of nowhere there’d be people showing up on set (or wherever we were filming) just to meet these guys. It was a really weird transition.

Luckily we’ve stayed close and no one developed crazy ego’s, but there have been challenges.

It’s hard scheduling stuff  – they’ve gotten more popular and they sometimes are spread a bit thin.

You were with one of the MCN’s in the very beginning, what was that like?

Yeah, after I did some directing for a bit I was hired by [Redacted – Name of MCN].

It was awesome. I was the 15th employee they hired. I was so broke at the time, that I didn’t even have a cell phone, I needed a job and they saw one of my videos the next thing I knew, I was working there.

Over the years stuff started changing, and the company got huge.

When it got big and corporate I started to lose my shit with all the bureaucracy.

Where is YouTube headed?

Back in the day, it felt like YouTube was all about bucking the norm, now it feels like it’s all about keeping with the latest trends. On top of it all everybody and their fucking grandma has a YouTube channel, even if it’s just a YouTube channel where they put random iphone videos.

It’s changed to the point where there’s too much now and it’s hard to comb through it all and find anything good or original.

I think people are just putting out more content, and I think it really started that way because I remember these MCN deals where you would sign up with them and you’d have to put up a minimum amount of minutes of content per month.

No matter who the fuck you are, the audience gets bored and just churning out crap doesn’t help.

So what’s next?

I think there’s just going to be another platform out there, I think something else is going to come out. It’s happened now with Vine and instagram – you saw how those fucking just blew up.

I don’t see YouTube as a place to make money; now I see it more as a launching pad for something else. It’s a great platform to showcase yourself and your work.

How do you recommend people make a living off YouTube these days?

The only way you can really make money off YouTube anymore is with brand deals, because CPM’s are just too low.

In the early days the CPM’s were high – it was probably between $7 and $10. Now it’s averaging about $1.25. Sometimes it goes up to $3, but mostly it’s hovering around $1.25.

If you’re looking to act or direct YouTube comes in handy – everybody now looks at your social media numbers. Everybody looks at the numbers. You want to get an acting gig? They’re going to look at your Twitter followers before they look at how good you are. And I’m seeing that everywhere.

What advice do you have for people looking to get into the space and build a YouTube following?

I talk to colleges all the time and I get that question all the time. I always make a joke and tell them, “be good-looking.” It’s very sad but it’s very true.

There’s really no guarantees in this space. Even if you’re the hottest person in the world, you have the best content, and you’re collaborating with someone like Jenna Marbles, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to blow up.

His success comes with confusion and criticism by people who think he earns too much money.

PewDiePie is worth $12 million.

I’d argue that he’s way underpaid for his work.

PewDiePie is one of a growing number YouTubers monetizing the platform to the point of business-building revenue. The present media environment is such that any audience of substantial size can be expressed in real dollars, so this 26-year-old content creator earns about $4 million in revenue per year on ads shown against his content: in-game footage from various PC and console titles with his frenetic free-flowing commentary running over it. It’s a model that might be easy for old-school media orgs to dismiss; it’s inane and doesn’t seem to require too much talent to execute.

But to blow off the examples of PewDiePie and other YouTubers of his ilk would be a mistake on the level of undervaluing an entire family of stocks in an emerging industry. It’s too important.

To determine what is valuable, we ought to look at what tween girls value in the present. PewDiePie and his well-followed YouTuber associates—Jenna Marbles, the Fine Brothers, Michelle Phan, and so on—boast high-value millennial audiences in the millions. These self-employed creatives make their own high-dollar deals with brands and get contracts with major television networks, all while maintaining their homegrown audiences of consequential size. This feature makes them worth an embarrassing multiple of what they are paid today. To be a YouTube content creator of their level is to achieve nothing less than a new caliber of celebrity, one that is made way more efficient with help from technology. To be a well-subscribed talking head on a video site requires little more than the personal computer one already has at home.

YouTube series are to entertainment media what startups are to the business world, angling hard to be of widespread significance while operating on drastically scaled-down means. A 1080p Logitech webcam costs $60 and worthwhile ideas, though hard to come by, don’t cost a thing. Meanwhile, networks pay an average of $2 million to produce a TV pilot.

The more-affordable paradigm enabled by YouTube isn’t something to be laughed away, but to be embraced. The stars of The Big Bang Theory earn $1 million per episode apiece while PewDiePie earned $4 million over all of last year. This raises the pertinent question: Who’s worth more? The guy who can create, produce, and star in content that reaches hundreds of millions, or just the talent on its own?

The singing-dancing-and-acting triple threats of Hollywood today can’t compete on a business level with the incoming generation of self-producing, self-directing YouTube penta-threats. They are a new class of creators who can find an eager and substantial audience for even niche content. And this content is free, on-demand, and available all around the world.

Everyone knows Justin Bieber puts on a show, but PewDiePie is his own show. Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg—PewDiePie himself—is usually a floating head in the corner of his gameplay videos, but he still opens everything with an intro and closes with a farewell, making eye contact with millions[1]  on a regular basis and doing so with no intermediaries beyond the YouTube terms of service. This yields an audience intimacy enabled by “limbic resonance,” a neurological feature of our brains in which they release chemicals related to love, motivation, sexual gratification, and addiction in order to drive an emotional connection with someone. If you’re looking for effective marketing, follow the dopamine.

PewDiePie is popular in a significantly different and more personal way than standard movie and TV stars are. While Tom Cruise certainly fits the bill as famous, movie stars seem distant and untouchable, so we don’t care about them as much. Meanwhile, YouTubers speak directly to the camera, often in their own bedrooms. The fourth wall is broken beyond repair, and we don’t want them to fix it. This content is intimate, it’s different, and it has a depth to it.

Importantly, the successful YouTuber demonstrates vast monetary value without ever suggesting anything less than total attainability. The basic (yet effective) production value leaves behind a strong suggestion that the high-profile job of “star YouTuber” is a possibility to each and every viewer.

Well-done YouTube content has an intangible of aspirationality attached to it. An audience mentality of “I could do that too” goes a long way towards driving subscriber numbers higher and higher. To subscribe is, on some level, to cheer for an independent creator. People most enjoy watching Web content similar to what they would make themselves, were it not for limiting factors like time or worthwhile ideas.

PewDiePie and his fellow YouTube creators hook their fans on a deeper level than any celebrity could hope for, and those fans exert real-world marketplace influence.

When PewDiePie released a video this year about an older and notoriously glitchy game called Skate 3 (his walkthrough of the game featured an overweight skater named Bob who tumbled hilariously when his skateboard tricks failed), consumer interest in the dated and unremarkable title was renewed to the point that people started buying it again. Retailers had to ask Electronic Arts to reprint new copies. Wielding influence of this level has so far seen PewDiePie write a book, start a production company, and release an iPhone app.

PewDiePie’s proven ability to generate consequential real-world income from his free video content is far from an isolated incident. When John Green’s young adult novel The Fault In Our Stars was adapted for the big screen, he was able to mobilize his YouTube channel’s 2.6 million subscribers to go see it in theaters. They did so in droves, even beating the new Tom Cruise movie at the box office.

Rock band We The Kings pushed none other than Beyoncé out of her number one Billboard spot based on the strength of their YouTube following alone. Connor Franta, whose Internet culture and lifestyle videos have earned him 5 million subscribers, wrote a book that spent 16 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Independent content creators no longer need a major network’s vote of confidence in order to make substantial economic impacts.

This isn’t a flash in the pan.

The Internet has simultaneously made distribution free and caused content consumers to redraw the lines for what they find sufficiently entertaining to watch on a regular basis. The anyone-can-be-a-YouTuber mindset turns triple-A entertainment on its ear and allows for a more personal reassessment of what one finds truly engaging. The on-camera talent for these niche series can also be the writer, director, producer, editor, and network. The cost of a webcam be broken out over multiple episodes, and it eventually costs a few bucks per episode to create an entire series rather than a couple million to make one episode of something that might not have any staying power.

By comparison to the television industry’s bloated budgets, YouTube series are lean and mean, commonly a one-person effort from top to bottom. They operate within a paradigm that allows for a new sort of credibility, one that holds deep and recurring significance online with effectively fixed production costs. As such, it’s a credibility that scales; every time someone clicks a YouTuber’s subscribe button, he or she reveals something of his or her tastes and general sensibilities. Moreover, this is content that a growing number of millennials prefer to other formats.

A study by Hunter Qualitative Research yielded results that millennials enjoy YouTube entertainment more than television. They find it more relatable and it makes them feel better about their lives.

The era of YouTube celebrity might be one where a foul-mouthed videogamer is captain of the ship, but YouTube as a juggernaut of attention has real staying power. You only need to look so far as Smosh, the two-person comedy team that grew its YouTube presence to 21.5 million subscribers over 10 years of regular activity on the site. It made headlines when PewDiePie passed them in viewership in 2014 (he’s now the single-largest entity on the YouTube platform). Ridicule him if you must, but don’t be surprised when Felix Kjellberg is earning ten times his current income in the near future.

Until mainstream media organizations learn to tap into this new and lucrative zeitgeist, PewDiePie can be found on his YouTube page, electrocuting his girlfriend.