Some of the major points we covered were:

• Subscription video on demand (SVOD) and YouTube competitors
• YouTubers “making it” on television
• YouTuber revenue streams
• How much money his top creators are making in a year
• How creators can better work with brands, and vice versa

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’ve been on YouTube for a very long time. How did you first get started?

I got started back in 2009, and I got started because I actually went to high school with another YouTuber. He’s still got pretty large following to this day.

I saw what he was doing and how we was building a community around himself. It seemed like a huge opportunity. So I started working with him a bit, and I was introduced to other creators and collaborate with them. I was able to turn YouTube into a career in about three months.

How has the community evolved since those early days?

What was really interesting about the early days is that once you hit a certain number of subscribers you were immediately part of the community. People had a sense of respect for you and vice versa. Once you hit that level, you could really approach just about anyone and do collaborations, or just strike up conversations and friendships.

As this community of a few thousand people exploded into the millions of creators you now have today, a bunch of micro-communities developed. Now, it’s like everybody sticks to their own clique. It’s almost like high school. So if you’re a beauty guru, you collaborate with other beauty gurus and you don’t really step outside that.

There’s just not as much cross-pollination as there once was.

I think a lot of the playfulness has disappeared as well. Now, we jump onto each new platform – push our audiences to them (the platforms), and then immediately we ask, “How do we monetize this?”

Speaking of fans, you’ve got a sizable following. What’s it like having fans?

It’s actually really interesting. I rarely use the word “fans,” I’ve allowed myself to use it as of late. This is something that I and a lot of my other YouTube friends struggle with.

We want to be humble, but also want to be respected in the same way that Hollywood celebrities are respected and perceived.  

Do you want to be put on the same pedestal as “traditional” celebrities?

Being labeled as a “celebrity” pigeonholes YouTubers because you can be recognizable without being a “celebrity.” I think it goes beyond celebrity. I think it’s about being a public figure.

There’s a new generation of influence sprouting up as a result of social media. You have people that may be an entertainer-creator or maybe they’re a body-positive influencer. There’s people with influence across spheres — politics, entertainment — you can be an influencer around anything now.

Whatever name we end up giving this new type of public figure, I think they are definitely going to be held to a higher esteem and value than they are today.

How has the perception and attitude towards YouTubers changed among brands and agencies?

The marketers have done a lot to catch up these last few years and they value what we do a lot more.

They’re beginning to recognize that we influencers are not a simple plug-and-play, where they can just say “Let’s put our bag of chips in this,” or “Let’s give them a bottle of water.”

They’re starting to take a step back and invite us in as collaborators. They’re asking what excites us and what ideas we have. It’s becoming a bit more of a conversation than it used to be.

Also, it’s interesting — as demand has increased, you see influencers being represented by four or five different managers and talent agencies. You don’t quite see that in the traditional talent world.

The fact that an influencer can be so freely represented and not be limited to one representative shows me that in some ways the influencer has more negotiating power than traditional celebrities.

I hear from a lot of the creators that “brands don’t get it.” To your point, and in my own experience, it seems as though brands are “getting it” more and more. Do you feel like creators are doing more to adapt and empathize with the brand’s perspective?

Yes and no. You and I have known each other over the years, we’ve seen people come and go.

For the most part, the ones that we’ve seen go are the ones that didn’t develop much business etiquette, or, even just the willingness to put aside some of their stubbornness to be open to some of those brand conversations and feedback.

The ones that have stayed around have been able to have conversations. They don’t just say no to an idea, they offer up solutions.

You have to be able to adapt and work towards a solution where everyone is happy with what they’re getting. It’s only a success if the creator is happy, the audience is happy, AND the brand is happy.

Some creators not willing to put forth the effort, and aren’t open to ideas or build off of ideas that are not their own.

Are you still with an MCN or are you independent?

All my channels are within different MCNs.

The deals I’ve structured are different than what most creators get. They’re in my favor more so than most of the contracts that these MCNs have with the 40,000 other people who signed with them.

What advice would you give to an up and coming creator? What kind of things would you advise them to keep an eye out for?

The first thing to keep in mind is that you’ve got a lot more negotiating power and leverage than you think.

In some cases I get 100% of my revenue. Oftentimes the MCNs will try to offer a revenue split over a certain amount of views. They say, “Hey, look, we did our math and over the last 12 months you averaged out this amount of views. We’ll do a rev-share split of this amount of views over your average amount of views.”

I say no to that because the last 12 months doesn’t mean anything to me. The last three months are going to be the most important numbers to me. And when you go down that math, you’re not going to come to an agreement.

I would also say if you’re going in with an MCN or any other company, you should do it with the idea of getting them to invest in you and your content (whether with upfronts or production support). By having them support you in creating more content, they’ll be invested in your success.

Also, limit your deal to no more than a year in length. Lastly, make sure you’re not just joining

for brand deals. Brand deals are great but you can get multiple managers and agents to represent you to get you those deals.

Where do you see the future of YouTube going? How do you juggle all these different platforms, and does YouTube have staying power?

I feel that YouTube is going to have staying power because of its massive library of content.

Facebook doesn’t have that much content, and I’m not sure if they are ever going to have it.

I think Facebook is similar to what YouTube was back in 2005-2009 — there are a lot more amateur videos and far fewer professional creator videos. YouTube on the other hand has really matured, and is closer to Netflix in the sense that the content has really developed and become more professional.

I feel that YouTube Red is a step in the right direction. And honestly, I think video platforms are going to evolve across the board between Twitter and Snapchat and everything else. We’re going to see different platforms cater to different types of content. I may go to Facebook one day to find a new viral video, but I’ll got to YouTube Red to watch something from a premier independent creator.

How do you as a content creator juggle all of these new platforms? How do you decide where to invest your time and develop an audience?  

It’s actually really natural.

I produce my content with the idea of being able to repurpose it for different platforms. So if it goes up on YouTube, it’s going to go up on Facebook. If it’s going to go up on Instagram it can go up on Vine.

Getting that content distributed across each platform isn’t really hard. I play around with each for a bit and figure out what works.

I took a great deal of interest in Facebook over a year ago and I played around with my content there and it did pretty well. Now I’m playing around with Instagram and it’s doing well there too.

I think people are thinking of their audience as being on every platform. The reality is that if it’s on YouTube, put it up on Facebook too. Put it up on Instagram. Put it up on everything you can. Do a quick edit and cut it down a little bit. Do whatever it takes. The amount of time that you’re going to put into repurposing and customizing content for each platform is going to show a return.

What’s the formula for success on YouTube? What does it take to build a successful channel?

It’s a combination of having fun and being logical. Everything I’ve ever done had to excite me and that doesn’t necessarily mean I didn’t get frustrated with it or I wanted to not do it at some point. You’re going to have speed bumps. But I was very excited to start. Very inspired. And I was very logical. I asked myself, “Okay, how much time am I putting into this? How much money am I putting into this? If this was money, how much money is this of my time? And how quick of a return can I get off of this?”

So when you go from being a personality on camera to investing into content and putting a team behind it, the decisions you make are all about ROI.

So I would say, if you want to be successful, do what you love but put some logic behind it. Put some business sense behind it.

Anything else to add?

The one thing that I will say that I’ve noticed over the years within this industry is that publicly we all say, “Yeah, everything’s all great and dandy.” But, privately you turn to your friend and you’re like, “F this. This does not make sense. This is so stupid. This is terrible. This is horrible.”

We’re all having these private conversations with each other, but we’re afraid to have them openly because we think we’re going to make people feel bad or it’s going to turn into some sort of World War III.

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.

We covered a lot of ground and dove into some juicy topics, including:
-The process of working with brands and creators
-The role MCN’s currently play with his talent
-Media sales
-The future of MCN’s

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.

What’s it like working with brands and creators?
I think that it’s fun because people are getting a bit more used to what a YouTube integration campaign looks like. There’s not as many questions as there used to be.

That being said, there is still is a lot of education that’s occurring on a daily basis and sometimes we as managers are educating the people who are bringing us the deals, because all they want are the impressions and the views and they don’t understand that it’s a fine line that needs to be walked. If they are too heavy-handed, they’re going to defeat the purpose that they’re trying to achieve.

Where are most of your brand deals being sourced from?
I get deals from all over- MCNS, PR companies, ad agencies, and brand direct. What role do the MCNs play in the ecosystem for you with your talent?

They’re just a sales agency at this point. They definitely don’t manage any talent, nor should they because there’s an obvious conflict of interest. MCNs will always do what’s best for them not what’s best for the talent. They’re not trying to nurture careers and look at long-term effects of what actions will have on creators, because their end game is squeezing out as much profit as possible.

The talent is a commodity to MCNs.

Do the MCN’s sell the media for any of for your talent?
They rarely sell media, and there’s really no reason for a buyer to buy media from an MCN. Why should they when they can buy from Google directly.

I feel like the MCNs are delivering value to a very, very small number of people in their network. And it doesn’t justify their business model. It would be a lot more honest if MCNs just called themselves what they were, which is a sales agency. The fact that MCNs have contracts that auto-renew without notifying the creative party is an indication of their awareness that they’re not delivering on their promise to creators.

Why else would they be reluctant to notify the party that their contract’s up for renewal?
If you’re confident in the service you’re providing, you’re never hesitant to let the other party know that it’s up for renewal. Why would you be? It’s professional courtesy.

How does your talent feel about being in an MCN?
Most are indifferent. Some want out of their contracts and be independent.

So, where do you think the MCNs are headed?
MCNs are waging a propaganda campaign where they’re telling all these ad agencies that they have relationships with creators that are exclusive, when they’re not. They’re not even remotely exclusive.

They say that they alone know how to handle campaigns with creators, when they could just go directly to the talent handlers. If an MCN brings me a deal for my clients, I’ll definitely do it if it’s right. But I think it would just be better for everybody if they were more honest about the role they play.

What role is YouTube playing these days in terms of the relationships of talent?
They’re trying to increase their role. YouTube’s so big, YouTube’s so vast, and the fact that it’s so vast affects how it interacts with talent.

If you’re a network, a television network, and you’ve got basically half-hour slots, Monday through Sunday, 24 hours a day, there’s only so many people that can be on air. But if you’re a website, and anyone who can upload anything can be successful, anytime, it just creates this very unwieldy landscape. It’s hard to manage and have impactful relationships.

Why do you think they bother trying to cultivate real relationships?
Most likely because of YouTube Red. Google’s always thinking a few steps ahead.

YouTube Red is going to be a challenge for them. It’s a bit nebulous what it is at the moment and paywalls are so fucking weird. If you set one up you better give me a solid reason that I can remember as to why you did it. But if it’s just so I can download content, I’m not sure that it’s worth it.

What do you think I haven’t covered off on that people should know about? What’s the juicy topic you want to talk about?
I would say it’s really that MCNs are really exploitative and don’t deliver on their value promise. And that people should know that, creators should stop joining and stop renewing their contracts.

Why do you think they are joining?
The top ones are joining just because of minimum guarantee deals. That’s it… it’s free money.

The MCN’s guarantees that the creator will make X amount in integration deals over the course of the term. And, if the MCN doesn’t deliver that amount in brand deals, then the MCN writes a check.

Thanks you for your time!

The major points of our interview transcript include:

•           – Why YouTube created MCN’s and how they’ve evolved
•           – Why creators often sign with MCN’s
•           – How brands should work with creators

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.

Coming from the MCN side of the equation – what was it like working with the brands, the creators, the agencies? What worked and what didn’t?

My understanding of the MCN industry is that Google created it as a way to help produce better quality content and help support creators. It’s largely populated with people who are coming from the talent side of the equation versus the advertising agency side or the technology side.

The biggest challenge is that the industry is new, so the norms have not been defined clearly. You have the MCNs, you have the agencies, and I’m saying “talent agencies,” like WME and CAA. You have the advertising agencies. You have managers. You have creators.

You have a lot more inputs to that equation than what you had back in the old television days. All those inputs and all these people who think that they have a role in the equation make it complicated to establish any real norms, or rules of engagement, metrics, and ways of doing business.

The players have not clearly defined their roles, and because of this everybody is running towards every opportunity. And that causes murkiness. That causes aggravation. It causes the true value of influencer to be masked because of the immense amount of waste of people’s time to get to the bottom line.

So, depending on your entry point you could end up with a very different deal?

Right, and just to focus on the MCN part of it, one of the big problems with MCNs is that they don’t harken back to their mission. Basically their mission was not defined by themselves.

Their mission was defined by Google and it is to add value. That’s ambiguous, but you could say there’s three places that MCNs could add value.Very few are doing this. You could say ad agencies and talent agencies could do two out of three of these easily. 

•       – By growing views & subscribers
•       – Providing business and/or production support
•       – Growing revenue

So, it’s important for MCN’s to be doing something different – creating technology, interesting integrations with available APIs etc.  Because you want to differentiate yourself and if you want an acquisition it’s good to own IP or unique processes .

Even if a creator is signed to an agreement, then at some point that creator’s going to want to get out of that agreement or that agreement’s going to expire. That’s not something other companies really want to invest in because you can go and hire talent.  This is the secret many in Hollywood do not want you to know, talent will “go” with almost anyone who is creating interesting stories, product, services.  The challenge is managing the workflow.  A lot of brands have success working directly with talent.

Anybody can hire your talent. That’s something people forget.

So, what’s the future of MCN’s?

It’s hard to build a product in technology that is actually going to be used by creators, but that’s the need.

We should be more focused on technology to help channels grow.

My classic example is Brendan’s Omelet Channel and my Crêpe Channel, and your handler at the MCN says, “Hey, Brendan. There’s this guy who’s making omelets and you’re making crêpes and you basically have the same audience and you’re both releasing videos on Tuesday. Why don’t you switch to Wednesday and point people there to Interviewee’s channel on Tuesday? And he’ll reciprocate and then down the line, let’s see if there’s a collaboration we could do.”

So, that is a perfect example of not only adding value, but growing the network because traffic goes back and forth.  A couple of MCNs have automated this process again points to the power of making great product and/or using technology to add value. More monetization opportunities. That’s an example of a great way an MCN could add value.

What actually happens is that everybody goes running into the space and the investors who put money in go, “Hey, wait a minute. You guys aren’t making any money. You’ve got lots of expenses, but you’re not selling enough.”

So, the MCN’s try and sell more media (not just brand integrations). The problem with that is that that media is already being sold by a person who has a Google business card OR it’s being sold in real time via an exchange.

The largest ad exchange called ADEX, which is part of DoubleClick, which is owned by Google.

By definition, if you have a seat on the exchange, you can buy and sell YouTube inventory. So, you can just go bid on channels in the exchange because there’s not an exclusive. You can get that inventory if you want it and probably pay less than what the Google salesperson is selling it for if you buy it via the exchange.

So that’s a challenge for MCN’s. Any savvy media agency is going to know that they can buy inventory via an exchange. They have a trading desk.

That is a perfect example of how an MCN fails because an MCN goes to try and sell more media, which isn’t really working because of the exchanges. And, as a result, helping to grow their audiences is falling by the wayside.

Why would the MCN’s sell media? Forget about that the exchange even exists – there are hundreds of Google salespeople crawling over every agency with piles of data. You can’t compete with that nor should you.

They [MCN’s] are just not going to sell the media. They’re not going to get the price that they want. And, the customers don’t want to buy their media because they’re able to get it already and from a cheaper source.

So, how were you guys actually adding value to creators?

Every channel, as part of our agreement would get optimized. We were trying to create technology to solve this, so that it wouldn’t become such a manual process.

You really need a technical understanding of what the Internet and in particular YouTube is…how it works. If you don’t understand the technical intricacies or the map of how to navigate this web, you basically won’t get the views that you need for free via SEO. And that is, once again, a point where MCNs have failed, where they don’t offer leadership. They don’t offer enough of those services.

I’m proud that we offered that. I think most MCN’s just made a lot of promises, and were just casting a wide net and pulling channels in as fast as they could without actually delivering much value.

There’s a lot of name dropping and that’s like heroine to a lot of young creators. They want to work with the big names or go to Hollywood and that’s what sucks them in. They have a little success and they think they’re going to be on CSI. That’s it. They’re just like, “Oh, my God, Hollywood. I’m doing this. Yeah.”

Let’s transition to the advertising side of things. Do you feel brands are doing enough to capitalize on this space?

What’s happening now is that MCNs, advertising agencies, talent agencies, and creators themselves are making it very difficult for a brand to figure out how to get from A to B.

I think that brands over a certain size…let’s say, if you have over $50 million in gross sales per year, they should be interacting with influencers and creating content directly.

And when I say “directly,” I meant they shouldn’t be going down the chain, the digital agency goes to MCN, who goes to the manager, who goes to so and so and then finally goes to the creator who comes up with the idea. That needs to stop.

There’s no reason to have that kind of expense. The whole thing about the Internet is that it removes layers, so you can have more direct control and access and that usually means you save money and you can do things quicker. And that’s what should be happening in 2015.

It should be, “Decide, create, deploy, measure.” And then you just keep doing it.

In terms of execution, there’s always tension between the creator and the brand. What do you think is the best way to navigate that?

Well, that’s called “creative tension” and that’s something that has existed since day one. And it exists in the writers’ room. It exists on the set.

When Martin Scorsese or Francis Ford Coppola is yelling at you and Marlon Brando in “Apocalypse Now” to act a certain way.  It exists everywhere. So, I think people are just basically fucking idiots if they don’t understand that.

But you have to set and control expectations. My rule is early, loud and often. You over-communicate to ensure everyone’s on the same page throughout the process.

What advice do you have for those working in the space?

I don’t care what anybody says. This is goddamn 2016.

There is so much talent, out there.  If someone’s an asshole and difficult to work with.  Guess what. You can find somebody else just as good. I’m not saying it’s going to be easy, but you can find somebody.

This latest interviewee for The Confessional is with a YouTube creator who has over two million subscribers across multiple channels. This creator is extremely well known, and has been on YouTube since 2008. He has (yes, it’s a he) a wealth of knowledge working with brands and building up channels.

He’s one of the most professional YouTube creators I’ve ever worked with and approaches his channel like a business in a way that few other creators do. He shared his approach to dealing with brands, managing brand deals, as well as his thoughts on how creators can better sell themselves to brands and get paid what they’re worth.

Some of the highlights from our interview include:

• His ‘Fuck You’ approach he takes to working with brands
• How YouTubers can negotiate and prove their value to brands and agencies
• Insight into how YouTube has changed (as well as how to keep up with future changes)

Enjoy.

(Editor’s Note: The following has been edited and condensed for clarity.)

I’d love to hear what’s it like for you when you work with brands? How do you approach that? What’s the process? What’s the pain point?

As much as I hate to say it I’ve had a kind of “fuck you” approach to brands.

I don’t mean to sound arrogant in that sense, but you don’t really have time to waste, so I try to be to the point and not be a jerk about it. But as far as brands are concerned, I’m very up front and I’m like “Hey, this is what I’d like to do and how much it will cost.”

I try to storyboard stuff from time to time or I’ll do a visual deck to make sure that we’re on the same page. There’s been maybe a couple of brands that nickel and dimed revisions and I just wouldn’t work with them again.

You’re definitely among the YouTube creators who are more professional, buttoned up, and process oriented. Why is that? Is that a conscious thing to differentiate yourself from other YouTube creators?

I want people to understand that this is a business and I’m treating it as such. And I really demand that respect and time, that effort and energy and in doing so I give them equal.

So if I spend a half-day creating a visual deck for a brand so that we are clear as to the flow of a campaign, great, because then I know that’s going to reduce stress and hurdles down the road where there might have been a lack of communication.

I don’t know if other creators do that level of work. I don’t necessarily do it to separate myself from them. I just do it to try to make my life easier.

It’s ultimately just trying to help make it seem more professional.

Do you think creators understand how to work with brands and how to address their needs and goals?

It’s hard to speculate for the masses because there are so many different types of creators out there. I personally feel that it’s hit or miss. For every example you can give, you can give another that’s completely different.

You can take someone like Michelle Phan or somebody who is insanely business savvy and understands a successful campaign strategy, how to biz dev etc. It’s all over the place.

But, I think it’s kind of hard to be successful if you’re not business savvy, because you end up burning bridges and then the well runs out.

Do you think YouTubers are getting paid what they’re worth?

I feel like certain ad agencies and brands understand the value of social media and digital content creation for their demographics. Unfortunately, a lot of them don’t necessarily see the value, or they see the value and they try to undersell it to the creator.

At the end of the day your rate card should reflect your ability to sell to your audience.

I know a lot of guys especially in the entertainment industry will say, “Hey, this is my rate, if you can afford it, great, if you can’t just come back to me when you can.” They don’t do the whole “Let’s do a deal this time and then later on we’ll figure it out,” because later on it never happens. Unfortunately it doesn’t because when you commit to doing something for a specific rate be it professionally or for a brand integration people hold you to it.

And more often than not the brand ends up coming back because the brand or the agency goes “Hey, well, I really want to do this with him”, and that ends up working in your favor.

How do you explain to brands why you charge them a certain amount? Do you go into detail on production costs, TrueView, comparisons to TV, etc?

All the time. That’s easily one of the best way to show a brand your value. You can buy views to target my audience and it’s going to cost you like $150,000 to get the same views and demographic as my video.

So when I say, I want $30,000 to $70,000, to do a custom integration, that’s worth its weight in gold. It’s a deal to get the content and reach the same demographic for half the costs of a media buy.

You’ve been on YouTube almost since the beginning. How do you think things have changed? What do you feel has changed the most?

The space is so competitive at this point.

People are willing to sell themselves short, and as a result you have to really work really hard to figure out where and how you can bring value to the viewer and capitalize off of it. It seems as though everything that you’re willing to do, somebody else is willing to do for the attention and you’re trying to do it for profit to pay the light bill.

A lot more people just see YouTubers and think “Hey, I could do that too.” It’s great because ultimately, I’m a consumer and I love shaking the system up and making sure people are creating good stuff.

Competition breeds innovation.

The second you feel complacent or you feel like you understand, it changes. It’s constantly evolving how people consume media and what’s effective.

What do you think is the key to success in building a channel on YouTube?

I don’t think there is one and it would be very arrogant for me to say definitively how to start a successful channel today. I think there are so many different variables.

If I were to start out a channel right now I would pick the one thing that I am the most passionate about that I enjoy doing every single day that I feel like I could come up with an endless supply of creative content. That’s it.

I would also spend so much money on marketing. I think that a lot of people spend their time creating a lot of really good content and then don’t bother marketing it.

But, regardless, you need to be brutally honest with the stuff that you create.

You know if you’re gaming the system or not. You know if you’re phoning it in or not, and that’s why I said I would just pick something that I was extremely passionate about.

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The last year has been pretty incredible within the YouTube ecosystem.

The space has gotten a lot of buzz and a lot more ad dollars flowing into it. Previously brands were experimenting, but not quite investing the way they should.

A lot of this really changed when Disney made a huge investment in the ecosystem, when they purchased Maker Studios about a year ago. When Disney spends half a billion dollars on something people tend to take notice.

The ad dollars really started flowing in as a result of the credibility that Disney lent to the space. The acquisition also kicked off a string of acquisitions and you could really sense and see the hype in all the PR and press that had flowed out of the space over the last year.

YouTubers were on the cover of Fast Company, they were on the cover of Variety, celebrated as the future of celebrity. They were on the cover of Adage and Adweek. And the overarching narrative throughout this was that YouTube is the future of media, entertainment, celebrity, advertising, and within the ad industry everywhere you looked it was YouTube is the future, the future, the future.

But I call bullshit. Not because YouTube isn’t the future of all these things, I think it’s got a bright future, it’s more that YouTube for a long time has been the past and the present. The platform is over a decade old and for nearly as long its been around has been having a huge impact on media, entertainment and advertising.

For as long as I’ve been working in this space, which is about nine years now, I’ve been able to work with a lot of the same channels and creators and leverage a lot of the same tactics and still continue to deliver value to brands and continue to surprise and delight them.

But brands have had a tough time with this space.

Look at the top 100 most subscribed channels on YouTube and there’s not a single consumer packaged goods or apparel brand. Now, compare this to other platforms like Facebook where there’s nearly a dozen brands in the top 100.

YouTube culture has become pop culture but that this is not a new phenomenon by any means, this has been in place for a long time. Despite this, advertisers have largely ignored the opportunities. But you can make huge gains in this space.

I imagine a lot of people are familiar with this space and probably thinking ‘I get it, I understand what’s happening’.

But, what do you think of when you hear ‘Breaking The Internet’? I imagine a lot of people think of Kim Kardashian’s Paper Magazine cover photo showing off her rather large assets. That photo was deemed to have ‘Broken the Internet’ because of all the press coverage and hype it generated online, and it did generate a lot.

The week following the release of the photo, there were close to 600,000 mentions of Kim Kardashian’s Twitter handle, which is a lot. But, that this was the first time in about a year that she generated more conversation and more mentions than this PewdiePie, the popular YouTuber who posts videos of himself playing video games with commentary.

In a typical month PewDiePie generates 50% more conversation on Twitter than Kim Kardashian. And what’s crazy is he’s not alone, he is by no means the exception.

A couple other great examples, Jenna Marbles versus Chelsea Handler. Jenna Marbles generated ten times as many tweets last month as Handler.

Neil Patrick Harris and Tyler Oakley. Neil Patrick Harris hosted the Oscars, he’s huge. Tyler Oakley generated, over 20 times as many mentions of his name.

It might be easy to dismiss this and say these may be outliers or this is a new phenomenon that digital stars are overtaking traditional stars, but, it’s not.

Going back to 2008, I was working with EA on the launch of the video game. And we came up with a pretty cool campaign. We gave early access to a portion of the game, where you could design your own creature, to a handful of traditional and digital celebrities. Everybody participating went, created their own creature, and then invited their audiences to go vote for them. The winner with the most votes was going to get $15,000 to donate to the charity of their choice.

We had traditional celebrities like Stan Lee,Katy Perry, Elijah Wood, Carlos Santana, The Flight of the Concords. On the digital celebrity side we had folks like Kevin Rose, Phil DeFranco, iJustine, Veronica Belmont, the lead editor of Kotaku.

Who do you think won? Was it Katy Perry who just did the Super Bowl halftime show? Elijah Wood who at the time was at the peak of his Lord of the Rings fame?

It wasn’t any of the traditional celebrities that won. It was Phil DeFranco who posted one video and in 24 hours got over 100,000 votes, it was incredible. He beat all the traditional celebrities by a landslide.

So, this shift has been possible for so long, I mean this was seven years ago.

Why isn’t everybody doing this?

The ad industry, my industry, admittedly is probably as guilty of this as much as anybody.
We’re obsessed with what our peers are doing, who they’re working with, what press they’re getting, what awards everyone is winning. This is holding us back.

For example, let’s take a look at the content creation process as it typically exists with the brands and agencies today. It’s not the most efficient system.

Typically the brand gives the agency a creative brief. The agency goes through rounds and rounds and rounds with a number of creatives, finally lands on an idea, they take that to the brand, typically there’s back and forth. Now from there they get sign off and it goes back to the agency. And the agency then doesn’t go off and produce it, what they do then is they go and hire a director.

After you finally hire the right director, then you go into post production – casting, storyboarding, and so on. After a few weeks you end up on set and then you’ve got to pay for a production crew, you’ve got to pay for craft services, it’s a whole ordeal. There’s unions, and if you go past eight hours you’ve got to pay time and a half and it’s a big expense.Then finally after that you go into post production – editing, color correction, music, sound design and so on. And at the end of it you’ve spent a couple hundred thousand dollars and nobody’s even seen your spot. Then you have to support it with media.

Now, you could do that or you could brief one of these YouTube creators.

Give them a brief, allow them to create, concept, produce, and distribute a video to their millions or thousands of fans and followers.

When they distribute content, it’s to their hundreds of thousands, or millions, of fans who are desperate for the content. And oftentimes, not always, you can do this for about as much as you pay for craft services on a typical production set.

Despite this, one of the things that I often hear when I’m kind of pitching this to clients is, “Well don’t you think this is a fad?

And, I don’t really think that’s the case and that’s because these creators have a direct line of communication to their fans, there’s a feedback loop there.

You create one bad video as a YouTuber, you see all the comments, the feedback, you can even look at the analytics and see where people are dropping off and you can leverage those insights and make changes and adjustments with the next video. People are not shy at all about sharing their opinion with creators. So, the YouTubers have an opportunity to learn from this.

Now, compare this to the studio system.

If you’re an actor and you’re in a terrible movie that didn’t make any money, the odds are a studio doesn’t want to go out and hire you again. There’s a saying, “You’re only as good as your last project.” And it makes sense, a studio doesn’t want to invest and throw good money after bad.

But, this direct line of communication that YouTubers have is incredibly powerful. And it’s more than just likes, comments, and shares, there’s a real tangible benefit to this. In fact, Variety did a study among teenagers asking them who are the most popular celebrities today and the results were pretty incredible.

Of the top 20 most recognizable celebrities 50% were YouTubers, and all five of the top five were YouTubers.

And, going back to my point earlier about this not being a fad, these guys having real staying power, number one on that list is Smosh, who were the first creator that I worked with way back in 2006. They haven’t gone away. Even back in 2006 they were averaging two million views a video, so it’s pretty incredible.

Now, who’s number 20 on this list that Variety put together? Number 20 on is Leonardo DiCaprio. Poor Leo, not only has he not won an Oscar, but he’s also lost a popularity contest to YouTubers.

As an advertiser it’s tempting to throw my money at these top creators – those on the cover of Adage or Adweek or Variety.

But, it’s important to keep in mind the context of the new media landscape. Old media is based on scarcity, new media is based on abundancy.

Twenty, thirty, and forty years ago there were only so many distribution outlets, and so many networks, so you only had so many celebrities. Today, the whole model has totally flipped on its head.

YouTube has:
– Over a billion visitors every month
– 300 hours of content being uploaded every single minute.
– 50% of visitors are coming from mobile (so it’s a highly fractured audience)
– 10,000 channels with at least 50,000 subscribers

So as an advertiser that’s a huge opportunity, 50,000 subscribers is a lot.

To put it into context, there are shows on MSNBC, that don’t even get 50,000 viewers. So you have 10,000 outlets with the potential for TV scale. So you don’t need to necessarily go for the biggest creator to be effective, bigger isn’t always better.

A great example of ‘bigger not always being better’ is six years ago I was working with DKNY on the launch of a new fragrance and we faced a bit of a crossroads.

We were deciding how to allocate our dollars, we knew we wanted to work with influencers and we were debating whether we should we give our money to one of the top five fashion makeup beauty gurus at the time, or should we distribute our dollars across up and coming creators?

We did the math and on a cost per view basis it made a lot more sense to distribute our dollars across ‘up and coming’ creators. We got about 50% more views than if we’d allocated it to one of the top more recognizable creators. This was six years ago, there wasn’t as much competition among advertisers as there is today. By going with the ‘up and comers’ we were not only getting a more efficient spend but we were also tapping into more niche communities that hadn’t been as saturated with brand names like the those following the top creators.

In working within this space I definitely recommend you let your competitors be star fuckers.

It’s good to buy low, sell high. Spread your dollars amongst the most relevant creators because you’ve got plenty of options in terms of scale.

So, why does all this matter?

Well, in a lot of ways, we in the ad industry are behaving in a manner not that dissimilar from the same teenagers that we’re trying to target. I mean, we’re obsessed with what our peers think of us, we want all of these awards, this recognition, these accolades without necessarily putting the time and the effort to understand the realities of the way the world is working today.

By continuing to tell ourselves YouTube, Snapchat, Vine, etc are something that’s going to be big in the future. We wash our hands of taking any responsibility and taking action today. We need to change our mode of thinking.

An analogy that seems appropriate is this story I heard about Arnold Schwarzenegger. I heard that when Schwarzenegger was training for Mr. Universe he took ballet classes because he thought it would help him with his posing on stage.

At first I thought that sound so ridiculous, a bodybuilder doing ballet?!?! His peers must have thought he was crazy.

However, when you take a step back it makes so much sense. He wanted to look more elegant and fluid when he was doing his poses. So what more effective way to understand how to do that than study ballet? Who cares if it’s different, it works.And I think we need more of that thinking in advertising.

How ridiculous does it sound to say, “Hey, you know, don’t give your money to a bunch of professional directors, invest it in YouTubers, and not even necessarily the most popular ones.”

We in advertising can spend a few more years and try and win some awards for commercials, or invest in this space and in new ideas and ways of working.

Because, YouTube is not going to future proof you, it’s not the end all, be all of advertising. It’s investing in a mode of thinking and basing decisions on facts, and the realities of the way the landscape is working. When you do that, even if it looks ridiculous to your peers, you’re going to adapt and change and set yourself up for success to evolve and be able to learn, and ultimately that mode of thinking is what’s going to let you thrive and set you up for success in the long run.