Photo courtesy of youtube.com | We sat down with a Xavier YouTuber to get a glance behind the scenes of his channel.
How did you get started in YouTube?
Me and my friends we started, he hit me up one day and said, “hey, do you wanna do a YouTube channel?” So I started helping them and over the course of like 3 or 4 months, we racked up about 500,000 subscribers. Then I made my channel at the beginning of summer, and then we began filming, and it just took off. Now they’re at like a million (subscribers). They just came up last weekend to film.
I always watched YouTube growing up, so I’ve always had a great interest. I have always watched people like Jake Paul, Logan Paul, Boosie Tube for inspiration and just for entertainment. So I was always in the YouTube community, so it was easy for me to pick up a camera and just start talking to it.
How many followers do you have right now?
I have 130,000 followers.
As your followers have started to grow, have you felt increasing pressure?
Not so much pressure, but I want to be able to do more things because now that there are more people watching me, I want to make sure I can compete with the top guys. There’s definitely pressure in terms of making sure I’m not boring and keeping my analytics up— just in terms of keeping my fans with what they want to see.
How would you describe your content?
I would probably say comedy, and then I want to get more into the lifestyle videos. But I try to upload things that can go viral, so its not really just my daily life— it’s more like things that can have a catchy title or interesting thumbnail— things that can get really big.
I think when I hit 200,000 followers, I might go more towards one daily video a week.
Do you have a process when making videos?
For some videos, I put in a lot of time with my other friend’s channel and so for like some pranks that we do we have to sit down and figure out like who we have to prank, what we have to say. When you do pranks they take up a lot of time, and you can end up wasting massive amounts of time if you mess up. So with pranks we take our time, but vlogs just we kind of just go with it and think of stuff off the top of our head.
How much time do you think you spend editing your videos?
Anywhere from two-three hours to six-eight hours. Sometimes I film two videos on the weekend, and I’ll be editing for 10 to 12 hours throughout the week. And it just depends on the video, like if it’s just a little prank it will take an hour— but if its like – like this video I have coming out on Friday, it probably took like 10 hours— just because I added so many things. It just depends.
That’s part of the thing that makes a YouTuber, I think. Part of it is like yeah, you can get in front of the camera and do whatever you want to do, but you also have to be able to edit and make and add things that make it funny.
I started editing— I had Adobe Premiere Pro at my high school, so I would just go into the computer lab and Google ways to edit, and then I would just learn off YouTube how to edit. And just over time I’ve just gained so much knowledge. I use the media lab’s camera (at Xavier) because it’s really, really good.
Do you have any crazy fans?
Yes! If you go on my Instagram and you go to the pictures tagged of me, we have a lot of fan pages and just like young girls— like eighth grade, ninth grade. It’s funny now because my friends will go on the explore page on Instagram, and they will see pictures and videos of me and on there and be like “what is this?” It’s funny. And it’s still kind of new to all my friends that me and my friends are this big, so when they see this they’re like “what the heck.”
Do your fans contact you?
They comment on my pictures— I’m cool with it. I know there is one fan who is like a day-one fan, before when we were even big. Before we even blew up she was always showing so much love, and I actually had a 150-Snapchat streak with her. We’ve always done that because me and my two friends, we were in the same position as a lot of these kids, looking up to people. So we always try to make sure, like, our Snapchats are all open. Anyone can send us stuff.
Do you have anything you want to tell the readers?
The one thing that motivated us, right when they started their channel— they had about 1,000 subscribers, and we went to a high school football game. We tried to get people to get into our YouTube video because we thought we were cool with 1,000 subscribers and we were trying to get people to be at the end of our video and some kids told us ‘you’re not even really YouTubers, go home’ and we kind of took that and started putting in so much more effort and within two to three weeks they had 100,000 subscribers on that channel and now they have a million on their channel and I have almost 150,000. So I would say to my viewers, if someone is ever giving you adversity, use it as motivation. Most of the time, if you use it as motivation you’ll go big.