am I too late is this still a thing okay if this video was recommended to you I'm going to assume you probably already know the drill a bunch of popular YouTubers have been quitting or at least scaling back their output on this platform and every YouTuber left on this platform has decided they need to chime in on what's Happening Now if you're a big YouTuber you can clickbait into this by titling your video something like quitting YouTube dot dot dot which you know open to the possibility that maybe you are one of the people quitting but if you're a small Creator like me no one really cares if you quit or not despite the title of this video I'm not really here to critique the whole discourse it is kind of funny how many videos I've seen with more or less the same title but I think it's really sparked a very fascinating discussion about the sort of meta of YouTube in general and as a small Creator it's been very useful for me to hear all the different perspectives of these large creators even if they're not quitting reflecting on their career and how they feel about sort of the trajectory of YouTube as a whole I recently uploaded a video titled why I'll never be a famous YouTuber which just happened to coincide with all these YouTubers quitting I think it was happening sort of as I was writing the script or as I was finishing the video so I didn't really talk about it in that video but what's funny is that it ended up being sort of from the opposite perspective of a lot of these people who are quitting I'm a small YouTuber just starting out and the video is my Reflections on what it's like to be chasing success on YouTube and how it feels to be on the outside looking in to a lot of these creators that video did really well and as of recording this has over 50,000 views which which is my most successful video ever it also took my subscriber count from about 600 to a little over 300,000 it took my subscriber count from around 600 to a little over 3,000 which is awesome and if you're one of my recent subscribers I just want to say thank you the amount of positive comments I received after uploading that video has just been amazing there's a lot of people who really sincerely seem to believe that I am going to be a famous YouTuber which I'm not sure about but it really does mean a lot to he all the positive encouragement I've gotten and in some ways that's why I wanted to make this video not because I think we need yet another take on this whole quitting thing but it was interesting to me that the release of my video and maybe part of why it was so successful is that it did coincide with this wave of YouTubers quitting so there was a lot of ongoing discussion about what it means to be a YouTuber and what the direction of the platform of YouTube is going to be going forward and as a small Creator it's hard to think about getting to the point of being so successful that you might get burnt out or like you need to step away from YouTube anyway another theme that if you've been watching these videos you've probably heard discussed ad nauseum is sort of the idea of creativity becoming a job now I do technically work in the creative industry as a graphic designer and I've been feeling pretty burnt out on that career path for quite a while which is part of why I've wanted to put so much energy into YouTube I think like a lot of people whether you've been in the creative industry or not you love the idea of creating something that's more authentic to you that's not based on the demands of a client per se which is what you deal with all the time in graphic design you're not just making any old cool thing you want you're making something according to the brief and according to the specifications of the project that someone is paying you to do what I've heard a lot of these YouTubers saying which makes a lot of sense is that as you grow bigger as a YouTuber you inevitably start hiring people and building what I've heard described as your own little Media Company you want to expand create higher production value stuff make more content so you need to bring on more people to help you keep up the level of quality that you want but with that comes a lot more responsibilities and emails you need to reply to etc etc you need to worry about paying people and taxes and if you have brand sponsorships you need to upkeep those relationships and manage all that anyway again this is all stuff that has been discussed in depth by many other creators who are already dealing with it and as far as building this into an actual career if I get lucky enough to be able to do that I guess my only hope is that from working in graphic design and dealing with the business side of creativity I think I do have a decently good perspective on how to hold these two things in Balance but it is always an ongoing Challenge and I think some people just aren't ready for it I talked in my other video about how so many young people want to become content creators when they grow up and I think deep down we're all just aware of how popular this whole phenomenon has become how many people want to do exactly what I'm doing right now and just sort of talk a camera share their ideas or their experiences to a wide audience and get paid for doing it a lot of the YouTubers who have quit or talked about the quitting phenomenon have underscored the fact that it really is a dream job and I hope they're right because it does seem on paper from my perspective to be a dream job I've worked in plenty of creative jobs that I didn't like doing boring work or working for bosses I didn't respect very much and it wore me down over time I've reached a point with graphic design where it's actually hard for me to tell whether I don't like doing graphic design like I'd rather be doing something else or I do like graphic design but I've just gotten so tired of the other things things that go with trying to do creative work every once in a while you get to make a really exciting logo project or build a brand from scratch and it can be really rewarding when you get to see that work out in the world but for every one of those projects it seems like there's five or more other projects that are just kind of boring and monness which is all to say that at least with YouTube you get to decide what you want to make and you're sort of responsible to yourself if you end up getting stuck making things you don't want to make I'm sure as you grow the incentives become more difficult and as income becomes reliant on that you do have a pressure to upkeep a certain amount of content output and you hope that that content continues to get you enough fuse and attention to continue to allow you to support whatever lifestyle you've arrived at so needless to say there's a lot to think about and I think that's why so many people have been throwing their voices into this particular Arena my goal with this video is something a little bit more off the cuff kind of like one of those Community update videos that YouTubers always used to do like thanks for a th000 subscribers here I'm going to answer some questions from my fans or or whatever I don't actually have any questions to answer so that's not going to happen but I guess it's interesting to reflect on say 3,000 subscribers which happened in the course of a few weeks and again I just want to stress that's awesome thank you so much for subscribing and if you haven't subscribed well I guess what I want to say is as awesome as that number is there's this very human tendency to just keep looking towards that next goal you know I'm not monetized yet so that's obviously my number one goal is getting the amount of watch hours I need um to get start getting paid by YouTube for AdSense but even when I hit that Milestone I'm not going to be making any real money until I increase the level of my channel several more times fold than till my channel grows a little bit more exponentially than this and you start to look at all these Milestones coming up like okay 5,000 subscribers probably won't feel that much different than 3,000 10,000 subscribers I mean that's awesome that's a long way towards a something obviously 100,000 subscribers is where you get that awesome little plaque and that would feel really really cool and as I said in my previous video one would think with that number of subscribers you're at least teetering on the brink of something fulltime but that feels really far away of course one can also imagine that once you hit that 100,000 subscriber Milestone some part of you starts to think more seriously about a million subscribers well maybe you start with 500k first that's just human nature I mean that's just what we do as humans once you achieve one goal your mind quickly moves on to the next goal but I think it is important to try and celebrate these little Milestones along the way a few weeks ago 3,000 subscribers sounded a long way away and now I'm a little bit past that and if you're one of those subscribers and you've made it this far again thank you thank you for being part of this it sounds cheesy and the internet can in a lot of ways feel sort of alien and strange like if I was giving a speech to 50,000 people that would be insane of course it's not quite the same not every View counts as a person sitting in their seat who's going to stay there for the entire talk but it's still a lot of people listening to what you have to say and that's really special so when it comes to YouTube I definitely don't think I have any special insights to offer beyond what the other people who have commented on this have already said but I like the platform a lot and I think a lot of us do it's a fun way to share expression with our fellow humans for whatever that counts for so I'll just say again thank you for watching thank you for subscribing and I hope to see you again soon
