The Radical Overhaul of Smosh

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] what i know you've probably already read the title by now i know that some of you guys may be wondering about the future of smosh now that anthony's gone they didn't warn any of their employees that this was going to happen they just shut down today [Applause] [Music] shut up why don't you and i take a little trip down memory lane [Music] youtube's launch in 2005 not only gave entertainers the chance to flex their creative muscles but made for a viable alternative to the increasingly sanitized nature of mainstream entertainment it quickly became a place of refuge for the younger generation as kids and teens had the chance to evade stress and temporarily forget about their everyday problems through the means of this guy yeah may not exactly have the same appeal now but these were the fundamentals that made youtube the video sharing powerhouse it is today without these faces the site would look completely different and without the authentic connection these individuals made with their audiences they wouldn't have been able to break such monumental ground at the crucial time in which they did but what happens when that familiarity is suddenly abrupt by an outside force and when does an entity become so eerily similar to the mainstream standard it once served as an alternative for i think the answer to this little quandary may be found while taking a look at the vast history of one of youtube's most beloved channels smosh [Music] smosh consists of two members and you know what else you have two of our sponsor today is manscaped being the only men's brand dedicated to below-the-waist grooming and hygiene the world's first all-in-one manscaping kit makes shaving below the belt easier and safer than ever before in fact i'm proud to boldly stake my claim as one of the first owners of the new lawnmower 3.0 water resistant trimmer which happens to be the only body trimmer on the market with advanced skin save technology 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that people were excited to use and it originally started off as just a website for me and my group of friends to talk like a forum together like really before social media was a thing um and then anthony padilla and ian heacox go back quite a long time to their sixth grade science class to be exact over time the two became pretty well acquainted with one another as anthony would often drive ian home from school managing to juggle coding on top of his regular classwork spending his free time creating flash games and videos on his own newgrounds accounts but it wasn't until the year 2002 when anthony first brought smosh into existence at just 15 years old originally intended as a small social media site for his friends at school smosh.com could only be described by ian decades later as sort of a new grounds inspired platform basically it's the word smosh was a inside joke between our friends because our friend couldn't say words and he said so you're making fun of his yeah we made fun of him yeah he said uh yeah he said yeah he was like oh it was a blink 182 concert there was a smosh pit like what he's like oh my yeah so then smosh became a word that just meant whatever he created kind of like a ripoff off newgrounds like do you guys remember newgrounds yeah he's like we were around then keep in mind this was years before youtube ever came about so you could say smosh was quite literally ahead of its time with several other notable creators attributing the site to the start of their own careers but anthony was still paying for the server out of pocket and as word spread around campus and the site began to receive more traffic the more expensive it was to keep online so it was only a matter of time before they would need to come up with an alternative which is around the time a little site called youtube began to pop off [Music] the first smosh video to be published on youtube wasn't even uploaded by ian or anthony in fact neither of them had even heard of the site before one of their lip sync videos was reposted by one of their fans with the increasing popularity of this new platform along with the gradually increasing price of anthony's server youtube seemed like the perfect opportunity for two young entertainers as the channel smosh was first introduced on november 19 2005. now back in the early days youtube videos were promoted much differently if you were lucky enough you could get your video featured on the front page putting your content in front of potentially millions of new people and with the abundance of videos they had been dumping onto their new channel it was only a matter of time before a smosh video would finally fall on youtube's radar and the day that happened would be the first defining moment of ian and anthony's careers [Music] the very first smosh videos consisted of ian and anthony lip syncing to popular songs in anthony's room they are basically the prime example of what youtube was intended for just a couple of teams having fun with a shitty camera and although it wasn't anything too out of line from the three prior lip sync videos they had already posted it was their pokemon video that was plastered across the coveted front page of youtube single-handedly introducing smosh to millions of new eyes being their fastest growing video to date it quickly became the most viewed video on the entire platform clocking in at about 24 million views before being hit with copyright shortly after but that didn't matter because at the end of the day smosh had gained about 3 000 new subs making them the biggest channel on all of youtube at the time at the brink of 2006 smosh was destined for greatness and the years that followed would prove just that millions of viewers now from all over the world are logging on to view their short films and video projects anthony padilla and ian heacox scribbled their ideas on a notepad and then turned them into short video clips alternating between sketch comedies and music videos ian and anthony began to take their content away from the illegally murky nature of lip syncing songs and down a more genuinely creative avenue one that allowed them to place their comedic abilities on full display and maybe it's the nostalgia talking but smosh's early stuff really wasn't all that bad looking back i mean i would spend hours binging this stuff as a kid so it's good to look back and know my taste it could have been worse check it out now the respectable consistency led to an influx in numbers and online success garnering media attention as early as the summer of 2006. the way youtube worked back then allowed the two to go from bored high school students to being featured in time magazine in under a year not to mention how their growing recognition was enough for them to open up a p.o box which ultimately kicked off the series i personally enjoyed the most [Music] dun dun dun we have a crap ton more mail to open and it's all boxes still let's open some mail around 2008 when google purchased youtube adsense finally became available which meant the profits made from these videos could later be put back into making more content which is when they hired an entire team to help bring their vision to life videos became hd writing became better than ever before and it was clear to many fans that smosh was hitting their stride launching several additional channels like l smosh smosh pit smosh games slowly but surely they were taking over the youtube game being the most subscribed channel three different times throughout their career in fact smosh had gotten so big that they had pulled over 700 million total views by 2011 the same year they were bought out by a company known at the time as alloy digital an extremely pivotal moment we'll get into a little later but for now it's important to underline the sheer marketability this channel had at the time i mean they were practically dominating the algorithm with every single upload brilliantly cashing in on popular video games and movies with their song parodies breaking in tens of millions of views with their pokemon irl series all right pikachu annihilate him with a thundershock and i mean their annual food battle videos were so popular i remember hearing about it at school they even found the funding to introduce food battle the game in 2013 with an impressive production value that accompanied their hefty following they were able to take their talents to the next level scratching the surface of mainstream exposure yet again with their commercial film debut the smosh movie [Music] distributed by lionsgate and directed by bill from bill and ted what the [ __ ] this movie was met with some pretty diverse feedback smosh the movie is one of the most lifeless empty and pointless films i've ever seen i mean i won't exactly get into it here because i haven't seen it but a lot of the reception seemed pretty critical of ian and anthony's acting not like they had zero experience in it it was just an entirely different medium than they were used to is it weird to say the closer this guy gets to my butthole the better it feels a little bit plus it was natural for the writing to seem a bit watered down when you consider how many people this thing had to pass through turns out making a movie may not be the same thing as shooting a youtube video in your bedroom it seems to me that they're famous for absurdist random and surreal comedy that works for a five minute youtube video with fast pacing but alternatively to smosh the movie taking elements of what makes them funny popular in the first place and translating that into a movie of the same tone energy and style instead they opt for the most generic and [ __ ] boring idea possible it's a safe predictable high school reunion comedy didn't stop them from landing a second one the next year of course this one being a youtube red exclusive that was met with seemingly more positive reviews although it was great to see the duo breaking new ground as youtubers it was this era that began to change smosh in a drastic way with five new regular cast members being added in 2015 the skits became more elaborate brand new series were introduced to the channel and their subject matter made its most noticeable change yet some videos didn't contain ian or anthony at all it was apparent to lifelong smosh fans that their creative process was going through a period of change but nobody could have expected what was to come in 2017. i'm leaving smosh or i guess as of today i've left smosh oh god this has been something that i've been contemplating for a really really long time and on june 14th 2017 anthony officially announced his departure from the brand he had conceived a decade and a half prior sending shockwaves throughout youtube and the internet as a whole i mean despite how the cast had grown and how their content had diversified anthony was still of course a main face of their brand but after generating an estimate of 11 billion views with a b it was time for anthony to branch out on his own for the first time in his entire career he'd be creating new content on his own without the company of his best friend a difficult adjustment to say the least but many fans couldn't have been more supportive though that didn't stop speculation either i mean this decision came via a five minute video published to anthony's personal channel where he did everything but talk in depth about this otherwise life-changing decision to rack up enough courage to take this career-altering step in a brand new direction was impressive but it still felt as if he was holding back like we didn't know the full story he and ian were quick to reassure the masses that nothing had happened between them personally and with anthony still consistently showing his support for the faces of smosh even after he left the main point of contention seemed to lie elsewhere a few of anthony's vague comments sort of alluded to more internal issues at bay behind the scenes more specifically at defy media smosh's former parent company defy media is being hit with a class-action lawsuit after they mysteriously announced that they were shutting down on november 6. they have bought a business built on nothing as we touched on earlier ian and anthony sold their channel to a company called alloy digital in 2011 for zero dollars to be cleared that's right they sold a four million sub channel for mere stock in alloy digital which is only valuable if the company goes public which alloy never did but that's besides the point see they eventually merged with break media to form what became known as defy media a popular multi-channel network that offered special protections to youtubers often in exchange for a cut of their ad revenue youtube would give your money to the mcn who would then dictate when you got the paycheck so you might be wondering why even join an mcn at one point you needed to be a part of an mcn in order to have certain features like custom thumbnails or even ad revenue in general but they were especially useful to anyone who dealt with copyrighted material i.e movie video game reviewers mcm's could prevent copyright claims from happen ideally putting more money into the creator's pocket along with an increased cpm and access to better resources and connections better sponsorships it seemed like a sweet deal on the surface to ian and anthony but the fact of the matter was they really had no idea what they were getting themselves into and honestly how can you blame them it was 2011. nobody knew anything some exciting news about smosh tell me what's going on well smosh is just an amazing sensation every friday we put out a video and three to five million kids on the weekend watch it 12 to 34 year old boys and girls will watch it every single friday it's the number one rated show both television and internet for 18 to 34 year olds you guys have created magic you guys are doing what all these big companies want to do you're number three on youtube everybody knows who you are if you had to talk to the corporate people right now what's your tip for how to do what you're doing uh do what you love do stuff that your friends enjoy and that you enjoy don't try to create something that you think is going to make it big or that you're going to make money off people can tell that you're just doing it for that you got to do it because you actually really enjoy it see the practices of mcns aren't always as ethical as they may want you to believe and that's because of a loophole that many of them have been quick to exploit over the past couple years one that a former employee of defined media matpat outlined pretty well back in 2019. think of it this way it's like if your paycheck before it got sent to your house was sent to like the water company and then like the electric company and then mcdonald's and whatever other services that you planned on using for the duration of that month and then it eventually reaching your own pocket everyone gets their cut and then you finally get access to the money that you rightfully own but when a lot of these companies are representing hundreds thousands tens of thousands of channels there is no way that you can actually give services to all of them especially not services that merit you taking that much money from just a fact it's still your money that you earned at your job at the end of the day but it went through everyone else's hands first as ad revenue was being passed through mcns before ever reaching the creator these companies would often turn around and use that money to make their company appear more valuable than it really was in the face of big investors which is how defy managed to land up to 70 million dollars in funding before falling under because it was built on nothing the company was nothing without its creators here they are receiving hundreds thousands tens of thousands of checks from youtube for all their different creators adsense sometimes that money is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars and of that money they're maybe keeping 10 20 of it but on paper it all looks like the company's money defies money because it's sitting in a big bank account that aggregates all this stuff so why would anyone care about this well because big pots of money are attractive to investors it was the massive success of channels like smosh they gave defy media value in the first place so they were not only repressing the creativity of their clients content they were using a disproportionate amount of their money in a dishonest attempt to line their own wallets and it wasn't just smosh either chris stuckman originally signed on to defy under the agreement that he would be getting 100 of his hard-earned ad revenue which worked at first until they eventually started asking for a 10 cut over time that percentage grew and they were even starting to place holds on some of his payments which is only a slight problem when you're an adult with bills and a mortgage no wonder anthony decided to bow out when he did the crooked nature of insians and defy specifically heavily contributed to the eventual split between ian and anthony they were both sick of having to deal with such a corrupt business that anthony couldn't take it anymore and decided to reluctantly walk away from the family he had devoted over a decade of his life to i've been holding on to these memories and hoping that someday smosh would be like how it was when we first started before smosh was a brand owned by a company and i had to come to terms with the fact that smosh being part of a company has put all of my creative decisions through a filter of what's appropriate for the smosh brand as deemed by the company his creativity was being repressed he wasn't having fun anymore and on top of everything else they were being spearheaded by a company who had all but their clients best interests in mind they came to me one day and were like hey we're gonna have you do a science show called smosh lab and i was like okay they're like yeah because you're you'll be like the science one i'm like i don't know anything about science but okay and they wouldn't they weren't doing well overall because uh because i feel like it didn't show us off it's not authentic yeah we were given a lot of lines we're like yeah this isn't many mcns operate with the intent to steal from their clients and lie to their investors so they could ideally sell before the bottom fell out and the company became worthless but unfortunately in the case of defy they never got to sell in fact they shut down out of nowhere in 2018 a decision that made a lot of people very happy so we were we were all working around the office that that things weren't too great there were people that were starting to trickle out of the company you know what they screwed over my friends today on november 6 2018 all affiliates of defy media received an email that the massive ncn was ceasing all operations effective immediately making the sudden decision to lay off every single employee who had been working at their beverly hills production office apart from a few layoffs earlier in the year this cataclysmic move came without warning or prior communication with their clients as stated openly by anthony himself that very same day in a seven minute video on his own channel anthony hinted at the heavy-handed nature of defy's business practices and blamed the company largely for his final decision to leave smosh the previous year the last few months that i worked there they started hiring new cast members and starting and stopping shows without consulting me first which you know they had every right to they owned the company i was just an employee but it hurt a little bit i i felt like i you know i created this thing with my buddy and we should kind of be consulted about these things not only have they been terrible for smosh's content but their questionable tactics had led to the eventual decay of the company itself as they were rumored to be around 10 million dollars in debt at the time of shutting down leaving countless talents from channels like smosh and clever out of work and without their fair share of ad revenue for the unforeseeable amount of time given how defy's assets were seized the same day they were meant to pay their creators that company was drawing in millions of dollars every year and i was seeing a fraction of that i have no idea where all that money went that the company was making which i also just read had millions of dollars invested into it last year and now it's gone where did all that money go i the money was then passed along to ally bank who is in charge of distributing the estimated 1.7 million dollars to its rightful owners which of course never happened it was very much a worst case scenario for anyone in the general vicinity of defy and led to a legal nightmare that ended up lasting for a good few months because because the way that the company was shut down it was complete anarchy like there was nobody there was nobody saying like okay now you don't have jobs this is what you're doing there is there was nobody deciding what would happen with the channels the channels were locked at first nobody could even get into them not even you right yeah going into 2019 it was unclear of where smosh was headed because here they were stripped of everything they had grown accustomed to over the past seven years all of their resources office space was gone in an instant although in search of a new parent company many of the cast members confirmed that they would not have pursued a career with smosh have they been involved in another defy situation in the future in my head i'm like even if it gets you know bought by this company i don't know how i feel about signing on to it if it's going to be another defy exactly it's going to be another one of those situations i was like oh but what if we controlled even more than defy then it's not gonna be fun we're not gonna get to do what we love i mean because i knew i for a long time like wanted to be more like creatively involved and not just writing and and being in the videos like i had all these ideas all the time and so i would go to somebody at defy and be like i have this idea say it was a show or merch or whatever and like they would be uh-huh cute okay go back to get your makeup for the video bye bye for a while it seemed like smosh was going to get bought out by the highest bidder which was scary because that's something nobody at smosh could really control so when defy went out of business then it was in the hands of the bank and it was just going to be sold to the highest bidder essentially so scary and then we also kind of realized as we were going like okay even if we get the investors i won't have a controlling share of this company and it'll be controlled by some random people yeah so that was that was starting to be a little bit scary one particularly bad one uh actually almost got it their whole plan was like okay here's what we're gonna do we're gonna take a smosh and we're gonna just hire a bunch of other people in other countries and start like new smoshes there so like we're gonna go to thailand we're gonna we're gonna find some talented thai boys and we're gonna we're gonna we're welcome to this we're happy thai boys and they're just gonna be like thai smosh so they not only missed out on a sizable amount of money owed to them by defy but were also without a decent parent company for a few terrifyingly uncertain months which seemed to mark the end of an era for these youtube pioneers except ian was still looking for a way to keep smosh alive and before long a light appeared at the end of the tunnel [Music] as many of you know the company that owns smosh went out of business four months ago and during that time we had no idea what was gonna happen on february 22nd 2019 it was announced that smosh had finally been acquired by none other than rhett and link see rhett and link have their own company by the name of mythical entertainment which has no investors and no debt giving them complete creative freedom over the content put out by their clients operating out of a 17 000 square foot studio in burbank california they ended up paying around 10 million dollars cash for smosh which was acquired by a holding company representing defy's creators according to variety for for those of you that don't know i guess we'll just we'll just go through this really quickly uh red and link are are the ones that that save smosh so uh you know it took you guys long enough to get on our pod geez well we didn't want people to think it would be a regular thing yeah that's true just about every original writer producer editor and staffer was reunited with smosh following mythical's purchase but on a wider scale this deal represented a lot within youtube culture it proved that there is an alternative to the crumbling mcn standard and that individual youtubers could still manage to support themselves when needed this was a massively important play that arguably saved smosh from certain demise and after the impressive failures of defy ian couldn't be happier with the future of his channel one day it was like you know we'd have a good meeting with somebody we'd be like it's this is gonna be good this is gonna be the thing and the next day we get like an email back like i'm sorry just in the time we can't do it and it's like everything's gone to sh we're all screwed [Music] thankfully in the freaking zero hour rhett and link come and save the god damn day it was a call like like i don't remember i don't know uh it was like uh well we got on a call with him and and we essentially told them what we thought the price was and the response was i think we could do that smosh's troubled past with defy media is a cautionary one warning other up-and-coming creators of the potentially criminal outcome of doing business with a large corporation whose chief goal is to make themselves money when the integrity of the contents is not being prioritized the entire operation begins to fall apart because guess what fans see right through that for a brief period of time there were smosh fans who could tell things were off certain series were being forced upon members of smosh that felt anything but authentic because the sad reality is that corporate executives are the most out of touch when it comes to keeping an audience happy they don't know what the fans want only the talent does and no good can come from a faceless board of directors who value their own wallets over the creativity of their creators who you know make the money in the first place smosh has existed for many many years and will continue to break records on the platform so long as they can exercise their creative abilities in the way they deem most appropriate today anthony runs his own series on his personal channel where he sits down with notable online personalities in front of an audience of millions meanwhile smosh continues to be led by ian with a team of incredibly skilled comedians still managing to pull relatively consistent views on a regular basis keeping the business alive and functioning through the help of rhett and link it's obvious that ian hecox and anthony padilla have been at this game for a long time and the longevity of smosh is a testament to not only their comedic ingenuity but the authentic connection they've had with their audience for so many years and as long as that connection stays pertinent smosh will continue to thrive on youtube for years to come [Music] you

Channel: j aubrey

Views: 1,372,002

Keywords: smosh, the, radical, overhaul, of, the radical overhaul of smosh, ian and anthony, ian hecox, anthony padilla, ian hecox and anthony padilla, ian and anthony interview, ian and anthony 2020, smosh movie, smosh pokemon, smosh old videos, ian, anthony, funny, comedy, video essay, rhett and link, rhett, link, j aubrey, satire

Id: PtJxhdyFd8k

Length: 32min 3sec (1923 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 31 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/ace_related_pun]

j aubrey makes some really good videos, i'm glad that one was made about smosh