The Rollercoaster Rise and Fall of Mini Ladd

all right welcome everybody back to amnesia we left thank you everybody for 3k i just had like half an hour ago whatever welcome to my q a video this one being for 5 000 subscribers and that's a crazy number i did an omegle fam meet up uh 400k so yesterday i had 300 000 subscribers which is a crazy amount i really can't thank you guys enough i want to thank you guys so much for 500k i'm gonna hit this uh later on hey guys honestly so much for a million subscribers two million subs guys thank you all for three million subscribers it's 5 million subs uh it's a number that just doesn't make sense anymore uh the fact that i'm half uh for the last month or so uh you may have noticed that i've been away i went on this mental health journey i realized that there's a lot going on in the world and i know the internet judge jury and executioner an audience of individuals who are compassionate to those who follow the rules while simultaneously brutal to those who break them say the wrong thing do the wrong thing or follow the wrong path and they'll wipe you out of the game without a shroud of remorse now the creator will be looking at today is an interesting case study as he's one of the very few youtubers who's had the opportunity to observe both sides of the coin almost in equal part from an overwhelmingly respected gaming youtuber pulling 40 million views per month alongside some of the biggest names in gaming to a mere clown rejected by the very audience that made him so famous in the first place an individual full of so much potential building growing expanding before one or two stupid stupid choices derailing a lifetime of hard work this video will cover the whole story from a nobody to a creative ideal to a clown in the laughing stocks bound for the graveyard of dead creators join me as we cover the rise and fall of craig thompson aka minilad and what made you want to get into youtube and what was the first video uploaded uh what made me get into youtube was a few friends in school told me about uh this guy who's i want you to cast your mind back to early 2011 a time period representative of rage comic memes the popularization of the iphone and where the only political debate was whether black ops 1 on modern warfare 2 was the better call of duty the rise of internet accessibility brought about the opportunity for simple-minded individuals to share content on what was a very much new rising popular media at the time youtube.com at the time youtube was nothing in comparison to what it is today but as previously mentioned what it was doing was providing an opportunity to a small group of unique individuals looking to pursue a career in video creation one of these select individuals was a simple 16 year old high school student from northern ireland by the name of craig thompson who at the time would have never expected the roller coaster of a journey he would encounter by taking the road less traveled after being inspired by one of the early youtube trolling video legends call me kevin go and sell the game no i just bought it and i'm actually really enjoying it it's a good game craig thompson aka mini lad was inspired to create some similar content for himself so i thought right this is what i want to do i want to sort of make videos and try and entertain people wasting absolutely no time minilad got exactly what was needed to begin his content creation journey so i got myself a tv and a pvr and i just went for it the collection of required equipment was followed by the creation of his youtube channel name which similar to many other call of duty youtubers at the time came from craig's gamertag minilet explained that the name came from a scenario where another friend already had the name craiglad and decided to use minilad as a replica he ensures that the word mini comes from the fact that he's younger than the other craig and doesn't reference his height being apparently six foot or six for one how tall are you i'm about six foot six foot one or something like that but because my name is manila people sort of assume i'm like four foot three and just a complete [ __ ] however after seeing him stand next to minnie minter who is apparently six foot one i'd question the legitimacy of his statement however craig thompson's height or lack thereof had no impact on his ability to begin pumping out content because it wasn't long after the creation of the channel that the uploads would begin minilad's first upload was on the game call of duty modern warfare 2 in early 2011. um this is my new xbox channel my other channel was uh epic proportions which i just put like me lad also states in his first video that he had a previous channel where he uploaded some content recorded with a dazzle recorder but i'm not able to find any information on this previous channel so we're going to assume that it was deleted at some point following minilad's first upload craig thompson decided to employ the old strategy of trying to upload a bunch of different videos none of which having any relation to each other to see which one performs the best the kind of content that was being uploaded was very similar to the other let's be honest garbage content that was being uploaded to the platform back in 2011. we're talking simplistic videos like minecraft let's plays hey what is going on youtubers mini here and we are back with some more minecraft call of duty survival all right what's going on youtube this is minnie here and uh this is like my episode two of my little survival series that i'm trying to do world's hardest game you know the kind of stuff that you think will get a million views on the first day but to your surprise barely cracks 100 views in the first year but that's all right in that first period of time discovering what works and what doesn't isn't the easiest of tasks so maybe mini lad had the correct strategy at the beginning but despite possibly having the right strategy none of these videos worked all that well as after six months of pumping out content minilad had only reached 300 subscribers but 300 was still better than zero and while 300 subscribers was not nearly enough to rival someone like pewdiepie it was still enough for him to get noticed by a significantly larger youtuber by the name of ihascupquake this week's gamer of the week is a mini lad i could tell that he puts a lot of work into his channel he really loves games he loves to help others but yeah if you guys like him subscribe to him i'm sure he would appreciate some loyal subscribers some active subscribers after being shouted out by i has cupcake mini lad went from 300 to 700 subscribers overnight a number that he found to be mind-blowing at the time so i think for that video i have like 300 subs like 700 subs like overnight i remember like screaming like because obviously when you double in subs no matter what size you're on you're like ah it's happening now doubling your subscriber count in one day is an excellent situation for any youtube channel but there was still a bit of an issue here mini led still had no real theme going on with his channel the strategy was still just kind of post whatever i'm feeling like posting a move that the most dedicated fans would respect but would simply confuse the new subscribers as they wouldn't really know what to expect it was clear that minilad had the problem of having no clear theme on the channel but this problem wouldn't last long as it was shortly after that mini led would figure out a video type that he loved to make while also benefiting the growth of his channel tremendously troll taj is i've started my uh first soldier video last week and i'm gonna try and make that a weekly thing i normally don't like like to do schedules whatever but i'm really really enjoying doing troll tags i'm gonna be honest with you it's like a new love love now if we go back a few steps we need to remember that mini lad actually began his youtube journey after being inspired by call me kevin one of the most popular call of duty troll channels at the time so it only makes sense that in the process of trying out different types of content minilad would try uploading a troll montage for himself minilet's first troll montage was uploaded to the channel in february 2012 approximately seven months after initially creating the channel then the performance of this video led mini led to upload another troll tires then another one again and again eventually uploading a series of 10 different troll tag videos these videos were a massive success in comparison to what minilad had uploaded previously taking his channel from 1 400 subscribers to 3 000 subscribers in a period of only 6 months another aspect that was causing massive growth for minilad was the improvement of his editing skills which by 3 000 subscribers had improved to a level where people were commenting on his videos purely to complement the editing mini led later stated that this was the point where he really started to enjoy editing and content creation but it kind of it starts to show you like where i started editing and where i really started to enjoy editing and as you might expect actually enjoying the process of creating the content would be a key ingredient for the future growth of his channel this initial success with call of duty trolling was an indicator to minilab that he should begin focusing on call of duty as the main game so that's what he started to do but once again there was another issue the trolling videos couldn't go on forever i mean minilad could have just kept going until he hit troll taj number 653 but obviously the audience would have gotten bored there's only so many times you can trap a teammate in the corner on modern warfare 3 before your audience goes yeah maybe time to watch something else eh but what mini lad had learned from the troll tigers was how to combine a bunch of different funny videos into one big video or put slightly differently he'd become skilled at making compilation montages which at the time as said by mini led himself weren't really much of a thing his funny moments wasn't really a thing before nowadays it's everywhere nowadays you see like funny moments the title mini lead transition from making troll tigers into making fun targets [Music] and fail targets with the ulterior intention of diversifying from basic trolling well this turned out to be a good move for the mini lad channel as diversifying the call of duty content with different montages reached a wider audience ultimately resulting in subscriber growth going from 5 000 subscribers in january 2013 to 35 000 subscribers only six months later in june 2013 but it wasn't only the diversification of content that was causing minilad's subscriber count to grow it was also the increased production value of his thumbnails and implementation of proper branding between the beginning and the end of 2013 we can observe a clear change to high quality thumbnails accompanied by an even more clear increase in views likely owing to the high quality thumbnails and at this point a massively increased production value for the videos with more views came more subscribers and with more subscribers came more views most of these views as previously mentioned came from his highly distinguishable thumbnails having the orange background and therefore being recognizable and relatable for returning audience it was also around this point early 2013 that mini lead would begin playing with what would later become known as the vanoss gaming crew the vanos gaming crew was a group of youtubers that would all collaborate on a regular basis to ensure cross growth of each individual channel this child put together by banos shows all the members of the group as well as their subscriber counts by date in the bottom right hand corner if we pause the graph in early 2013 when minilad began playing with them regularly we can see that there were many youtubers with larger audiences providing ample opportunity for the personal growth of mini lad and this is exactly what happened watching the graph in fast motion we can see mini lag go from 35 000 subscribers in mid 2013 to 200 000 by the end of 2013 only six months later and it's not like the growth stopped there by mid-2014 it was extremely rare for mini land to be getting less than 500 000 views on a video with many getting north of one or two million views mainly owing to the hilarity of the videos and notoriety of the individuals that he was collaborating with such as vanossgaming who had over 7 million subscribers at the time then by late 2014 mini led hit 1 million subscribers and just for the video stars i just want to thank you guys honestly so much for 1 million subscribers then 2 million subscribers also 2 million subs guys guys what then you guessed it 3 million subscribers again thank you all for 3 million subscribers it's it's it's getting to the point where i can't even i literally can't put it into words anymore it's just it's humbling i just by 2017 mini lad's channel was performing so well that he purchased himself a property in la which was displayed to the audience in a video finally bought myself a house away from noise complaints by this point the thumbnails and video quality had improved yet again with pretty much every video being either a gaming video or a video with a vanos gaming crew with the vanos gaming crew point being important for the downfall section later in the video with more videos came more views and ultimately more subscribers minilad hit 4 million subscribers in mid 2017 and 4.5 million subscribers by the end of 2017. so you might say that 2017 was a pretty good year for mini lad however it would be the final year before the downfall would begin for craig thompson [Music] in 2018 subtle signs began to show up here and there hinting at a change in mini-lad's behavior comparative to his previous years on the platform most specifically relating to his relationship with the members of the vanos gaming crew the amount of videos posted with the crew had almost dropped to zero and fans began to notice that mini lad no longer played with a group that had helped him become so successful in the first place with all this in mind a donation was made during a mario kart stream asking why he was no longer playing with the groove because i don't play gmod anymore that's all he does question done i also i'm also breaking off into a solo youtuber because it's a lot more fun now despite simply saying that it was because of gmod there was an obvious hint of anger and bitterness in his voice tone leading fans to become suspicious around the authenticity of his statement this was then backed up by another live stream at a later date where once again mini light appeared to be a little bitter around the simple fact that they were playing gmod they're still playing gmod damn for all this time they're still playing gmod this again raised suspicions with his audience why was he so angry and rude towards the group just because they were playing gmod well what was said next might add a little bit of clarity because this time around mini lad also added the comment that he was kicked out of their chat i mean they kicked me out of all their chat so i have no idea what the hell they're doing so this comment saying that he left on his own accord just to clear up some [ __ ] uh i wasn't kicked followed by some clearly bitter comments about how much better he was doing since leaving that all they did was play fortnite in gmod and then talk about other youtubers so i said that i broke away from that group i'm doing my own thing i've never felt better my community's stronger than ever i'm pulling more views than ever and i'm personally a lot more happy as a human but all this did was create more questions why was he sprung into an angry mood just by observing the game that they were playing why was he going to the effort of bragging about how well he was doing that's almost a telltale sign of someone who's resentful saying haha you might have kicked me out but look how well i'm doing now someone who left on their own accord would have no reason to brag about doing better than they used to be they would have just left and been respectful of whoever they had left plus if he had left on his own accord wouldn't he still be in contact with them and on good terms well then let's analyze it a little bit further there was a point in the video when mini lads said all they did was talk [ __ ] about other youtubers and then talk about other youtubers well what i'd guess is that the youtubers he's talking about was actually him hence leaving the group as if they were bad mouthing other random unrelated youtubers why would he leave it's not like mini lad was some moral saint that would leave the group because they said something rude about some random youtuber the only reason you'd actually go to the effort of leaving the group if they were talking about you specifically so here's how it probably went down vanos crew was gossiping about mini lad mini lad got angry and left on his own accord but was clearly resentful towards the group from that point onwards but here's where minilad made the mistake instead of just accepting that sometimes people talk dirty about each other and being a man moving on and staying in contact with them he got resentful and as a result alienated the whole group by bad mouthing them on stream why not invite minnie i'll tell you why he doesn't play with us he left and then he decided on stream to bad-mouth me myself and my friends well mainly just my friends and i didn't appreciate that so i don't play with the guy lately at a later date mini lad stated that he was patching things up with the vanos gaming guys i got to finally meet up with brian we're figuring things out you know we talked backstage evan show and we shook hands and we're gonna work on it so like you know i miss the dude and it's good to see things coming together which was shot down by terrorizer afterwards saying that the statement wasn't true uh so yeah i don't particularly want to work with the guy i know he made a video saying we're patching things up which is not true i feel like he says things in order to kind of get flak off his back now this whole scenario was the beginning of the end for mini lad for two main reasons one subtle reason and one more obvious reason the subtle reason was that mini lad was publicly displaying his proclivity for lying to his audience in order to save his own reputation saying that he was patching things up with the vanis crew when he clearly wasn't saying that he was kicked out by them when he wasn't being unclear about why he was angry and bitter towards them pretending that it was for some unknown reason that he left when it was clearly because they did him wrong in some way that he wasn't willing to admit possibly because he realized that it was so petty that coming out about it would ruin his own reputation death by a thousand cuts with each cut relating back to why mini lad wasn't all that trustworthy as a person and the audience began to notice you can tell when you're being lied to and when you get found out the audience loses instant respect now the more obvious reason for why this might have been the beginning of the end was that minilad was alienating a whole group that could clearly help with his growth into the future now obviously it's impossible to quantify but what percentage of minilad's 5 million subscribers at the time had come from collaborations with other huge youtubers in the group vanoss h2o delirious wildcat having 23 million 11 million and six million subscribers respectively at the time when you go from consistently playing with other insanely large creators to going out and doing your youtube mission solo a slowdown in growth is almost inevitable which was exactly what happened following mini lads beef with the crew because by september 2019 following all the drama as well as a self-proclaimed drop in video quality i just didn't feel like the videos were good enough meaningless subscriber growth halted stagnating at 5.74 million now what's interesting to me is the fact that mini-lead subscriber growth halted in september 2019 as this was a date before the true tsunami of drama would wash over the mini-lad empire on the 29th of december 2019 minilet uploaded a video as he normally would but following the video didn't upload anything in january or the start of february for that matter after 52 days of not uploading mini lead released a video on the 21st of february 2020 titled why i left it's been a minute uh it's actually nearly been two months uh since i uploaded a video mini light explained that he had broken up with his girlfriend sammy and i broke up um i'm not gonna get into too much which is a fair enough reason for not uploading videos that would have been a tough thing for anyone to go through but his other reason for not uploading possibly rubbed a lot of his fans the wrong way for those who've been around for a while like i said before it's i struggle a lot with mental health issues um you know it's not some to just kind of brush aside it's something you take seriously otherwise it's gonna catch up with you and that's exactly what happened now i want to be a bit careful with what i say about this because i mentioned this in the sky does minecraft downfall video and goddamn i could have never expected the level of backlash from commenting on someone's depression but here we go if you're going through some mental health issues that sucks of course but using it as a victim card for why your videos haven't been doing as well is truly pathetic the respectable person is the one who is going through hell and has the nobility to deal with it on a personal level not to use it as a public excuse for your behavior when youtubers especially male ones come out about mental health problems to their audience it's usually to the detriment of their own channel and that's all we'll say about that following minilad's mental health break he continued to upload videos but failed to see any subscriber growth staying at 5.74 million subscribers during the four months between february 2020 and june 2020 at which point two sets of allegations towards minilad came out on twitter which would prove to be the final nail in the coffin i was manipulated and completely used by mini lad aka craig on the 23rd of june 2020 at the peak of the second rise in the metoo movement two women came forward on twitter with stories relating to mini lad and sexual misconduct that took place back in 2017 the twitter post basically outlined the fact that craig had spoken with them sexually and even attempted to meet up with one of the girls despite the fact that he knew that they were both underage at the time i was 16 17. following the release of the statements mini lad released a statement himself confirming the allegations also taking another month and a half break from making content now despite the publicity of the allegations meaningless surprisingly didn't lose many subscribers in the beginning only dropping 10 000 in the two weeks following the incident on twitter his first video following the break was once again a mental health pity party my mental just took a turn for the worse and i know i needed to get back i needed to be around the ones who i love i wanted to work on myself my mental health journey i got myself into therapy for the last month giving absolutely no attention to the allegations while simultaneously blaming what was going on in the world for his problems rather than taking personal responsibility for his actions i went on this mental health journey i realized that there's a lot going on in the world and i know i just need to step away and i know i just needed to take care of myself the video ended up with a 50 dislike ratio accompanied by almost every comment having something to do with his inability to address the problem at play then the next video had an even worse like ratio with even more comments talking about how he's ignoring the elephant in the room well after this one on the 3rd of september 2020 the pressure was too much a mini lead gave into making a video about the allegations now that some time has passed and i've had time to reflect on everything and get a grand scope of everything that's been going on i wanted to set the record straight the video addressed the allegations but as you might guess the audience didn't really buy it with many comments relating to the inauthenticity of the video with the audience opinion supported by the like-to-dislike ratio now it's questionable as to whether this video was a good choice for his channel as it seemed to be somewhat of a catalyst for his subscribers falling off a cliff going from 5.74 million just before the allegations to 5.48 million at the time of this video mini ladders continued uploading as if nothing ever happened however the dislike ratios are a pretty good indicator of how his audience currently perceives him so as always we'll finish the video by answering the ultimate question what caused the downfall of minilad well in some cases it's a bit of a gray area but i think in this one it's pretty crystal clear a failure to take responsibility for various long-term upload breaks being resentful and alienating a former group over the most petty of reasons then the most obvious one that sticks out like a sore thumb soliciting sexual activity with multiple minors before they would come forward on twitter the rise of youtube as discussed in the beginning has highlighted the rise of another phenomenon you don't get anything for free there is a price to pay for an individual's inability to conform to the rules of society you want to be a dick to the people who made you the price is the future growth of your channel you want to alleviate all responsibility by blaming external factors for your shortcomings the price is a loss of respect you want to take the shortcut to gratification by preying on young vulnerable fans the price is your career mini-lad never had a downfall he's simply paying his debt to society for his shortcomings and he's socially bankrupt he has no value left he's done his goose is 110 cooked second chance or no second chance the internet is judge jury and executioner and the verdict for craig thompson's youtube channel is death use mini lad as an example you don't get away with anything [Music] ever

Channel: SunnyV2

Views: 5,137,762

Keywords: Mini Ladd, Miniladd, mini ladd exposed, mini ladd vanoss fight, Mini Ladd terroriser, Mini Ladd Downfall, Mini Ladd Prison mate luke, mini ladd diesel patches, vanoss gaming crew, where are they now?, a brief history, documentary, youtube documentary, where is, Biography, narration, video essay, twitch, youtube, entertainment, education, joon the king, fredrik knudsen, down the rabbit hole, no swearing, family friendly, sunnyv2, sunnyv2 downfall, downfall, demise, rise and fall

Id: gMiPe0oD418

Length: 23min 17sec (1397 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 08 2020