FEBRUARY 2 — “Anybody that writes a book or goes on TV with the notion that they have a story worth telling, that people might want to listen to, you’re really already, by definition, an aberrant personality and a monster of self-regard.” — Anthony Bourdain (from his last interview with Fast Company)
I was running a workshop for a mix of 15- to 17-year-olds the other day. We were discussing careers and what some of them wanted to be when they grew up.
The usual answers popped up; we had the doctors, the lawyers, the engineers, the pilots (of course) and — I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised but somehow I was — one boy jokingly (or maybe not that jokingly) said he wanted to be a YouTuber.
I (also jokingly) asked him if he wanted to do it full-time and he beamed a Yes.
We didn’t follow up much on his answer but after the session I thought to myself: If that kid was serious, he’d have his work cut out.
I mean, yes, being a full-time YouTuber or TikToker or what-not certainly sounds fun but if anyone is realistically considering this as bread-and-butter activity, there are some key questions they’d have to ask.
I’ll only discuss two in this article. First, an obvious one...
1. What is your theme or area and how do you intend to approach it?
It’s great if you have some particular skill which helps you stand out among the crowd, eg dancing or playing some instrument or doing crazy stunts.
Just filming yourself doing breakdances or playing some world-class piano pieces every three or four days would, I guess, be a good start to your full-time YouTubing or TikToking career.
This is, in fact, what many accounts do. Practically every video is a short film of them performing.
But what if you don’t have these skills? What then?
I suppose the second most popular form of full-time content creation is simply giving your thoughts on some contemporary topic or event.
I recall one of my students casually telling me he wanted to do some videos on anime and that led to some other questions: What sort of anime videos does he plan to do? Does he just want to review recent anime films, discuss characters, critique plots or what?
I suppose that could work.
However, you need to ask what could be so special about your videos that thousands of people will tune in on a regular basis.
Remember that full-time content creation requires a lot of clicks and likes and so on; why would that many people want to view your stuff all the time?
Check out Bourdain’s quote at the top. That’s not a trivial point he’s making. He essentially forces all story-tellers (and isn’t content creation a kind of story-telling?) to ask themselves what and why they’re doing what they’re doing.
Even more so if this is your #1 source of income.
Which brings us naturally to the second major question...
2. How do you plan to sustain a heavy yet reliable and consistently high-quality flow of content?
Bear in mind that becoming a full-time content creator requires frequent uploads if you want to make a good living.
You can’t just upload one or two videos a month and expect to be earning big bucks. You must be uploading at least once (if not twice or more) a week to keep the views and subscriptions coming.
This is something even I, as a columnist, need to think about. I write one article a week and God knows the ideas don’t come easily to me. Every week I need to come up with an idea of what to discuss or debate and so on.
This problem of frequent yet reasonably good content is also why many YouTube videos end up looking like rehashes from previous vids.
The average account on, say, fitness will usually have a few videos on building biceps or abs, etc. Repeating previous videos in slightly different form is, I suspect, an oft-used trick of the trade.
Especially if there’s “pressure” to be churning out a new video every week, this issue is going to be a struggle for many people.
The best creators know that having huge time-gaps in uploads will be a red flag because that will likely mean viewers are going to shift their attention to other accounts.
And that means your revenue will fall.
So, well, if you want to be a full-time YouTuber (or content creator) the above are questions you need to consider seriously. Remember that if you’re not sure, or maybe even if you are, it’s always good to have a back-up source of income (I’m sure I heard that advice on TikTok recently...).
*This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
