The Reality of Being a Successful YouTuber
June 2017. I just graduated high school and wasn't entirely sure where I was going with my life. All my friends had moved away, and I was stuck in my small hometown with quite literally no one by my side.
On a cool summer night, I went out to the park where me and my friends would spend hours after school. Only this time, it was just me. The town I was in was very small, and so having an entire park to yourself gives you a bit of time to think, to say the least. With no one to run around with, I just laid on the grass and stared at the Milky Way.
Looking up and seeing thousands of stars littered across the night sky always made me feel like I wasn't alone. I thought to myself that stars like these form the elements that are in my body. I am the waking universe staring at itself, so how can I be alone when the very things that made me are out there staring back at me?
This is one of the reasons why I love space. I loved it so much that I wanted to be an aerospace engineer and one day work at NASA. I took every math and physics class that I could in school and went even further beyond what I thought I was capable of at the time. But that dream, just like the Milky Way, seemed so far away, so out of reach.
That night, as I laid on the grass staring in awe, I just thought to myself: out there in the world, there are thousands, if not millions, of people looking up at these stars, all just like me. I'm pretty all right at making videos; I should make a YouTube channel about space. I like it, and I’m sure a lot of other people do too.
Maybe I wasn't so eloquent in my thoughts, but I remember that night like it was yesterday. The next day, this channel was born. I had no idea what I was going to make. I didn't have any technical skills with script writing or recording voiceovers; I just knew my way around an editing program from making gaming videos as a kid.
Regardless, I just started. I published my first video, and other than my few friends on Discord, nobody really watched it. But I didn't care because I just loved space and wanted to talk about it. So I kept making videos. I still didn't know how to compose or voice a script properly, but I always tried to make sure my next video was better than the last. I continued working on the channel every single day, as days turned into weeks and weeks into months.
October 2017. At this time, I had published a few videos on the channel, and I went on a road trip to visit some friends who moved to the next state over. I remember getting home a week later, unpacking everything, and sitting down on my computer. I went on YouTube, and well, that's where my life completely changed.
In the week I was gone, the first video I had ever made on this channel got picked up by the algorithm and had gotten half a million views—more than I had ever gotten on any of my gaming montages. My subscriber count grew from 100 to 8,000, and it really wasn't slowing down.
Throughout the next week, I stared at my computer for an unhealthy amount of time, watching as my subscriber count rose from 10 to 15 to 20,000 people. The success of that one video had formed the core fan base of this channel. I was supposed to be happy; this is really what I wanted. But something strange happened.
When I had just 100 subscribers, I thought I'd finally be happy when I hit 1,000. Yet here I was, staring at 20,000 people, feeling not happiness, but just nervousness. I started asking myself: why did all these people subscribe to me, a kid who really didn't know what he was doing at all?
I got all the information I used to make that video from a couple of Wikipedia articles, recorded it with a $50 blue microphone, and used free stock footage to create the visuals. It was not in any way professional. I became worried that I would disappoint the subscribers I had gotten and that they would end up figuring out just how clueless I really was.
I stopped uploading videos because I felt like I didn't deserve the subscribers or that I couldn't match the quality of that video that went viral. For months, I literally didn't look at the channel at all. I tried doing other things, but my love for space kept calling...