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.

But 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 me back.

After 7 months, I went back to the channel and decided to give it another go. I made the video "What will happen in 1 billion years?" and I guess it was my lucky day because that video got picked up by the algorithm again and was taken even further than my first video. And the rest, they say, is history. To this day, those two videos are in my top three most viewed videos on the entire channel. I've since grown from those hundred of my Discord friends to 40,000, 100,000, a million, and now there are 2 million of you that decided to click on that button to say, "Yeah, I'd like to watch the next thing he makes."

And there is no day that passes that I'm not grateful for each and every one of you for making that decision. You all have allowed me to live my dream. I've thought about this since I was 7 years old, back when YouTube had a five-star rating system. I'm not a NASA astronaut yet, at least, but with this community, I've become a lot more connected to the universe. And best of all, I've been able to make a living doing what I love.

I love each and every one of you, and I hope you know that because I don't say that lightly. But accomplishing your dreams, or what you believe to be your dreams, doesn't come without a bit of a sour taste in your mouth. Being a big YouTuber isn't all it's cracked up to be, and I don't want this to come across as me complaining or anything because it's far from that. But I'd be doing you a disservice if I sat here and left out the not-so-pretty parts.

I love making videos and will always love and want to do it, but the sad reality is that sometimes it's just not always fun. Sometimes you spend months working on a passion project only for you to click upload, and it just flops. The first thing you see when you open YouTube Studio is a table that compares your most recent upload to your last nine videos. A 1 out of 10 means the most recent video is performing better than the last nine, which is what you always want. But you don't always get that; sometimes you get that dreaded 10 out of 10 that leaves you wondering if this is the day your channel starts to die, and that feeling sticks around for every single upload, even to this day. It's mentally draining.

Also, making these videos, believe it or not, is extremely difficult and has become even more tedious over the years. Now, it might seem easy on the surface, but everything—from coming up with the idea to doing all the research to writing the script to voicing it to editing the videos— that's a lot of work for one person to do, especially when you're trying to do better and better each time.

At the start, it was completely fine when I didn't have any subscribers. I could just easily take information from Wikipedia because even if I made a mistake, who would find out, right? Nobody was watching anyway. That all changes when you have millions of people watching your videos. There's a certain level of quality that's expected of you, and you kind of put that on yourself too. If there's a video that's not up to quality by even a fraction, there will be people in the comments making sure I know that, which makes sense because if millions of people are willing to give you their attention, you have to make it worthwhile for them.

But that also puts an insane amount of pressure on you because you're always having to one-up yourself. Not only do you have to keep increasing the quality, but you also have to increase the quantity because that's what YouTube likes to see. I have to impress the big robot located somewhere in Google's servers. Although many creators don't like to admit it, YouTube is a numbers game, and you kind of have to play it that way. The more videos you make, the more opportunities you have for the algorithm to pick up a video, and the algorithm picking up a video could very well be the difference between you being able to afford rent this month. You can imagine the stress that causes.

Then there's all the times you work hard on a video only to be hit by the big yellow "Your video is demonetized for reasons you can't really understand." And trying to dispute that takes longer than the video itself took to make. YouTube is also a very lonely career, if you want to call it that. From that night lying down on the grass when I just decided to start this channel on a whim to the thousands of cumulative hours that I've spent making these videos in my room, it can get very lonely when it's just you. You can quickly start to lose sight of why any of this matters.

I made a video titled "The Reality of Hitting 1 Million Subscribers," and in it, I talked about some of these difficulties too. I even mentioned some of them again in this video. That kind of just goes to show the same things I was thinking 1 million subscribers ago are still here in my head a few years later. After making that video, I honestly just contemplated letting the channel go and doing something else. It seemed kind of romantic to reach the pinnacle of what I had wanted for almost 15 years and to leave it as a living testament of my childhood dream.

But then I thought about the community that had been built, and I just couldn't do that. I often read your comments, and I'm honestly floored by how much my words have helped some of you. It's genuinely hard for me to wrap my head around the apparent impact this channel has made. The butterfly effect that kickstarted some of your lives began from watching a video made at 3:00 a.m. It's amazing to be able to have such an impact, from stoicism helping people to change their whole approach to life to death helping people cope with grief. How could I turn my back on these people who have given me so much?

But I did have to be honest; I still couldn't continue to do it all by myself because, in all honesty, I'd experienced burnout one too many times. I needed some help in more than one way. So for the first time in the lifetime of this channel, I got a video editor and two writers: Ashim, Mahir, and Eka, and they helped tremendously. While initially very nervous, they genuinely did carry the weight of this channel for a while. When I could barely even consider making videos, with them around, making these videos didn't feel so lonely anymore.

I had people I could bounce ideas off of, people whose stories made the work we were producing that much better. Speaking of stories, when I started this channel, I knew that I loved space, but I didn't really understand why. It took me a while to realize that the reason why I love it so much is because all of the things it teaches us about the human condition. Space makes you contemplate everything. I enjoyed going deep into thought about things that all came from a bunch of elements and hot gases in the vacuum of space—like how our never-ending search for alien life teaches us just how wired for social connection we humans are.

We never want to be alone, or how the stars teach us just how interconnected we all are. The same stars that the first humans to discover fire saw are the same ones that we see each and every day. I realized it wasn't really about space or Earth or the sea; it was about how they all affected the human condition. It's not about the universe out there; it's about the little piece of the universe that's in all of us, about our shared experience or humanity, the definition of which we create ourselves with each passing day.

And that's what I want to keep doing. I no longer want to just create the largest community of space lovers on YouTube; I want to create the largest community of people with the same desire to understand the human condition. People who love humanity and want to see us thrive. When I started working with what became my team, I realized there was so much about the human condition that I would just never know about. My singular experience as a human is limited, especially considering who I was back in 2017.

I can do all the research in the world, but I'll never know what it's like to lose a father as a young child and the grief that comes with it, which is why AA was better equipped to write the script about death. It came from a place of personal experience, and so it resonated so well with a lot of people who were going through the same thing. It's like astronauts who come back from the space station with an entirely different view on life. It's something you can't really get without having been through it yourself.

Once I understood just how important different perspectives, voices, and stories are to the miseries of understanding the human condition, I became a lot more comfortable with working as a team, with letting go of some of that control, and to reach more people and tell some more unique stories. I searched for almost a year to find the right group of individuals who had the same love for the universe and everything in it.

I eventually found Underknown, a media company from Canada, with a team who kind of just seem to get it. You might have even seen some of their videos before. We've been working together for about a year and a half now, and we've accomplished just what I wanted. We've been able to tell more and better stories, and I finally have the resources to do a lot of things that I've wanted to over the years. I can interview experts from around the world and create longer, more in-depth videos on different topics.

I can tell stories of things and places I just couldn't have known about on my own, from talking about how the advancement of technology is affecting humanity, through videos discussing how overstimulation ruins our lives, and spending a day with my AI girlfriend, to sharing even more stories about space with videos like the "Fermi Paradox" and "Becoming the World's First Trillionaire." We also launched a podcast, which you guys have been asking for for years, and started a new long-form format on the channel that you've seemed to love.

The roots I planted years ago have started to form new branches and reach new heights. I really couldn't have imagined, and the best part is I've been able to do all this without burning out because I don't have to wear all the hats anymore. I can focus solely on coming up with the best ideas that resonate with you watching this right now. With all of that extra weight off my shoulders, burnout isn't always lingering on the horizon anymore. I can see the light not just at the end of the tunnel but right here in front of me.

There is so much I've always wanted to do that just wasn't possible logistically, at least in my own head, but we can finally do that now. We can make documentaries with deep dives into topics we love and interviews from experts around the world. We can give a platform to voices who might not have the loudest one but still need to be heard. Anyway, when I made the video about how sports betting is destroying young men, I saw a lot of comments talking about how it's an even bigger problem in countries like Nigeria, Ghana, and India.

That's something that I just could not have known with research alone because most research only really covers the West. By giving different people from different backgrounds a platform to share their story, we better understand the nuances in our world and can form a more cohesive representation of what the human experience truly is. My longshot dream is that this channel will one day serve as an archive for humanity. I want it to act as a golden record of sorts where aliens from outer space or humans from future generations can look back upon to understand what it means to be a human being living in this century, to get a grasp of what we were thinking in this time and how things may have changed.

What that means is that maybe not every single video on the channel will resonate with you personally, but that's okay. There are some videos that even I don't connect with deeply on a personal level because it's not about each video; it's about the entire channel, and the whole is far greater than the sum of its parts. You can't have the highest peaks without the deepest troughs. The team now is made up of people from around the world: the United States, Nigeria, Canada, the Middle East, and even more. This is what allows us to tell the best and most accurate stories on the human experience all across the world.

Now going forward, you will hear some of these voices, and I'm personally asking you to encourage them, listen to them, and learn from them. Because while I no longer sound like the immature boy I did in 2017, just like him, I still don't know everything and I never will. So instead of acting like I do, I want to give other people the chance to share their authentic stories, the same way I have for years. If you've been watching this far, then you're definitely a huge fan of the channel. Not everyone can sit here and listen to a guy like me talk for 10 to 20 minutes nowadays.

So once again, I do want to say thank you for subscribing, watching, commenting, liking, disliking, and letting me know when you don't like something I did. I appreciate everything, the good and the bad because it is what makes this community better. I do also want to share more with you guys things that I can't really fit into a YouTube video properly. We've had a Patreon for a while, and while I don't really like to shove it in your face, I figured I should at least let you know about it.

Everyone who subscribes gets access to our private Discord server where you can meet with the team and communicate in real-time. Unlike the comment section, where a lot of things can get drowned out, you also get a discount on all the merch items, which goes back directly into helping pay the team to make the videos you're watching right now. Higher tiers will also get things like a behind-the-scenes look at our higher production videos, meetings with the team, and so much more that we haven't even figured out yet.

And you know, now that I think about it, you can definitely let us know what you'd like to see, and we'll try and make it happen. This, along with all the YouTube ads that pop up on each video, allows us to fund the big ideas that we want to achieve with this community. The ones I've thought of for what feels like ages—the amazing videos from around the world that we want to tell. But of course, all of this is extra content, and we never take away anything from this channel. It has been free since the start and it will stay that way. You have my word on that.

As always, team, thank you very much once again, all 2 million of you. I refer to you as "team" because you're just as big a part of this as everyone else. Without you, there is no aperture, and I would have given up a long time ago, trust me. Whether you were here since the start or just showed up today, I value each of you more than you could probably ever imagine.

When I say this has been a life-changing experience, I mean it in a way that I could truly never show, but that doesn't mean I won't try. Whether it's sharing love for the universe we live in or sharing the carbon and oxygen that is in each of our bodies, I will forever remain connected to you. We can't know what the future holds, but just know I'll be stepping into it with each one of you, just as uncertain as you are. Take risks, work hard, fail harder—it's all a part of life. We are the result of nearly 14 billion years of cosmic evolution, thermodynamic miracles, if you will. The fact we're here is reason enough to try.

Regardless of whatever happens, I like to think I've done some good with my time here on Earth, and I hope to be able to keep that up. Thank you for everything you've done for me, and I hope to make you all proud. I'll see you around.