Celebrating Ten Years On YouTube

Lonelygirl15 AKA Bree was 16-year-old, home-schooled girl living somewhere in the US.  She was trapped in her bedroom by strict parents who were part of a mysterious cult.  Bree's only outlet was her webcam, she poured her heart out to her viewers and along with Danielbeast took us all on a unique journey which sparked a vlogging revolution and changed the way people thought about online video content.

At the time I discovered Bree she was the channel with the most subscribers on YouTube with 30,000 subs.  Yep, in 2006 that's how many subscribers you needed to get to the number one spot.

To put that into perspective, I currently have 33K subscribers and almost eight million video views.  Bree had caught the attention of the world's media with less than two million views because what the creative team behind Lonelygirl15 was new, original and had never been seen before.  They were telling a story in the same way a TV show does but on YouTube and they'd made in profitable.

Fortunately I had the sense to deleted the video from YouTube a long time ago but the original video does still lurk deep in my digital archives.

The other way your videos could be discovered back in the early days of YouTube was if you achieved the almighty honour of being selected by an editor and featured on the YouTube homepage.  I was lucky enough to get featured twice and was even once picked as a guest editor, I got to chose which videos were featured on the homepage for a whole week.

These were the days when a sense of community still existed on YouTube, it felt more like a social media platform than a video site.  I'd managed to find myself in a nice little gang of YouTubers who all cross-promoted each other and frequently collaborated.  Our group comprised mainly of British YouTubers, including Little Rich, Iggy35, Dan & Dan, FroGhandi and Slorge.

This was great for a while, I even went to a few YouTube gatherings around the country and met some of the biggest British YouTube stars of the day.  But as YouTube grew it lost touch with its sense of community.  Features like most watched videos and video responses were removed and smaller channels became lost in a vast ocean of content.

Nowadays around 300 hours of video is uploaded to the site every minute so showing the top 100 most viewed videos is obviously a little bit redundant as a way of discovering content.

Within my first two years on YouTube I felt like I'd been quite successful.  I'd notched up over 400 subscribers and around quarter of a million video views.  I'd had a video featured on a Channel 4 show and been named "web celeb" of the week by Annie Mac on her BBC Radio 1 show.

Most of the attention at this point had come as a result of my spoof travel guide videos.  The first of these was a guide to my home town of Patchway.  I followed this up with a spoof tour of Bradford-on-Avon in Wiltshire, which went on to become my most popular video at the time.

I'd landed a full time job in radio and after six month in the job I was moved to London where I spent the next six years working at one of the biggest commercial radio station in the UK. My role involved producing plenty of video content which featured some of the biggest names in music like One Direction, Lady Gaga, Little Mix, JLS and Rita Ora.

My time working in radio gave me the chance to improve my video production skills. I was at the forefront of the rise of social media as brands fought for real estate on sites like Facebook and Twitter. I now had a better understanding of digital content creation than ever before and had even bagged my first trip to YouTube's London office as part of my job.

For a few years I felt fulfilled creatively in my work but soon it was time to move on and that move prompted a return to making my own content for YouTube.

As before, I was uploading a mix of spoofs, parodies and new travel guides but I quickly realised my old subscriber base had moved on and forgotten me. It was really like starting from scratch and it took a few months to get any real momentum.

Then in June of 2014 I struck gold when I uploaded a video inspired by the Robert Popper and Peter Serafinowicz spoof science show, 'Look Around You'.

Based on suggestions left in comments on the video, I made another potion, this time a mermaid potion. It performed even better and went on to become my most viewed video of all time, now with 1.6 million views to its name.

Due to the success of these first two videos, I started producing more potion videos. They weren't particularly cheap to produce as they require a lot of props and ingredients but as my channel grew, so did my income from YouTube's ad share programme and this helped to fund future videos. It enabled me to go from one potion video a month to two, and now for the last six months, weekly potion videos.

There's a demand for more content but as always cost and time is the limitation, but growing to this point as a one-man team since 2014 does give me a little optimism for the future of my channel, whether it be with potions, travel guides or something completely different.