EPTAs the above quote suggests, I have finally been accepted in to the youtube partnership program on my youtube channel http://www.youtube.com/HuskyMUDKIPZ
This is a pretty damn big deal for me, I have been striving for this for the past 4-5 months and have finally achieved it.
I would like to celebrate this accomplishment through finally writing down my current youtube history.
I began my youtube career, like many others, through recordings of the video game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. I will be the first person to admit that what I was doing with MW2 was hardly original and did not deserve to be featured on the youtube website in any way. I tried to inject my sense of humor and ability to analyze situations in to my commentary, but with the youtube community so over saturated with gameplay commentary my youtube channel hardly shone, in any sense of the word. For a while there, from approximately April to mid July, I was known as one of three things; The Valedictorian, various nicknames to my friends, or that kid that did youtube videos on MW2. Then came August.
August was a pretty big month for me, I was working while trying to get ready for school, I was having fun with my friends, basically I was outside every day in one form or the other. In Early-Mid August I had to stop making youtube videos because I went to my God parents Farm in an attempt to make some money, but I knew the real reason. The real reason I was heading there was to see them before I went to school, this was because I knew that I would not be seeing them until probably the next summer. In this period I really slowed down my interaction with the interwebs and lost my taste for the game MW2. Now comes the end of August.
If August was a big month for me, it is all because of the last weeks. In this period of time I learned about a new video game through my youtube friend B3ATNIK, a game that went by the name of Minecraft. Minecraft was a strange game to me, it was a game in which you could basically do ANYTHING and build ANYTHING. In short, it was a game of infinite possibility. This game really grabbed the attention of both myself and one of my best friend's, Creighton, and we started playing continuously. I believe the first day that I bought it He and I played approximately 6 hours straight just trying to discover and build the coolest things we could. Almost instantly we had a few of our other friends hooked and we started playing together. This was before the huge amount of "survive your first night" videos were published on youtube and I started to find that more and more I was stuck explaining the same concept to my friends and I was actually doing well in the explanation. Then suddenly an idea appeared in my head! Why don't I make a video tutorial/Let's play in minecraft? I was encouraged by a lot of my friends to do so until I finally found a screen recorder and recorded my first minecraft video.
This was somewhat a new experience for me. As I said before I had already been doing video game commentaries on youtube so I wasn't exactly afraid of the concept. The only thing that bothered me at first was the idea of recording and commentating at the same time. Before I had simply recorded some gameplay, looked the gameplay over once or twice, and then recorded myself while the gameplay was playing in the background. Now I found myself in the situation where I had to both explain a concept and act it out in real time.
If we may take a moment to get super cereal I would like to address something. Making video game commentary is not for everyone. To do it well you need to have some sort of spontaneity or improvisational skills. You also have to be able to get over your fear of sounding stupid or idiotic and be able to talk confidently. I know of a lot of small youtube channels that got started and were never able to get off the ground because the commentators were just not confident in their speech. Now back to the story.
After making my first two videos and uploading them to youtube I had received a few comments and views but really nothing special. Suddenly a subscriber pointed me in the direction of a forum with a lot of minecraft players on it. This forum was Minecraftforum.net. I started to post my videos on it and gained some marginal popularity as being both entertaining and informative at the same time. For some reason, I actually have no idea where this thought came from, I decided that it would look cool if I blew up a mountain in minecraft with TNT. This led to my first TNT video, Minecraft: 780 blocks of TNT vs Mountain.As an aside I would like to say that I know I wasn't the first person to do this, please don't assume that. Either way, I suddenly found that I shot up in subscribers! This TNT video was getting me a lot of attention from people on both the forums and on youtube in general. I decided that I was going to try an even larger explosion and I placed 3000~ blocks of TNT in an area. This video literally blew up my channel. I went from having maybe 130 subscribers to getting over 1,000! While also continuing my Let's play series I started pumping out a lot of different explosions. As my explosions got larger and more elaborate, so did my channels subscriber base.
I started posting more let's play videos then I did explosions, trying to create original videos with original building ideas and entertaining commentary was a lot more to my style then "Here is a bunch of tnt, boom!". I found myself getting very comfortable with the way that I could speak and the ways that I could express myself in both the video game and real life. I became more confident and started posting a lot of different games. I even started video blogging. Now, as a Curly headed, overweight, pale, funny guy starting a small video blog is normally not on your mind, however I found that I just didn't care. I didn't care about the trolls, or the guys who would say "Fuck you ugly gay head, unsub nao". I felt so confident in myself that I lost all fear of internet ridicule and simply started to enjoy being who I am, because others had.
Fast forward to now, it is nearing 5 months of constant posting, I have over 150 videos under my belt, and I have over 20,000 subscribers. I feel more confident in what I say, I am finally over the age of 18, and I have found what I wish to be my future. I have discovered throughout this past 5 months that I do not want to be a mathematician as I had previously thought, what I truly want to do is be involved in some sort of Media Broadcasting. This has resulted in me changing majors from a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and Economic Statistics to a Bachelor of Arts in Communications.
This has resulted in me finally seeing my future, and embracing it.
That, my friends, is a summary of my history in youtube so far. It will, of course, not be the end of my youtube career. I hope to continue posting videos and entertaining nerds for a long time to come.
I hope you enjoyed reading this, as I have enjoyed writing it.
