I have been working on my youtube channel fulltime. It is a lot of fun. Tough, too, sometimes. There are a lot of haters out there so I have had to keep my head up and know when to just avoid reading the garbage some people spew. Definitely have had a few bumpy days or even a week or two here and there with the long hours and much slower than I hoped for growth of my audience.
Hmm lets see, how can I make this entertaining or informative for ya'll?
Well, I have made <$15 in all of this time -- I am at 30k views on youtube now. No biggie, I dont expect to be able to support myself with this for a while.
What am I doing on youtube?
Let's plays. If you aren't familiar, that's commentated videogame footage. I have been experimenting with a few different formats of how I want to do things. There are some interesting characters already on the scene out in Youtube land. Maybe you have heard of PewDiePie, he combines the on-the-fly commentating performance with post-production to keep his videos at a high level of entertainment value. He's HUGE on youtube and the biggest let's player by far. Almost all of his videos just feature him. He launched a multimillion dollar career solo and can maintain it, too. Awesome.
Other folks who are doing well for themselves straight up commentate while they do a playthrough of games, one of the big names for that is TheRadBrad. A further popular dude is Markiplier. He basically simulates PewDiePie's style, so he cuts out some of the in-between stuff. Markiplier specializes in being really loud and fun like a bear on cocaine. Except friendly. Yeah.
That is a little background on the youtube scene. I think many of you are familiar with what's going on with twitch.tv and streamers. Most streamers are pretty quiet and chill the entire time they're on air.
I have mostly been doing straight up playthroughs and developing a flowing style. It basically feels like a process of unchaining my personality, becoming more expert at flow. A few of my videos are edited in post-production like my two-part WizardWizard series
(ep 1 ep 2
--- I did more "cut the slower stuff" in Part 2)
I think some of my best straight-up playthrough work has been in Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, a classic roguelike/dungeon crawler -- if you're interested
The experience of doing this has been quite interesting. Back in my earlier videos I was carrying more of a, "I would like to do videos like those guys (re: PewDiePie, etc) except without any cursing and as a better influence on young audience members" and my commentating flow was of course less practiced. In more recent videos I am getting a bit more loose. Still grasping for what I thought I was about to say sometimes but overall my flow is smoother and more consistent. The only rule I give myself is to aim for 95% of airtime as having commentary over it without blabbering.
Hmmm. It is definitely an art and I am getting into it!
I will write again if people want to hear more about the experiences I have had. Some episodes of losing hours of hardcore commentated footage due to forgetting to click a single button, or to the recording program crashing have come and gone. Going forward, I am going to keep on the grind and mix in some more edited videos. Maybe add some regular twitch.tv streaming as I had some success with that just recently (not in high viewer numbers but in that it was comfortable).
OMW progamer
P.S.
Broforce is an awesome game too!
I made a Pink Unicorn Episode after I started going nuts during a long recording session
Shout out my good friend Skoal and I got to hang out in Rust