A picture of a proper dude.
Who, you?
I’m the sort of narcissist who doesn’t want you to know anything about them.
Where from?
I am from England. I live in Kentucky. I don’t know why.
But. Youtube?
I left the UK (I’m British, don’t you know), to live in the Caribbean. I had no job out there, I just wanted to live somehwere cheap and different, and write a book.
Yeah. That sort of narcissist.
I wrote several but never published any of them. I don’t think of them as worth pursuing in their present state, but one day I’ll go back to them. He says. But I will.
I ended up in Mexico, even cheaper than St. Lucia or Grenada, and easier to live in without leaving and re-entering, or (ugh) seeking legal residency status. There, someone I knew asked me to do a podcast. That podcast doesn’t exist anymore, but it led me to YouTube - something I’d never really considered getting in to beforehand.
In YouTube I saw an opportunity to have my voice heard, without having to talk about anyone else’s agenda and without having to do anything anyone else’s way. Really, I knew that writing novels (I sound so bourgeouise, oh, and there again, and all these brackets too…) was never going to get me anywhere, and Youtube offered a scope to talk about anything. I have a degree in production-assistantology, minoring in callsheetatronics, and have worked on small sets and as a corporate videographer, so video production wasn’t new to me.
Without much of a plan I started making YouTube videos, at first comedy pieces and current affairs overviews, and then about movies. I started the channel in February 2016, essentially with the dream of slowly building it up to the point where I might be able to crowd fund a micro-budget movie. I hoped that I might get two or three thousand subscribers annually.
By January of 2017, I had 300 subscribers - not a lot for almost a year on YouTube. It was very difficult to produce videos in the early days, as I’d only get 20-30 views on most, and very little feedback. I was often extremely uncertain as to the external appeal of what I was doing, and doubted there was even a niche audience.
Then, in February 2017, a video I made about HR Giger started to get regular traffic. In April, a video I’d made a few weeks before about the Streisand Effect was featured on the front page of Reddit (thank you to whoever it was who posted it) as part of that site’s response to United Airlines dragging a paying customer out of his seat.
After that, my channel saw rapid growth and I was able to make a living from YouTube - previously I’d been living off the savings I’d built up from regular jobs, back in the UK.
Now, I have a number of subscribers I never thought possible, and I make a small but entirely independent living from ad revenue and patrons.
I work, under my own volition, on projects I choose and drive - this is what I have always wanted. I owe that to my audience.
So, what are you doing?
I’m trying to be an artist without being entirely pretentious or humourless.
I don’t care about making a load of money or a name for myself. If I’m honest, I don’t much care about what others think of me or what I do. I’m interested in creation, and the standards I hold myself to are my own. Sometimes I work quickly, sometimes I work slowly, but it’s always on something that I want to work on.
You can see the channel by clicking this sentence. You can also type ‘Georg’ into YouTube and it’ll be there.