Panel: The influencer’s perspective

[Music] [Music] thank you guys for coming this is our influencer inside panel yeah we're just gonna talk a bit about like the past 2017 the future in 2018 and some of the branding trends that are gonna be happening so yeah let's give a quick intro cool hello my name is Terps or mark I'm from the Yogscast we're a collection of YouTube and twitch influences there are all influences hate the term influences but it's basically what this world is decreed us to be known as and yeah I'm on the internet most of the time so

that's why I do my name is Jordi also known as quell woke up I make gaming let's play videos and pretty much whatever I want to do mainly on YouTube and I'm almost at 8 million subscribers I'm a Zee my channel is called a seal and I'm at almost 3 million subscribers and I do a combination of everything on my channel skits gaming she's reaction funny way to show me up guys my name is Josh I've got a combine falling of 1.4 million subscribers Thank You Jodie for putting me after those two comedy videos and some work with Comedy Central as well and yeah cool great thanks so why don't we just give a little brief background on how you got started like what was their breaking and lightening moment when you wanted to break into YouTube say this is a career this is where oh my god yeah I mean wow so we started out

making videos because we enjoyed making videos and then YouTube came along after that so it's quite a weird thing so we started out we've got our 10 year anniversary coming up this year and it was really just an opportunity to try and make our friends laugh and that kind of snowballed into the point where YouTube came along other people could watch funny content 2011 came along and we had like the most-watched video on YouTube and then that snowballed into 2012 we were the first UK channel hit a billion views and then I mean took four years to get to that first billion and then we got a second billion the year after and it's kind of you know YouTube's just a crazy place but we do it because we love it and now really it's just become an excuse to not grow up so we just try to keep on keeping on you know I spend my days hanging out with my friends playing computer games so it's it's pretty much

the best job there is so yeah so I started around six years ago I was I was watching videos on YouTube probably this guy and some other people who are making videos back then and I really enjoyed playing games so I thought why not just get a capture card and start recording and from there on like I've told myself let's go and make a video every day so I did every day for the past six years haven't missed a single day I started making videos and then once it started taking off I started building up a team editors people that have made my thumbnails channel managers and now I have a pretty big team all working on just one channel and it's going great yeah you're doing what 14 videos a week you said earlier yeah yeah so so 14 videos a week it's a 2 per day and in December I tried three per day just for

fun see ya how would we go it wasn't fun I started two years ago I actually was in school to become a doctor and I started doing YouTube as a hobby it was just for fun and as it started blowing up I realized that that was a different way I could help people and I just became Sun in love with it and yeah Here I am yeah I had a really weird introduction into YouTube so I actually used to play on professional cricket from the you guys know cricket is right you and I always loved entertaining people and used to make stupid videos when we were younger as I'm sure a lot of people didn't had a lot of friends who are involved in YouTube and in 2015 I got glandular fever in the middle of a cricket season and I was ruled out to not be able to play cricket for the rest of the season so I started making more weird videos and then started uploading those weird videos and some more weird

people started watching those weird videos and Here I am yeah Wow it's intense it's really it's such an interesting space and it's just growing so quickly and there's just so many different personalities coming in 2017 we saw a ton of controversy and things have really threatened like they're really turned yes it was huge it started out obviously big trend was anti-semitism that died off and then it became filming dead people so I mean I couldn't tell you what's now I can't keep up with it it's just you know it's always moving really quickly you do you do a lot with different actors on your channel you were just adopted by Will Ferrell yeah well I was apparently we look quite similar I don't know if that's a compliment or what but yeah I think that's one of the coolest things for me that I've been given the opportunity to do that now that I have an audience that I can make videos for

and I'll get the opportunity to make videos with big actors and comedians alike and and that is just something that I never really thought I'd be able to do so to be able to remember there was a moment in a video I did with all Farrah where he had like a genuine laugh at something I said and I was just like oh my god that gave me like a really warm feeling inside so that was really cool yeah it's really cool it was hysterical to watch just the whole dynamic with you guys yeah well well it's grown so so what do you guys think of 2017 and how it kind of came to a close how extreme content is and well obviously I think most content you know YouTube and all the other platforms are great you know it's fun I watch it every day when I wake up when I go to bed and but obviously sometimes you get these these rotten apples and then the media picks up but you know

like a lot I assume a lot of people know that not every influencer is like them which is what a lot of people still think though that everybody's now filming that people or everybody is making racist Nazi jokes but it's it happens every now and then it's especially very annoying for for us creators which are doing a good job that when one person doesn't do a good job we get we get shot at right right yeah it's also like a bit of a commentary on the times as well in that we're living in a day and age now where the kind of prospect of amnesty is not really something that exists anymore because as a kid or a twelve-year-old now you could say something that is really not right something racist or homophobic and now when a kid says that it's invariably on Instagram or on Facebook and that's there now forever and that will stick with them forever whereas when I was 11 years old I said a bunch of stupid things to my friends or to anyone but thank God I wasn't putting those things in writing

so I think it's a very exciting time but a very dangerous time now as well especially for children because everything they're saying is is on social media and it's there forever so when they get a job one day or when they go to when they want to do whatever those things will be dug up so I think yeah for parents or for anyone who's sort of guiding children I think that's something that's really really important because that being said obviously you know it's proven now you can even become president haven't said some of those things is done it's done so you can't really avoid that yeah yeah I think the frustrating thing this past year was D monetization really on the platform the reason we can be up here doing this is because we have audiences those audiences see pre-roll and post for advertising we make money from that after the scandals a lot of advertisers people now YouTube had to rightly kind of tighten up the ship and it meant the ad

revenue dropped to all-time lows so you know people like ourselves who have built up kind of a sphere of staff and crew and companies around ourselves with fixed costs and things like that found it a lot tougher than previously we would have one of the strengths of the space originally was that it was very agile you know you didn't have large overheads you were a young creator just doing it for love and then the money came along and now we're a big business with costs and responsibilities so that when those things change it can make for quite a tough year right yeah we all have like employees and we have to feed those employees too so the ads revenue drop sometimes you have to cut people and that's really shitty yeah yeah so on your point of things slowing down you're getting quite big this past year you blown up your number twelve biggest our fastest growing consumer in the world

not right now but I was a couple months ago yeah yeah past Logan so how do you you have a really engaged community like you're you performed insanely for Fastlane you know there was one point I remember calling you and like you know just past jelly and the leaderboards for instance and your little shrieks and screams were just so rewarding um so what do you what do you specifically do what your secret sauce for keeping your community so engaged well I try to engage back with them I try to like you know obviously it can't talk and respond to everybody but I try to pick out comments that I really like on every video and I try to talk to them and try to keep engaged with them like on all my social medias and I think they really appreciate that and I guess I just try to like keep it real like try to be myself because it's people can always tell when you're like being genuine and when you're not being genuine and I think they appreciate that and I think that's why my engagement is really high for my following right yeah good job and COBOL you became a rapper

this year yes I became a rapper so pretty much you know I'm a youtuber which means you can do anything stupid and make a video on it and upload it and people will watch it but pretty much what I did with some friends was a we rented this place in New York we plan to vlog and they were really do is planned and then we're like so what do we do now well obviously we need to like start roasting each other that that'd be fun everybody's done it so why don't we do it right and I kicked it off and caught the guys by surprise and then that they responded it was great and their rat like I'm not a rapper I'm really not good or anything but it was definitely fun to do something totally completely different from what I usually do gaming Let's Plays and the fans loved it it sounds very catchy and it was just fun yeah it's just a joke is it was a

rap roast video roasting over Enzo's fantastic cool and so I saw that you'd met up with you had Hodor hold the door for you yeah yeah Christian he's a lovely guy he is an actual giant and so yeah off the back of Game of Thrones obviously a spoiler for a few years ago but get with it Hodor died but we learned about him holding the door we've got his name from so we were at a cinema and so I filmed a quick bit afterwards asking him to hold the lift door and yeah it just it went viral and it was one of those things you always expect like once you've gotten a concept like similar that it was right time right place it was it was gonna do well I was a surprised how well it did but again it's one of the big things on YouTube is is timing and make sure that you hit those those cultural points you know quick so I was just very lucky yeah

really cool so what's uh what's the big highlight of 2017 walking away from it what was what was your highlight you think just just engender thin Jarrell oh that's tough I uh I I really liked I liked Christmas was very nice my god I got everything I think for us we we started doing more more in live so on Twitch so really proud with the the growth we've had on there the numbers were achieving there that's really good and more importantly just the fun all of our creators are having the great thing about twitch is it's a live platform and so the response and interaction is near real-time right and so that's fantastic you know you you crack a joke and then you see the response there and then as opposed to YouTube where you you hope as you scroll through the comments afterwards because we're the most kind of shallow and kind

of you know fragile people on the world you know I'll read through a couple of pages of nice things write nicely nice thing Oh someone says something nasty I'll dwell on that for a couple of days exactly why do you bring up how so so twitches is that times 10 so it's great to have that that real response there so I think yeah really pleased with that and really excited about what the future of that holds okay so what I really liked about 2017 were some some crazy things obviously I kind of thought it was great that the ad pocalypse finally happened mainly because it showed that there were still so many flaws on the platform and it's something YouTube's needed to start maturing and it was either it was gonna happen either like the start of the year end of the year maybe next year or it would have happened now or I mean start of January

with that controversy but it's it's it's really it's it like it's a great wake-up call because a lot of influencers they mainly think that they're fames gonna last forever their success is going to last for and they can just spend everything all the time on the nice cars and this and that right but the ad pocalypse really showed like listen guys this is still a young young business young industry everything is new nobody nobody's seen this before an apocalypse right where the ad review for everybody wondering the ad review cut in half just like that overnight so imagine what you're making right now and then cut in half and your boss is not telling you why that makes you like a little bit paranoid e like is it me and you're trying to ask your boss and your boss is ignoring you and and you're doing research and everybody else has it too and nobody knows what's going on but it really makes you think or make me think like okay well listen

like what if it happens again and revenue is cut in half again then it can be like danger for the company so I started thinking of other things to branch out to and obviously my most favorite thing this year last year sorry was being on a bus with a lame my face was on there and as his face was on a bus rave here in London driving around he's great we don't drunk on the bus too but not allowed to say that from Debbie was so much fun working with Fastlane was amazing also from me 2017 was great because I hit some like personal goals a pretty consistent hundred million views a month so that was really exciting for me and I'm pretty new so I don't have like oh yeah that's true I hit a million subs this year and you ran naked through the streets of Amsterdam right not actually highlight I feel like I should

probably say something about YouTube but I'm gonna be honest I got the chance to play in this and if you've heard of it it's a football game called the Wembley Cup by EE and it's basically a bunch of youtubers playing football against each other and then there's sort of three professionals on each team so there was like Stephen Jared and Emile Heskey and a whole bunch of people playing and like obviously eSport was a huge part of my life growing up and when I gave it up to perceive more full-time I was like well that's kind of that you know I'm never going to have that feeling of playing in sports in a stadium in front of people or anything like that and then somehow through doing YouTube I managed to play at Wembley with Steven Gerrard so that was for me just like the most surreal moment and a really really cool sort of highlight for me and I'm saying I'll remember for the rest of my life so it was really cool awesome all right okay

so like as a brand how would we approach you or what would be the least intrusive way to get in touch with you is tricky I think a lot of us have kind of management agencies and people that that we work with and so often it's kind of cleanest and easiest not to try and go direct to us but to the to the brands that we work with and then with that it comes down to you know email is still great but if you try and email again a lot of our talents you try to email them directly you'll never hear from them you know they might read it but they won't respond whereas if you go through kind of the management agency so we use a company called fourth floor creative if you email them they will handle all of that and then talk to us so they kind of filter out stuff and then hopefully as well a lot of brands still don't really understand how important relevance is so they'll come to someone and just be like hey you've got big numbers will you talk about this product and the reality is it

doesn't really matter about the numbers it's about the relevance of the product to our audience and we have lots of different creators with lots of different audiences so again going through those people just allows us to kind of filter and direct those requests to the right people right so I think the best way to get in touch with me is obviously well if you see me walking around you can approach me and talk a little bit but don't expect me to talk too much business their business is the my my managers obviously they will go over all the all the numbers and what I can provide and things like that and the best way to get in touch with them is either call them or email and the emails all over the place on YouTube about section or Twitter Instagram there's always an email somewhere but I I've noticed over the years that one mistake brands tend to make is they assume that influencers will cover products for free and maybe somebody will cover something for free if they

have 10,000 subscribers but when you're talking about a reach of millions or billions of views then it's not gonna be free anymore unless you can offer something really exclusive like a private jet if you got a private jet do for free but it's like it's like a bus driver doesn't work for free either you're gonna have to pay or at least compensate but most of the time paying works and that's just how it goes you're making money from promotion so it would be nice to share that with with a creator with the influencer yeah to add on to that too we also offer like really awesome because because it's a really awesome advertisement because we can give you like the exact demographics and everything targeted audience and we get a lot more views than television so it's a lot I think better place to put your money and like Jordie said the best place to reach me is my email it's posted everywhere in my About section Instagram Twitter and I have people who

check my emails for me so I don't miss anything yay I mean to get hold of me claim futures is who manages me so like that and I think in terms of working with brands I'm quite sort of fortunate in the fact that when comedy it's pretty like varied so the type of videos I can make and kind of vary to many different things so if I were to work with the brand it's always really cool when they give me the opportunity to do something that I wouldn't really be able to do without sort of an outside help and then it creates something unique for the brand and something unique for me it's obviously more beneficial than just plugging something so to speak so yeah okay you have a very mixed channel yeah I was looking through him it's just amazing how many different games you've been able to pull off and her channel it's really difficult to do yeah it's I personally benefited from having an exposure through the main

yogscast channels and i think if you're trying to break into youtube and twitch being a single focus game is still the best way it's the easiest way to find an audience and off the back of that hopefully kind of they fall in love with your personality and they stick around when you move away from the original thing that brought them to you I like I said I had an opportunity to kind of be featured through personality driven content so then my audience is really just tuning in to see what I'm doing but I wouldn't say my kind of my personal YouTube channels nothing special it's it's very much the yogscast as a whole i think and and with that again we do try to stay to kind of genres and we put different genres on different channels right so we have a civilization channel that just plays the Civilization game and that's a great ensemble with lots of different people we have a channel called gamers night where we

play board games and D&D and things of that so we try to put things in the right box and that's more so about YouTube's algorithm and how it feeds content out to subscribers and things like that that you're again incentivized to be as kind of specific as you can I guess be the content well okay let's let's look into the future here put a little tinfoil hats on what do you see coming up in influencer marketing trending in the next next year I think jump out no I am godly I mean in terms of are you saying so in terms of what what we think brands are going to want to be any kind of seeing more of I hope really it's it's the understanding that our audience likes us and our tone and our way of presenting content so brands kind of letting go a bit is always welcome we get a much much better result the more freedom we have and it's that

sort of thing if you've done your homework and you found the right influencer to work with the more you allow them to then do their job and make their content that's what their audience enjoys and that's how you're gonna get the best results brands who get very sort of all you can't say that or don't mention the other product you know it's like honestly it doesn't really matter and again if you've done your homework you should be partnering with someone who is gonna be delivering content in the sort of way you want yeah I totally agree I think brands should give the creator's a lot more freedom not too much of course and make sure to monitor it because some creators will mess it up but at the end of the day I know my audience the best and if somebody's there who's probably not even seen a single video of mine giving me feedback of what I should do and what I should say it's not gonna work a good example is sometimes I get a promo or for my Instagram stories and I know exactly what a good Instagram story is and how I can get people to click on that link or

swipe up for the link but meanwhile this brand will approach me and say no no I don't want you to do that I want you to post this entire paragraph on your Instagram story and it's like an entire book and then people have to read that in the in the ten seconds or pause it like nobody's gonna read it they're just gonna go to the next part and so really giving a freedom to certain degree is very important it's also like sometimes brands will tell me what time to post a video and and I can show them with evidence like that's not when my channel speaking that I should post it when like my channels most active so that the video can get more views and because that's when people are watching my videos so it's it is really important to give that freedom and yet like you said it's just better results if you if you do that I don't have much to add that's pretty much everything we know exactly what our fans

want we know what time to pose we know what to say we know how to sell a product to them without selling it you know but when it's like forced they're not really sold on it I think the way you can like in it is I suppose one of brands advertising sometimes they're thinking about it in a more traditional sense so if you're watching an advert on television and you're watching television and an advert pops up it's an advert you know it's an advert and it's like it's there to be an advert whereas when you're advertising through an influencer you are now tapping into a character or a person and then you're tapping into their audience so it's got to be something that naturally integrates with them rather than just your advert wax in the middle because if you do that it's going to stick out the audience isn't gonna like it the creators probably not gonna like it and you're not gonna get the same result that or you're not gonna get a good result basically from your advert so I think it's just yeah about communication and finding a sort of happy medium between brands and creators yeah and

like I think as a brand you shouldn't worry too much about the little things so if if let's say I don't name the exact name from the from the product like this monitor model 37 ABCD then it like it doesn't matter like the people aren't gonna be getting like click less because you haven't pronounce the entire and name correctly or things like that oh and brands like I hope that well you guys should do your research before approaching an influencer know the risks because they're it's not always a guarantee to get a certain amount of views unless like you obviously negotiate that but at brands which you know really wanted to work together with me and you know I did my best and then afterwards what really did my

best right and then afterwards they came back and they weren't happy and I said well I did everything in my power to make it to make it as those as successful as possible but it didn't work and I don't think that that's my problem I think that's their problem because they organized the entire campaign but meanwhile they're trying to push it on me but like for example you can't make me dance like I can't dance and don't hire me to dance and I get mad that I can't dance right do your research if you pay me I'll dance sure right how do you how do you see how do you see a successful campaign from an influencers perspective like I need to do a campaign how do you how do you view it for her measure it from your in the way we would any other video really just in terms of how many views what was the general kind of sentiment you know we get stats like coffee watch time so we can see did people actually

watch the video or did they click off after the first few seconds you know we're looking for successful videos to be successful videos so I don't know I mean with stuff like you know dancing and things like that maybe you know I might you know be quite happy if I look like I could dance that'd be great but I don't know it's like having Genesis up here isn't it it's great so the way I measure campaigns like they're totally like there's so many different ways so many different campaigns possible but the easiest one is you just look at the average audience retention on your video if your channel average is 5 minutes and you make a promo on an amazing mobile game and realize the audience retention is only one minute you know either it's a horrible promo or your audience just doesn't like it you probably shouldn't do it in the future and the same thing goes for views if your views are like a hundred thousand views minimum per video you know blood this promo only gets 20,000 views like it's

it doesn't work you should rethink it another way to measure like how well promo went is you know how many clicks did the link get if you're pushing a link or how many people showed up at the event if you're promoting an event but most importantly like how happy is a brand you're working with if I sometimes I do a promo and I'm not really sure about it and then it I also Brandon a brand is super happy where they didn't and they really want to do and a follow up problem well that's great of course yeah basically think he just said if the brand's really happy then you know the promo went well audience retention you can see how long they watch the video and when they clicked off when they lost interest and just total views of the video yeah I think that's been covered alright I think we're I think we're on his run time but thank you for all your info does anybody have any questions yes Jimmy and Mike it's a question from me

and my 11 year old daughter okay who's got her own YouTube channel going so she's trying to get to ten million views so I think she's got don't follow her sorry I think she's got nine million nine hundred and ninety nine thousand and ninety nine to go absolutely so the question yeah you're right the question is is it a legitimate career choice to be a youtuber and can she have some free careers advice so it can't give you a private jet for this if I have to be honest and this is Janelle her neighbors there you go you know hi

it's it's a very risky business it's like becoming a professional athlete or like a musician like it's hard there's so much competition if you don't work hard now if you're not gonna make it sometimes you'll work too hard and that's why you can't make it but if you need some advice I'd say make a video every day work on it you don't even have to pose them or you actually should pose them and accept the the feedback but just work on it every day and after a few years you're gonna be really good at it and at that point in time you're probably grown up and and then you can can decide if you want to continue this or if you want to continue your school but you should definitely continue your school yeah I was gonna say you definitely need a back-up plan it's stuck it's definitely possible but you don't want to just just want to do YouTube like you want to have a plan B in case it doesn't work out because you never know yeah I mean they've got us for up here if they got everyone up here

who had a channel wanted to do it but doesn't do it as a job we'd need a much bigger stage it's really really really really hard and no matter how good you are and how hard you work there is a component of luck so it's no guarantee that you will be able to do it the reason to do it should be because you love to and if I said no you're not allowed to do it anymore you would still do it so if you're doing it keep doing it and hopefully you keep enjoying it that's what my mom said yeah and we did it already stop screaming into making videos and who's laughing now now she works for exactly yeah you got to just give it everything you got as these guys wouldn't go I'm gonna start a YouTube channel and that's gonna be my career give it your best shot I don't know I'm torn in two minds as well because there's a saying saying if

you have a back-up plan your original plan will never will never work so I don't know I'm conflicted but you go for it and see what happens what I did is it was a hobby for me so it was like I think when it's a hobby it's more of a passion and your passion driven but when you're like driven by money I don't know if that works as well there's no money there's no money left anymore no no way you're grown up I'd pop lives number five would have hit by now thank you for question one more question Jody you be and then check them in the back I'd say the majority yeah yeah it's well it varies we've got lots of different revenue streams so you've got merchandise you've got pre-roll advertising you've got integrated brands

which I guess is what you're called in mercenary so depends it really depends on the channel I wouldn't say there's like a fixed number but it can be anywhere from sort of what up to a quarter I would say for some creators and you find that stuff to yourself well yeah through through an agency and so forth at all like when you start without you that was just no no no exactly you when you're starting out you're making content you're making videos you're building a brand and you're building in the following and then it's what you have that following that people come to them trying to monetize set following for their products yeah so I didn't do a brand deal till a million subscribers I believe which is pretty late but back in the day it was really hard to work together with brands like that but currently like I've had months where 50% of my my revenue came from brand deals but they never also had months where it's absolutely nothing so it really depends

sometimes you get this one month where all the brand deals happen at the same time and then the next month like in December there's absolutely nothing but then in January everybody weights up again so you will never see something you off your own back and say oh that's an interesting subject I'm going to do that yes of course no no so so I work together with an agency and if I have something very interesting I want to showcase in a video like a new television I will let my agent know and then he'll try to reach out to the tooter brand and be like hey maybe we can maybe we can work together [Music] [Music]