- This was not the video that I
was planning to do today but,
we're gonna talk about it.
Hey everybody.
This is Roberto Blake,
helping you create something awesome today.
Today, I wanna talk about something really important,
at least I feel it's important to me
and to a lot of creators on YouTube.
This is gonna be a response video
to Casey Neistat's video that he
put out today as of recording this
on the pressures of being a YouTuber.
This is a conversation that aspiring YouTubers
and current content creators need to be having
and I'm just adding my voice to that conversation.
I would invite more of you whether
you're a small YouTuber or a big YouTuber
to make your own response videos to Casey because
I think that it would be healthier
for more of us to talk about this
and I'm really glad that Casey is
bringing some awareness to this.
Recently other creators like our mutual friend
Sam Sheffer have talked about their struggles online.
Elle Mills made a video about
burning out at 19 as a YouTuber.
I think that ultimately in the community,
one of the things we're not talking enough about
is the pressures and the mental health because
I think we feel embarrassed or that
it's somehow a guilt thing of saying
how dare you complain about success.
You see, we're living in an era of social media
where anybody regardless of where they come from
could actually avoid all the gate keepers.
They can work really hard and in
three to five years they might've
achieved their wildest ambitions in life.
It's a tremendous opportunity,
it's happened for a lot of people.
It doesn't happen for everybody
but what I also think we're not talking about
is just because that happens doesn't
mean that doesn't come with it's
own set of challenges and problems and
that sometimes if you succeed very quickly,
you're not prepared for everything that goes with that
because your entire life is changing at a pace
that you weren't expecting and that
you have to make changes and adapt in a way
you've never had to.
At least not with the same speed or urgency.
It is a challenge and it is difficult.
What I like to tell people is that
just like in a video game, your problems,
they scale and they climb in proportion to your power level.
When you were down here,
your problems felt overwhelming
and they were at the same level as you.
If you quickly move to up here,
don't think for one minute those problems
won't also move up on the ladder
and get more complicated because they inevitably will.
One of the points that Casey brought up was
can you still make it on YouTube today.
He said the answer was yes and I concur completely
with that statement despite a scathing
article from Bloomberg.
I think also was out of context but,
they did make some points that are very real.
It's hard to compete on YouTube in 2018.
Yes, there is a lot of saturation in the platform.
Some niches are more saturated than others, though.
There's still plenty of opportunity
to bring something new to the table
and we see success stories that are
still happening and I think that
that should really encourage people.
That being said,
can you still financially make it on YouTube?
Can you still make a living on YouTube?
I've always felt that this was precarious.
I've always felt that it was always
the minority of creators that were
making a living on YouTube.
There are different ways to approach it.
Far too many people rely on YouTube ad revenue
which is almost completely unreliable
at this point if we're gonna be very honest about this.
You might as well completely forget about YouTube AdSense.
Put it in a tip jar or do what I do,
throw all of that money at your taxes.
That's another complication that people
don't account for is that if you're successful,
there are things that will change in your life.
Maybe your entire life you've gotten
a refund on your taxes and then all of a sudden
you change your situation and you're successful
and all of a sudden you owe a boat load of money to the IRS.
That's something that a lot of people
don't account for in their situation.
It sounds like a good problem to have
until it actually shows up on your doorstep.
That's just fighting the anxiety
of the platform itself though and then
the change in your financial situation.
We're not even talking about how
this added level of attention can
impact your mental and emotional health,
especially when you consider that
most people who are successful on YouTube
believe it or not are introverts by nature.
If you look at content creators
like myself or Boogie2988 or Zoella,
we're people who actually do a lot better
and seem a lot more energetic or charismatic on camera
because we're filming in the safety
of our favorite environment,
in a place that we're absolutely comfortable.
We have these other underlying issues
with our stress and social anxiety
and things that despite any level of success,
it's very hard to change something
that's part of your internal nature
or core or the way you've always been.
Some people adapt to it better than others.
Other people don't very much venture
out of their area of safety and I think that
if you are here as a creator on the platform,
you understand that there are things
that you might be doing that work
in a temporary way but if you had
to do that every single minute of every single day,
it would be completely unsustainable.
There are people that the way that they do their channel
is so over the top that it would be
completely unsustainable to maintain
that in everyday life but,
on some level there is an expectation of that
from say their audience or their fan base
and that could be a certain amount of pressure as well.
Then we're not even getting into
how to deal with your haters.
It's super easy to say have a thick skin
or ignore the haters or all of those things but,
you're not somebody who is getting
death threats everyday if you're saying that.
There are YouTube creators who
are so benign and are such good people
and yet because somebody just wants to be a jerk
or someone has a disagreement with them
or something they said or something that
they did in a video,
they make these threats and given
the way that social media and online personality works
and the way the world is and it's
such a scary place sometimes,
you can't take those kind of threats as oh it's just a joke.
There have been YouTubers who have
actually had to deal with physical violence
and confrontations with people and you just never know.
There are a lot of unhinged scary people out there
and when you live a very public life,
that's something that you constantly
have to have stress around.
It sucks because again,
these are mostly people just trying
to share something they love on the internet
and a lot of them didn't expect
that it would really turn out to be such a big deal.
It's really unfair to just say
they should get over it or you signed on for this.
Nobody, especially not any of you watching this,
you didn't sign on for getting
500 hate messages every single week.
You didn't sign up for that,
you didn't decide to be a tech reviewer
or a beauty vlogger or share your daily life
or play video games specifically
for the purpose of having the expectation
that you would have to put up with
100 messages everyday telling you to go kill yourself
or nit picking over every insecure thing
that you already deal with in terms
of your physical appearance or the way that you talk
or anything like that.
None of you signed up for this, none of you deserve it.
When Casey made his video,
it really struck a cord with me because
I feel that a lot of creators feel that
because they're successful, they shouldn't complain.
A lot of aspiring creators are putting
ridiculous pressure on themselves
to make it as a YouTuber and the
daily grind of what the algorithm wants
is just not even practical for you to do
if you're balancing that with a family
and a full time job for the far majority of you.
If your goal is to make it on YouTube,
it is very hard to do.
I've done over 1000 videos on YouTube
over the last five years and one of the
things that I made sure to do was
I didn't let YouTube take over my life,
but the format and the type of content that I want to do,
I'm very lucky in the sense that
I chose something that is very natural for me,
it's very easy to produce.
The videos that I'm editing as I'm working on this,
I shot almost all of them in a day in one setting
to do a week's worth of content.
The majority of people on YouTube,
that's not an option for them because
of what represents quality and their niche
or whatever they're doing.
I also have the experience of a system,
not to mention a career before that
that lends me certain skills.
I don't think that that's something
that most people should be expected to do
but on the other hand,
the algorithm becomes more ruthless
every single day apparently.
Even with doing that level of content,
I even have to adjust what my expectations are
of how that's going to work in YouTube
or what it's going to satisfy.
The pressures of being a YouTuber are very real.
I don't deal with nearly as much
as many of my friends and contemporaries
or even some of the people that I mentor
or even some of you who are smaller YouTubers.
There's a lot more pressure on many of you than me
because of the way that I chose to approach YouTube,
but I would like to pass onto you
the mindset of not putting as much
of an emotional investment in YouTube as a platform
and your success in the platform.
There are far too many of you judging yourself
and judging the quality of what you've
worked so hard on based on the
what I consider to be arbitrary numbers
of views and subscribers.
You might think that that's easy for me to say but,
it's really not because this affects
a lot of friends of mine,
this affects my students that I mentor,
this affects a lot of people in my life
and the only reason I don't let it get to me
is because I have a completely separate
but equally unhealthy pressure
in my prioritization of my business as an entrepreneur
to the degree that I actually,
which I'll share with you and I'll
cover this in another video,
I actually recently started therapy
and it's one of the best decisions I ever made.
There are people that are trying to do YouTube
that are going into debt taking out and maxing out
$5000 credit cards to get the perfect
camera, lighting, and audio setup
to try to make a real go at YouTube.
I do not recommend that you do that.
There are people that are sacrificing
their health and doing YouTube while
going through sleep deprivation after doing their day job.
I do not recommend that at all.
For the love of God,
do not sacrifice the important
things in your life on the altar of YouTube success.
I really don't think that that is
sustainable or practical.
I don't think you should kill yourself
to make it on YouTube.
I don't believe in it.
I also don't think regardless of
what success you get on YouTube
that you should feel in any way ashamed
to admit your struggles or your difficulties
even to your audience.
One of the things we saw happen on YouTube
that I think was a silver lining of
the adpocalypse situation, the advertiser boycott,
was YouTubers came forward about
their financial struggles and whether
they were actually financially stable
doing YouTube and some people admitted
that they were doing YouTube as a loss.
What happened was their communities, you guys the viewers,
rallied behind your favorite creators
and dug deep and a lot of them found
financial support in new ways.
Many of you decided to become
patrons of your favorite YouTubers
and support them on Patreon,
some of you donated directly through PayPal,
some of your bought their merchandise
and it made a real difference to see
these creators react and realize that
their audience had their back and
that they were willing to show it where it counts,
with their wallet, to help them actually
make this sustainable and that
their audience cared about them
rather then was going to shame them
for their difficulties and for their struggles.
I think that that is amazing when
creators can feel that real emotional support
from their audience in a way that
directly impacts their life.
One of the other things before I end this video
'cause it's getting longer than I realize but again,
I just felt it was an important conversation.
I want more of you to be honest
about what you're going through
as an online creator and how it's affecting you.
Creators that I talk to,
we talk about these things personally,
we talk about these things at conventions,
we talk to each other on the weekends
about it in our downtime and having that support system,
I think it really means something
and I'd like to know that maybe for
other creators that are feeling isolated
that there's someone for them to talk to.
If you are thinking about and things are getting really bad,
definitely find a support helpline
or reach out to someone immediately
or talk to your friends and family.
I know that a lot of times they
won't understand this internet-y stuff but,
just talk to somebody.
I think it really matters.
Hey you guys, that's it for this video.
I know that this video was probably different
and not what you guys were expecting
but at the same time,
I think it's important to have these conversations
and I would like more people to be honest about it.
If you want to do a response or a reaction to Casey's video,
I think that it's something he
probably would really enjoy seeing
because I know that the creator community
is something that's really important to him.
It's important to a lot of us and
not just those of use who are quote-unquote
larger creators but,
to many of you who are smaller creators or aspiring to be,
I think that these conversations
pull back the curtain of what it's really
like to be here on YouTube and address
the reality that it's not all sunshine and rainbows
just because you get a silver or gold play button.
There are real challenges and difficulties.
I talked to people who say that
they're literally thinking about quitting all the time
and again, they have the numbers,
they're making good money,
but they're thinking about quitting
because it's come to a point where they
feel like YouTube has taken over their life,
but they don't feel that they can
have an honest conversation about it
without people shaming them.
I don't think you should ever have to
justify or make an excuse for what
you wanna do with your career or with your life.
Those are my thoughts on this.
I'd love to know your thoughts.
Hit me up in Twitter if you make a video about this.
Hit me up in Twitter, let me know.
Let's hear back from some of you in the comments.
If you are in the comments,
please try to be supportive of creators
and give them some encouragement
and some actionable advice because
I really think that it could matter for a lot of people.
I'd like for people to feel comfortable
to open up about these things just a little bit more.
Anyway guys, you know what to do.
Like this video if you like it,
don't forget to subscribe,
share it with other creators.
Please do.
As always you guys, thanks so very much for watching
and don't forget, go out there and
create something awesome today.
Take care.