- Drum roll, please!
(drum roll)
Hi, everybody.
I am so excited, honored and grateful.
Invisible People's YouTube channel
hit 100,000 subs.
(band playing)
(rocket launching)
(fireworks exploding)
(tooting)
(laughing)
(beating drums)
(band playing)
♪ I've been waiting so long ♪
(applause)
To give that a little context, Invisible People
is a non-profit, working to educate
the general public on homelessness
by amplifying the stories of people
experiencing homelessness.
We're non-profit, on the topic of homelessness.
Added to that, your typical non-profit
may have a few thousand subs.
In the Homeless Services sector,
YouTube channels have a few hundred subs.
We just hit 100,000 subs, thanks to you!
You did it!
Thank you, I am so very grateful!
It's perfect we hit 100,000 subs
while I'm here at the Non-Profit
Technology Conference, because it was
around nine years ago at the Non-Profit
Technology Conference that I walked up to a YouTube
booth because they had YouTube socks,
although I dig giving socks to homeless people,
and YouTube socks really caught my attention
and the girl behind the booth, Rameo,
you talked me into moving Invisible People videos
from Vimeo over to YouTube.
Nothing against Vimeo, YouTube has a community,
you guys!
And Rameo was right, I'm so grateful
that she talked me into moving platforms.
In fact, on October 22nd, 2010, YouTube
allowed Invisible People to curate
their homepage for a day.
Yep, for 24 hours, YouTube's homepage
had Invisible People videos.
One point six million people in 24 hours
had a positive interaction with homelessness.
It was a miracle.
I love YouTube, I love YouTubers.
I love you guys.
Thank you.
I don't have many regrets in life,
but one of them is I didn't wake up sooner.
All this growth, we grew 80,000 subs
in the last six months.
We had 20,000 subs for years.
I thought being 20,000 subs for non-profit, that's huge!
We average about 40,000 a month views.
That's huge, the topic is homelessness.
I thought that's the way it was.
Then one day, I typed into YouTube search bar,
"homelessness".
And all of these garbage videos came up.
Homeless experiment videos, they're fake.
People make them just to get views and clicks
and raise money, but that's all that comes
up to the top.
We have about 600 videos on YouTube,
and they weren't populating to the top.
It's not YouTube's fault, what goes to the top
on their algorithm is what people wanna see.
But I viewed that as a serious problem,
because when kids are typing in, "homeless",
they're learning about homelessness
from these videos, these social experiment videos
that are created to make profit, and they're fake.
And that's what kids are getting their
information from.
So I started to do a deep dive into YouTube
and I realized that I had neglected our channel.
I started to make changes last July.
Significant increase, we immediately spiked
to four million views a month,
that's come down to about two million views a month.
I mean, we were 40,000 views a month for like
several years, I thought that was great.
Now we're at two million views a month
and we've just begun.
Because of this YouTube growth,
many of you are now supporting us on Patreon.
It's the first time in the 10 years
of Invisible People, if you don't know this,
I mean, right now, I have no income.
I'm unemployed, I'm moving in with my mom,
because I can't afford rent anymore
I love my mom, I'm helping to take care of her,
there's other reasons, but a big one is
there's just no money.
But thanks to all of you and YouTube,
you all started donating to the Patreon campaign
and for the first time in a decade, we have
some regular funding coming in.
It's still not enough to hire one person,
it's getting close to 3,000 a month,
that is amazing.
When it gets to 6,000 a month, I'm hitting
the road full time.
I am going to travel around, amplifying
the voice of homelessness.
There are no words to express how grateful
I am this channel hit 100,000 subs.
You guys did it.
I've always said Invisible People is we, it's not me.
We did it.
We did this.
You did this.
By reaching 100,000 subs, what this says to me
is that there is a community here on YouTube
that will rally behind Invisible People's work
in ending homelessness.
And why that's so important, and why that's so amazing
is because we've only just started.
This next year is going to be our best year.
We have a new website coming with more
educational content.
As we hit more goals on Patreon, we'll be able
to scale our work, to produce more videos,
to visit more places and to multiply our impact.
And it's all because of you.
Your support.
Thank you, thank you so very much
for supporting me, for supporting this channel,
for supporting YouTube, for supporting Invisible People
and for supporting the fight to end homelessness.
(upbeat music)