(clicks mouse)
♪ (dramatic chord) ♪
- (boy) Hey, YouTube. I didn't see you there.
- Oh, yeah, this is the dude that got on Reddit!
- (boy) I did it! - This is like my first YouTube video.
- (boy) What is up? This is Jackson here.
Today I'd like to tell you, "We did it."
We hit the one like.
- One like?
- (Jackson) I know that you guys are gonna be like,
"Dude, it's just one like."
But it's still awesome that I know that you guys are there.
(laughing)
- (Jackson) Yeah, I can't believe we have a like!
- I love this kid. I know exactly how he feels.
- (Jackson) Can we get to 3 to 5 likes? - (laughs) Aww.
- (laughing) Oh, that's so cute! - (Jackson) If we get five or three likes,
that'd be amazing!
That'd send me through the roof of my house!
- Oh my gosh, I wanna give the kid a like right now.
- (Jackson) ...most subscribers with a video that got three likes.
And my YouTube links for my Twitter...
- Kids are starting early these days, trying to be all famous now!
- Promo! Promo! Get that promo!
- (Jackson) That...would just be stoking.
(laughs)
- (Jackson) Follow me on Twitter-- - (laughing) Stoking!
- (Jackson) And go sign up for my site.
And subscribe. And like!
- He's making the first-time vlogger mistake,
where he's looking at himself.
- (Jackson, breathlessly) I already went through the roof.
You know what? You know what?
Do you want any proof?
- I need for proof for that. Oh!
(cracking up)
- Dad hasn't fixed the hole and the leak in the roof.
- (Jackson) ♪ I came in like a wrecking ball ♪
(laughing)
- Ride that trend, man. Ride that trend.
- (Jackson) See you guys later. Peace out!
See ya. - Okay.
Oh my gosh.
(giggles)
- He's gonna pass Wong Fu Productions in a year.
- Yeah. - Less than a year.
Next week. - Can we collaborate with him?
- I'm glad that I didn't have a YouTube channel back then.
(laughing)
♪ (dramatic chord) ♪
- (Finebros) What was this kid so excited about?
- He got... (dramatically) one like!
- His very first like on YouTube.
- (Anthony) It's kind of weird 'cause you could like
your own video, so was it him?
- Hmm. - Was it his own like?
- I mean, it kind of reminds me of when we first started.
- Ian and I, when we first had our first popular video,
we were refreshing and it would go up by five views every second.
We were like, "Oh my god!"
- It's easy to get lost in the numbers.
To see his genuine excitement over that first like is...
it takes me back, and it makes me really step back
and appreciate.
- (Finebros) He was so excited about just one like.
These days, how many likes do you tend to get on your videos?
- It depends.
I average anywhere from 20,000-30,000 likes per vlog,
depending on how good my thumbs up annotation is.
- Thousands, tens of thousands, depending.
- When I started on YouTube, I remember going through
what this kid went through, where every like, every comment was like,
"(pumped up) I got a comment! I got a like!"
And it made butterflies inside my heart to know someone engaged my video.
- (Finebros) Do you know the story of what happened
after he uploaded this? - No, I don't.
- This is my first time. - I've never seen that.
- No, I've never heard of it.
- Something to do with Reddit?
Someone posted it on Reddit and it went really viral.
- I'm guessing it probably got put on Reddit,
and it probably got a million likes.
- (Finebros) Somebody found this video and saw his excitement
and posted it to Reddit, telling Reddit, "Let's give him so many likes."
- (laughing) Oh, that's awesome!
- (Finebros) So now the video has over 130,000 likes
and over 80,000 subscribers, and the video has over 1.4 million views.
- Oh, that's really sweet. - That is so cool.
I love the internet sometimes.
- Round of applause, society! Oh my gosh.
- That just proves that Reddit runs the internet.
- I hope he got enough likes to fix the hole in his roof.
- I wanna know the story behind that!
- Just seeing someone happy and wanting to make him even more happy,
even though they're like, "We're kind of trolling him by liking it."
I think that's so nice for people to do that.
- It's crazy that people that don't know each other
all came together to help one person, again, that they don't know.
No one knows each other on the internet like that,
and somehow they're all forming a community.
- He has what a lot of people don't have, and that's genuineness.
You can tell that he was genuinely excited.
And it's like, you want to root for that kid.
- The internet did the same thing to me.
Someone posted Chocolate Rain on digg.com.
Someone saw it there and put it on 4chan,
and 4chan was like, "Hey!
Let's turn this into a joke and spread this around."
And so, in many ways, it was a similar process
that led to my coming into publicity and engagement on the internet,
and I think people do it as a sense of wanting to see
someone who looks like them be successful.
- (Finebros) Let's go back to the beginning of your YouTube career.
What was it like with the first people watching,
the first comments, those first likes.
What did it feel like? - As far as Pentatonix,
the first video we did was on my iPad.
We did a cover of Moves Like Jagger.
- I remember posting it and YouTube tweeted it.
- Oh yeah! - And we were so excited.
We were running around the halls. It was really cool.
- I was a nerd making music as a hobby in my living room.
I had no ambitions of public life or anything.
- I remember my first video got to 100 views and ten comments,
and of course I responded to each and every one of them
with paragraphs.
- Every single comment that rolled in was so critical.
I read every single one.
- The good comments felt great, and then the bad comments felt terrible.
- I do remember when we were first uploading our videos
to our website, not even YouTube yet,
and we had to check our web statistics.
It was amazing to know that, to just imagine people
in another country watching our stuff.
We stayed up every night. We would just refresh and be like,
"Oh my gosh! Did our numbers change?"
- One of the first videos on my current channel,
which is TimothyDeLaGhetto2 'cause my first TimothyDeLaGhetto
got hacked into, it's me saying, "Man this sucks.
My first account, it got hacked into.
Dude, I had almost 500 subscribers. Ugh!
Man, this is so lame. (laughs) I have to start over again."
You know? So it's kind of crazy to look back on.
- I remember the very first comment that I got from somebody
asking me to make more videos,
and I thought, "Bob from Ohio wants me to make another video!"
And I remember my wife coming in and she's like,
"Hey, don't you have to go up and do that granite job?"
I'm like, "No! I can't.
Bob from Ohio wants me to make another video."
That first interaction, it was like, there's people out there
that think that what I said meant something,
or that it was funny and they want to see more of it.
And there's something very addicting about that.
- (Finebros) What is it like, seeing a kid this young
using YouTube lingo like "comment, subscribe, like, follow me."
- Right, well, it just shows how people learn through osmosis.
- It's weird, being a part of something, and then seeing
how it's affected the younger generations
and how they come up, and now they're doing it.
And at the time, we had no idea.
We're just going with the flow, trying new things,
and now those things are concrete, what people do now.
- It kind of also makes you realize how much YouTube has changed.
Everyone's like, "Like the video, subscribe, share it."
When YouTube first started, it was just like,
"Here it is. Have fun with it."
It wasn't trying to sell stuff to you, like click everything.
- People pimp themselves out for engagement
and beg for likes and subscribes because YouTube's algorithms
started to value that.
- (Finebros) So seeing something like this video
and talking about all this, how does the reality
of this audience that you have, that people may think,
"Oh, I want to be that." You have that.
What does that feel like?
- It makes me feel definitely lucky and self-reflect
and look at what I have and what I've accomplished.
It is real and it does affect people.
- It's just crazy to see how far me and a lot of other YouTubers
have come in such a short period of time.
- YouTube's weird, you know?
Yeah, we can go to a YouTube Live and then feel famous
for a weekend or a playlist and feel famous for a weekend,
and then go to a regular event, or a Hollywood event,
and no one gives a [bleep].
- It's perplexing to think any kind of story that we want to tell,
there are people out there who enjoy the stories
that we're creating.
It's perplexing.
- We're very lucky to have come up in this generation,
or this time, where the technology matched,
synced up with the talent.
Now, you know, people that have the drive can also find an audience.
- If I was to go back in time and talk to myself and said,
"This is gonna be your full-time job.
You need to hang out with your family,
film about 20 minutes of it per day, put it on the internet,
and you'll make more money than you've ever made before."
That is my reality now and it's insane.
- You look at the number-- I think, what, 1.8 million subscribers...
what does a million people look like?
It's overwhelming.
Just as hard as it is for me to imagine those 100,000 people,
those million people looking forward to my videos...
I think it's just as hard for them to realize the impact
that they've had on my life.
I get a little choked up about it, but, you know,
those people have completely changed the direction of my life
and I'm so grateful, so grateful, to you guys for doing that.
- (Finebros) So finally, what advice do you have for this kid?
- He needs to start selling merchandise.
(laughs) Shirts! Shirts, my friend!
- Keep hustling. Keep doing your thing. - Keep making videos.
- Get some good lighting so you don't look yellow.
(laughs) You kind of look like a Simpson.
- You can't be calling for "like, comment, subscribe."
Focus on one thing.
- Keep on doing what you do.
Be you 'cause they'll like you for you.
Good luck.
- Stay away from drugs, stay away from the whores.
You know, it's lonely at the top, kid.
Just stay grounded. - (snickering)
- Thank you guys for watching YouTubers React.
- Guys, if we could get, like, one-- - One like.
- One like on this video.
- And if you could, like, check out our channel too, and then--
- If our video got one like. - Just go to everyone's Facebook.
- (both) Thanks for watching YouTubers...
(harmonizing) ♪ React ♪
(laughs)
- (Finebros) You guys really did plan that?
- (both) No.
♪ (end music) ♪