-I wish YouTube would have been around since I was born.
-I'm the guy from the Internet.
[music] Chocolate Rain [music]
[music] Some stay dry and others feel the pain [music]
-People are like, "I want to be famous.
I want to make money."
But if you're in it... -You have to love it.
-All the people that have a lot of subscribers,
they're all really unique
and have something about them that people just want to watch.
-That sh-t's love right there, okay?
-This sh-t is love. -[ Sniffles ]
-Are you really crying? -Why am I crying?
[ Both laugh ]
-I remember when I had one subscriber.
It was Bree. -Yeah.
-And she had one subscriber. It was me.
My first trolling video I ever did,
she filmed a skate park
where, like, I was just making fun of little kids
the whole time. It was really fun.
[ Laughs ]
-They think we're so rich.
-Yeah. -But it's really --
-Like, you're here. It's a one-bedroom apartment, man.
-I think a lot of people don't understand
how much work YouTube is
to, like, keep it up on a consistent basis.
'Cause I'll go back and watch my videos.
I'm like, "Oh, that took three days.
That took four days."
And when I say four days, I mean four days.
I mean me getting like a couple hours sleep,
getting up, and hitting it again.
-There's a reason why YouTubers aren't tan.
They're all very pale, strange people
who can't shake your hand very hard
because they're inside all the time.
-It's true. -It's the truth.
-I am one of them.
-I went into it not knowing anybody,
and it was through making my videos online
that I made all the friends that I have now.
And YouTube's a really small community,
so you go to one gathering, and you meet everybody.
-We all do things for free, and, like, "Oh, hey, yeah.
I'm helping you out. You help me out next week."
That's the culture of YouTube.
-It's crazy in thinking,
like, at one point, we only had like five subscribers.
-Oh, yeah. I remember having 5,000.
I remember having 10,000.
And like, we all were just like, "Holy sh-t, I have 10,000."
I'm like, "Mom, I have 10,000 people watching my videos."
-Things can somehow just get amazing overnight.
-The moment that "Chocolate Rain" blew up,
nothing else had really blown up like that.
I was truly a hobbyist musician
in every sense of the word.
There wasn't any epiphany in the process of making it
that, "Oh, this is gonna be big or huge whatever it is."
But I also realized that
there wasn't gonna be some fast-forward
that turned me into Akon
in the moment that "Chocolate Rain" is blowing up.
On one hand, there was this tremendous pressure
to strike while the iron is hot.
On the other hand, I knew that I had to take the time
to grow into the person
who I knew I had not really grown into.
That has been the biggest blessing
of committing to YouTube.
It really has been the opportunity to iterate, to grow.
-I've been making videos for five years,
and some of them have been watching from the beginning.
Some were in grade school,
and now they're, you know, moving to junior high,
high school, and you're growing up with them.
I'm really connected with these kids,
and I want -- I want them to know what I'm thinking.
I didn't really have a choice about when my dad got sick.
I made a video when he passed away,
and I felt like I owed it to them
because they were so involved with my life.
I mean, it was therapy for me, I think.
They're my Internet family.
I don't know how else to explain it.
This is some of the stuff that people have sent me.
I have a whole drawer in my kitchen
that's just full of artwork. I think that's my favorite thing
is just the drawings that they do.
And I usually end up sending a postcard back.
So if they send me something, then I like to respond.
I don't know. If they take the time to write me a letter,
I want to, like, take the time and say thank you.
It's just this tremendous amount of love
from people all over the world that you don't know.
-If we go to the mall or, like, any public place,
there are always kids that are like,
"Hey, we saw you in some video somewhere."
-Yeah, they're -- It's really funny 'cause --
-It's never from our channels.
-It's some look that they give you, like...
-[ Laughs ]
-I kind of accidentally became sort of an icon
for the Internet, or what viral video stardom meant.
Even today, people who don't remember "Chocolate Rain,"
they'll stare at me across the room,
and they'll be like,
"You're that guy from the Internet!"
-YouTube has changed so much in the past five years.
Now it's becoming more and more and more professional.
And I'm not in this huge rush to, like, get off of YouTube
because YouTube's given me so much,
and I feel like YouTube and sites like it are the future.
-I feel like I'm moving towards a goal at all times,
like I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.
-And the best thing is just to be yourself,
'cause if people don't like you, like, who cares?
-The thing about YouTube success
is that every success story I have ever seen on YouTube,
whether it is Shane Dawson
or Ray William Johnson or Jenna Marbles,
their success is incidental to who they are.
The camera just happens to be there to document
the way that these people would normally be in real life.