I remember when it kind of first started off,
a group of us were just out to dinner
and we very darkly sort of said,
'Who's gonna be next?'
And we chatted
and came up with a list of about seven people
and within six months, all of them were gone.
[BEN] Do you see yourself as, kind of like, one of the early YouTubers?
I don't really see myself as an early YouTuber.
I still consider myself third generation,
which means nothing to anyone except me,
but the first-generation YouTubers
were literally the people that were on there
when the site first kind of booted up in 2005.
I mean, the most subscribed YouTuber at one point
was an 80-something-year-old British guy
called Geriatric 1927.
He's a first-generation YouTuber,
and then next would be second-generation people
kinda coming on, showing up at around about 2006,
like Amazing Phil.
And then I consider myself third,
'cause I started posting in, I think, 2007,
but I've been putting stuff on the internet
since 2001 or two.
I think I was about 11 or 12
and I typed in the word 'stupid' and then '.com',
because that's how you'd browse the internet back then.
Just 'random word.com',
see what shows up.
And I saw my first-ever online cartoons
and I immediately went, oh, this is what I wanna do
for the rest of my life.
Just in that moment just went yep, that's it.
That's what I'm gonna do
and everything was kind of building towards that.
But yeah, so, in about 2008,
when YouTube rolled out the Partner Programme,
which enabled you to make money, I'd already had
this kind of understanding of these six/seven years
on the internet, figuring out what people liked.
So I put all these things that I thought I understood
together into this little two-minute cartoon
called asdfmovie.
And obviously that failed miserably
and this interview isn't happening, so.
[CAKE] Tell my children I love them.
[CAKE CHILDREN] Daddy.
[MAN] No!
My motivation was never financial,
at least at that stage. Now everything is driven by money.
Oh my God, I have a mortgage.
But no, at that point it was just, 'Oh neat.
Oh, money, cool.'
Because I'd just turned 18,
the point they rolled it out as well.
So, even money wasn't too much of a concept,
I was just starting university
so it was just a nice bonus.
I signed up to the programme and you only got paid
once you'd made $100.
And so from the time I became a partner,
the first paycheck I got was still a few months
to make that first $100.
And I remember getting that check
and that being a big moment, but it was only
in the sort of the last months of me being at university.
So at the point I'd been a partner about three years
that I was making enough money to be, like,
oh, okay this is a thing.
Great, brilliant, really convenient
because I was finishing uni and I already had this
full-time revenue stream.
[BEN] Did you feel an amount of pressure then?
It didn't really change much pressure wise
because I wasn't even considering money real, I guess.
There was no fear.
It was all just so, 'Wow, this is all just happening'.
So I was just throwing myself into it
and not worrying about it, you know?
And for this sort of year after that happened
I was at on such a high that I was just churning out
just so many videos that were just doing really well.
I mean, videos that were getting a million views
in sort of 24, 48 hours, which was more impressive back then
and, yeah, just dropping things every week or two
and it was just an absolutely bonkers time.
I was very just excited and it was a lot of fun then.
[BEN] And how would you describe your style back then?
American.
I would describe my style as, I'd call it
'explosive comedy', which was just quite Americanised.
So you did have a lot of that sort of British dry wit
and sarcasm, but then someone would explode
and scream and stuff.
So yeah, it was quite heavily inspired by,
on one hand, Monty Python, sure,
but then just sort of American ridiculous loudness.
Yeah.
My audience was just sort of US
by, just logically, there were so many of them
and then the UK and then Australia, Canada,
sort of all these English-speaking places.
I think the next would be Germany,
which really surprised me,
but the Germans, they love those little cartoons.
I don't know why. I thought the whole thing
was that they didn't have a sense of humour.
I dunno if that's a reflection on me, actually,
but they bloody love them.
[BEN] I remember seeing your, kind of, stickers and t-shirts and stuff like that
quite early on.
Was merch a thing and you were copying it, or was it something you were thinking,
'Oh, I could do this', and kind of pushing out on your own?
Yeah, in sort of earlier YouTube there were so many taboos
that we had to...
thanklessly pioneered,
as it were, like, merchandise and sponsorships
because it was considered selling out.
This term 'sell-out' was, you don't really hear it,
to be honest, anymore because it's just kind of a given,
but if a YouTuber would suddenly start releasing t-shirts
with their face or quotes from their videos,
they'd be like, oh you're a sell-out.
But I always figured that selling out
was compromising your integrity
and doing something you wouldn't normally do
specifically in the pursuit of fame and money.
So, if a brand was giving me a nice budget
and I got to make a huge production value sketch,
just, I had to centre it around Oreos,
I didn't see that as selling out.
I thought that was awesome.
'Cause I got to bring more exciting videos to people
and yeah, hey, thanks Oreo for... I'm not forcing you
to buy Oreo, just, hey, Oreo paid for this, isn't that cool?
And people go, yeah, that is cool.
And that was great.
It was a great relationship.
But yeah, there'd be a lot of pushback at the time
and a lot of anger towards it. And, I mean, hell
there was a point where putting ads on your videos
would make people angry, just enabling adverts
would get you called a sell-out. And now yeah,
people will start a video, say, 'Hey check out my new tour.
I've got some new merch'. But first, here's 40 seconds
about Hello Fresh.
And also, you just watched two unskipable pre-rolls
there's a mid-roll every two minutes on this video
and hell, we'll just throw some more ads at the end as well.
Why not?
And people didn't even get mad about that.
They just accept that now.
And that's great for us, I guess,
but yeah, it wasn't enviable to be someone
trying to trailblaze that, as it were. A thankless task.
The first sponsored video I ever got was in 2010
and it was for Marmite and it was just some minor player
at an ad agency that had been given
probably, like, about a £500,000 budget
and tasked with reaching out to
what would later be called influencers.
And this person reached out and said,
'Oh, would you do a video for Marmite?'
And I was, like, okay, I'll do, how much do you pay?
And they're, like, oh, £100.
Woo, yippy!
I was 19, that was great.
I could buy a whole... some pizzas with that.
So I took on this job and I made this video for Marmite,
there was no contract, there was no agreements.
There was no, 'Oh, you have to say this
and you can't monetise the video'.
So I release this video.
I think it has something like 20 million views now.
And I've had ads on that the whole time.
So I got my money back in the end.
[MAN] Marmite, what are you doing?
[Marmite] I'm sleeping with your wife, John.
[MAN] Yeah, you are.
Incorporating the brand in the creative way
and having fun with it is still more enjoyable
than just knowing you're just kind of being talked at.
[BEN] When you talk about not getting paid for brands, not wanting to do brands
you seem like you're very, sort of, relaxed and quite easy-going about it.
Do you feel that way?
I have a lot of grey hair.
Yeah, no, it is an act, I'm not relaxed at all.
I'm extremely stressed all the time.
I overthink absolutely everything,
but it's fun just to recount it and laugh about it.
But no, we overthink absolutely everything
to a ridiculous degree.
That's why I'm one of the many creators
that has experienced varying degrees of burnout.
First time I experienced burnout was, I think, in 2009,
I tried for about a four-month period
to release weekly videos.
Wow, weekly videos.
And it was a nightmare.
It was just too much, I couldn't handle it.
I mean, to be fair I had no crew or anything,
it was just me making videos and stuff
but it was trying to make
high production value comedy sketches and stuff.
But yeah, that was the first time I experienced burnout
and it really just felt like the end of the world
at the time, like I'd failed.
The next time would be a few years later
when I just... during that sort of big UK YouTuber boom
when suddenly there were so many more eyes
and so much more excitement.
And I was making loads of content
in quite a manic, just churning-it-out state.
But that, like, pulling an all-nighter,
you pay the Piper eventually.
And I became burnt out and yeah, that 2013 burn-out
has gone on nine years now.
Around about 2018 I very much felt like
I didn't have anything more to do or say
that I was really just scraping the bottom of the barrel
of what I had left to kind of offer the world, content wise.
I mean, in 2018 I started a series called 'Content',
which in itself was me just going, oh f**k it,
here's just some stuff.
And I put together this music video as sort of a tying-off
of asdfmovie called The Muffin Song.
And in that video, I kind of touch on themes of burn-out
and depression, 'cause that's what you want
your little funny cartoon... And yeah, I put that out
and it got about 30 million views and it was well received,
but it was sort of my way of saying, I think that's it.
I think that's all I have to offer.
And then TikTok picked up the video
and initially it was just some people
doing these quite cringe, is what it's called, videos,
lip syncing to it.
And then it was getting memed on a lot.
And then that evolved into people enjoying it unironically,
and very quickly, I think within the year,
that song went gold
and is well on its way to going platinum,
the video now has well over 200 million views, I think
and it just suddenly bought me
a whole new lease of relevancy.
But make no mistake, I've been considering that
borrowed time ever since.
We decided to ride this wave of popularity
from The Muffin Song,
we made a card game called Muffin Time.
And that also did really well.
And we just kept making stuff.
And for about four years now, my mentality's been
I'm just gonna keep making stuff while I'm allowed to
because I did not expect to still be able to do this.
So it is, whereas it used to be this desperate cling
to relevance and growth,
it is now more of just a grateful, like, 'Oh, me.
People are still paying attention'.
[BEN] You've played around with lots of different types of video and content.
Why is that?
I've often described myself as consistently inconsistent.
That's just something that I've kind of told people
to get used to.
One thing that I saw on the internet, even before YouTube,
is that a creator will get massive success with one video
and then just go, okay, I will just keep doing that.
And this is something that's,
with a platform like TikTok, is, I think, even worse.
I think that's... You can really see these numbers,
TikTok will do one thing that gets a laugh
and then they will just keep doing it again
and if they don't, you can just see this
absolute black and white, 10 million views,
and the next video they don't do it in has 100 views.
And then they do it again, there's 10 million views again.
And so it can be brutal.
But I saw that trap before I even started posting on YouTube
and I really did not want to get sucked into it.
So even when I made the asdfmovie video
and that did really well, I didn't then just go, okay
I'm gonna do two, three, four, five,
I mean, I did do those, but I made sure
to put a year between them, and in between them
I would put out other things, longer cartoons
and comedy sketches and even, at some points, short films
and stuff, because I really wanted to just make
a lot of different stuff.
And if I wanted an audience there I wanted them to
just enjoy a variety of things.
Weirdly, the most fun I have these days
is doing sponsor segments for brands
because I get to really just cut loose
and make the wackier stuff.
And the pressure isn't nearly as high
as it is anywhere else.
But don't get me wrong as soon as it dries up,
I'm out of London, I'm gone, I'm going home.
I'm gonna settle down, get some more dogs.
[BEN] People know about comments online.
Was that something that affected you or something that you could, kind of, take in your stride?
Oh yeah, it was bad.
It was really bad.
I was extremely susceptible to comments.
I mean, the way it's kind of always worked
for a lot of creators, I think is that one negative comment
outweighs the hundred positive ones.
My theory is always that it's basically
it's because you agree with that negative comment more,
they're just confirming your own insecurities.
But yeah, the comments have always been a thing,
although, weirdly, they're fine now.
I think that because I've just been around so long,
there's not that kind of excitement.
No one feels the need to tear me down
but when I was younger and more enthusiastic
and popular, to be honest, there's just this sort of
natural need to tear that person down.
And I'll still have that if I have a video
that suddenly does really well and leaves my
sort of bubble of my audience,
you'll suddenly start getting an influx of nasty comments.
That's actually the best way to tell
that a video is doing well, is that people start being mean.
[BEN] You know, you start to rise in YouTube
and then there's kind of a group of British YouTubers.
There was a big scene that collapsed in on itself centred around Alex Day.
Wow.
He's definitely involved, sure.
[BEN] Would you mind talking us through that a little bit?
Yeah.
So, in 2013, 2014
there was, the best thing you can describe it as is a purge
in the UK YouTube scene where, basically,
a lot of creators,
all male, as far as I'm aware, were just kind of found
to be doing a lot of predatory things
and they were getting systematically turfed out.
And it was all open secrets,
'cause we knew that there were all these creators
who were very predatory and would be sexually inappropriate
with their fans or just generally not good people,
but there's not really much you can do about it
because it's not your story to tell, they can just sue you.
So all you could really do is wait
for people to come forward with things you knew were true
and then amplify that.
And that was sort of the play, really.
I remember when it kind of first started off,
a group of us were just out to dinner
and we very darkly sort of said,
'Who's gonna be next?'
And we chatted and came up
with a list of about seven people
and within six months, all of them were gone.
You'd see this again in, sort of, a few years
with the MeToo movement. Basically, what we saw in MeToo,
it had happened beat by beat in the UK YouTube scene.
And it was just very weird and grim
and I wish more people knew about it, almost,
because I do worry that it's just gonna happen again now.
Logically, it just will,
the same thing will just happen in the TikTok world
where you have a lot of new, pretty, young people
getting loads of attention suddenly
and having the opportunities to abuse that attention.
And those who do not learn from history
are doom to repeat it and all that.
So I do hope it doesn't happen again.
I really do.
[BEN] If you met someone now at a convention,
a young person who's thinking about starting a channel for the first time,
what would you say to them?
Oh, I do.
And for a while I would say don't,
because I was really miserable.
I was a miserable little b*****d.
And I'd be, like, 'Just don't do it'.
What I would, oh gosh.
I mean, the thing is it's shifted so much,
what it means to be famous on the internet
has changed so much over the years
that I almost wouldn't be able to tell someone
what to expect because fame looks so different now.
On YouTube, I had such a slow, steady growth
over the course of years, and even though
I did have a big boom at one point,
that boom was only getting, like, a million subscribers
within a year.
Comparatively now, kids are getting a million followers
on TikTok in a week or so,
and that's unfathomable.
I can't imagine the mental weight of that.
I was at a convention last year and I was on a panel
with a bunch of other creators,
and the question went around,
'When did you start posting videos?'
And it's worth noting all of these creators
had similar numbers to me, followers in the millions,
and every single one of them would
started posting the year prior, in 2020.
That was just, that was mad.
That was just... And the scariest thing about that
was they had no idea what they were talking about.
And I don't mean that to be rude, but it was just
they had not had the necessary growth and humbling
and experience that you get when you have a large audience.
And the biggest thing is responsibility.
You know, you need to learn that you are an influencer,
that term exists for a reason
and it's an appropriate term.
If you tell people what to do or what to think
they will do that, they'll believe you
they see you as an authority figure.
So I have to choose which brands I work with,
and I choose carefully.
I won't work with, like, alcohol brands
and I've had plenty of alcohol brands approach me
and just offered wild amounts of money
that I would love to take.
But I know that my audience is young and susceptible
and I'm not gonna promote it to them.
If I had an older audience say, yeah, no problem.
But I know my audience
and, therefore, I know the responsibility I have to them.
Even if you are a 17 year old
and you think there's no way anyone is gonna be,
I have any power or responsibility, you're wrong.
You do.
Because people your age and younger
and even older are listening to you
and viewing you as an authority figure.
And they respect you
and they are taking what you say literally
even if you don't want them to.
And that is an intense responsibility,
please wield it carefully.