Placeholder Image

Subtitles section Play video

  • I got an email a couple of weeks ago, asking:

  • how do you get started making stuff online?

  • If you're starting from scratch,

  • if you have zero followers, zero subscribers, zero anything,

  • how do you get an audience?

  • How do you get popular on the internet?

  • The first time I tried to answer that question,

  • it was more than ten years ago.

  • YouTube didn't even exist back then,

  • and I thought I knew it all.

  • I didn't, and I probably still don't.

  • But with another decade and a million subscribers under my belt since then,

  • I can at least tell you the rules that I've worked by for the last 15 years or so,

  • not just for YouTube, but for anywhere online.

  • The short answer is: you just make stuff.

  • The long answerwell,

  • the best way to tell that does not start on an incredibly rainy Scottish island.

  • It starts down in London.

  • Right.

  • I've been making stuff for the internet pretty much all my adult life.

  • I had a few decent hits when I was younger,

  • viral web pages and games and short videos

  • that were forwarded on through email in the days before social media.

  • But those were one-off bolts from the blue,

  • they were nothing you could base any sort of career on.

  • When I was 19, the British government mailed a leaflet out to every home in the country.

  • It was called Preparing for Emergencies,

  • and it gave some pretty obvious advice on what to do in the event of a disaster.

  • There was a lot of cynicism about that leaflet,

  • and while the intentions were good,

  • it was mostly seen as a waste of the taxpayers' money.

  • The government also put up preparingforemergencies.gov.uk.

  • They forgot to register preparingforemergencies.co.uk,

  • so I bought the domain, copied their web site,

  • changed all the text to be really sarcastic,

  • sent it off to a few friends, and went to bed.

  • That sort of joke was still new and exciting in 2004.

  • I'll be honest, it hasn't aged well since then.

  • This was before social media, way before smartphones.

  • Facebook had only just got its first round of investment,

  • and it was only open to a few US colleges.

  • That joke was being forwarded by email from person to person to person,

  • because that's how it worked back then.

  • And the feedback that I was getting was by email.

  • Anyway, when I woke up the morning after,

  • okay, I was a student, so it was probably the afternoon after, but,

  • I had some emails from friends saying 'that's quite funny'.

  • And so I had some messages from people I didn't know saying 'that's quite funny'.

  • And then there were some messages from people whose email addresses ended in .gov.uk,

  • saying, 'that's quite funny, it's doing the rounds of the civil servants'.

  • And then there was a message from someone in

  • the government department responsible for the original leaflet,

  • saying 'take it down'.

  • And I said no.

  • And it turns out that while mocking the government is a reasonably good gag,

  • mocking the government and then having the government not find it funny,

  • that is a really good gag.

  • At least in countries where you can get away with it.

  • That takedown request meant that the news got interested,

  • and this went all over the country, as in,

  • national newspapers and local television coverage.

  • And it was just a quick joke that I'd put together in an hour or so becausewell,

  • because the alternative was not doing it.

  • Preparing for Emergencies was the first demonstration I had

  • of a principle I now know and have worked with for years:

  • that the chances of a project succeeding aren't really coupled

  • to how much time, effort and money you've spent on it.

  • And it can often seem like the opposite is true. You'll see people complain

  • that the thing they've poured all their heart and soul and effort and time into,

  • that thing sank,

  • but something quick and dirty that they slapped together has become popular.

  • And maybe that's true, maybe that is how it works sometimes.

  • But I would bet that, like me, anyone with that complaint

  • has made loads and loads of quick and dirty things.

  • And most of those will have failed.

  • It's just that they didn't care as much about those quick and dirty things,

  • they just don't remember them as much,

  • compared to that One Big Project.

  • If you spent ten dollars and one hour on an idea, it is likely to fail.

  • But if you spend a million dollars and a year on an idea, it is still likely to fail.

  • There's an old adage called Sturgeon's Law: “90% of everything is crap”.

  • I realise that isn't what Theodore Sturgeon actually said,

  • it's been cut down a bit over the years, but the idea holds.

  • Sturgeon was a science fiction author,

  • and his reply to the idea that “90% of science fiction is crap”, was yes, it is,

  • but only because 90% of everything is crap.

  • Most things fail.

  • And sure, something that's spent months being polished

  • might have a slightly better chance of survival:

  • but the odds are still against you. Instead of polishing,

  • you could spend those months shoving out ten or twenty or a hundred ideas,

  • and each one of those projects is a new roll of the dice.

  • And each one of those projects is something you learn from,

  • something that helps make the next roll of the dice just a little more likely to succeed.

  • Of course, this is all assuming that your definition of success involves being popular

  • or getting paid for it.

  • These days, I know that I could probably make a lot more money

  • and save a lot of effort if I just stood in front of a green screen

  • and monologued aboutIncredible Facts About Cartoon Series You Won't Believe

  • orAncient Mysteries 'They' Don't Want You To Know About”.

  • But then, I wouldn't be travelling so much,

  • I wouldn't be having so much fun

  • and maybe I wouldn't have kept going through rough times.

  • There are other definitions of success that aren't just about the numbers.

  • More than a decade ago, I came up with this graph.

  • Across the bottom is effort, and across the side is awesome.

  • This is still the guiding principle that I use to determine

  • whether I'm going to do a project or not.

  • And sure,what I consider 'effort' and 'awesome' have changed over the years,

  • both in definition and in scale.

  • Awesome doesn't have to mean money, or viewcount,

  • it can mean getting to do something really cool or working with someone you admire.

  • You define your own success.

  • Anyway. Naive me, at 19, thought there was a chance

  • of going right from Preparing for Emergencies to a full-time job

  • making weird stuff for a living.

  • There wasn't any chance of that.

  • Obviously, in hindsight.

  • Because the people looking at the site weren't goingoh, he's good”,

  • they were goingoh, that's good”.

  • There was no reason to stick around,

  • no reason to do the 2004 equivalent to clicking the subscribe button,

  • which was clicking a subscribe button, it just added an RSS feed to your reader.

  • I miss RSS.

  • Anyway, I got lots of lovely emails about Preparing for Emergencies,

  • I made a couple of contacts from it, but that was all.

  • I'd taken only the first step up the ladder,

  • and I had no idea how long that ladder would be.

  • So I kept making stuff.

  • But back then, I was missing a piece of the puzzle,

  • and it's a really important piece.

  • But to explain that, I need to start heading north.

I got an email a couple of weeks ago, asking:

Subtitles and vocabulary

Click the word to look it up Click the word to find further inforamtion about it