Transcription
So we have 23 channels with over 100k subscribers, and then we have five with over a million. The revenue is around 150 to 200k. That's generally a strategy I think other people can take. If you find popular formats in illustration, particularly with AI animation, you can probably do a really nice job of remaking that in a visual format.
We've grown to a team of 100 people and scaled to 15 million subscribers. If you had one piece of advice for someone wanting to start an animation channel, what would it be?
First of all, make sure that the...
What's up, Oliver? Welcome to the number one podcast for YouTube creators to grow on YouTube.
Thank you! Yeah, looking forward to talking, and I love your background. It's one of the best I've seen.
Yeah, I just decided to stay in the garden. I've got mosquitoes biting me, but I'll manage.
So maybe a quick background on if you can tell the viewers what you do, basically.
Yeah, so I started out as a YouTube creator making gaming videos as a teenager. I did that for around five years. After I left school at 17, I decided to go into business right away. I was like, "I'm not going to work a job, so I'm going to purely go for business." I started an agency that did video editing for YouTubers.
We have like 10 to 20... how many? 10 billion views on the videos we've edited for other YouTubers. After that, I made a bunch of money, reinvested it into my own brands, and now I'm building a media company that is doing animation education videos in space, biology, and geopolitics. The goal is to scale a company that keeps launching new brands that are really interesting, valuable, viral, and also educational and useful as well.
So if we go right into it, basically, when exactly did you start on YouTube?
Yeah, that was 2012, when I was 12 years old, making Minecraft videos like a little kid. That was it. I did that, and I think I got 70 subscribers for 100 videos. That was a pretty impressive ratio. It took a long time to get anywhere, but gradually I learned how to speak on camera, and it gradually improved.
I mean, that story you hear often, but at least you kept at it, and now you've grown to such a big team.
Exactly!
How did you go from that to creating your first animation channel?
Yeah, so it was a lot of studying other creators. I think there's no university course for how to become a YouTuber. It's just like you watch content, you try and figure out what's working about it, and you follow experts. That was a lot of what I did, and that really helped to generate this understanding of how to make content.
There was that, and the agency I worked on helped other creators with video editing. When they're giving feedback and notes, you can kind of get a sense for style. You see like 12 different styles, and you get a good sense of content when people who have millions of subscribers are giving you feedback. That's good.
In terms of the animation, we got here because I really wanted to do valuable education, also entertaining. It's reaching people who may not really care that much about space or biology, but it's fun, so they watch it, and then they learn something as well. It's like a mixture of those two things.
Was Solar Balls the first channel you built with animation?
So it's actually the third or fourth channel, actually. The first channel was around history, and it was this concept where aliens analyze human history. It was there to educate people about how weird what we're doing as humans looks compared to others from an outside perspective. That didn't really work out too well; it was a bit too weird, a bit too niche.
That was me kind of going on my tangent of enjoying making content, but it did reasonably well for some videos. In short, it did a few million views, 10 million for this one, so yeah, it did okay.
That was the first one. The second one was Mr. Spherical.
When was that?
Oh, okay, yeah, the start of 2021. That's when I started the brands. Then the next one was Mr. Ferle, which has been succeeding. That started at the end of 2021.
Before going to the next one, what made you go from that first channel about history to this one?
One, it was mainly because I saw an opportunity where this niche was getting like 500k views for a three-minute animation video that was pretty mediocre in quality. I thought, "Well, I can do something better here in quality, and I can make a brand here."
That was the reason I saw the opportunity. Secondly, the first brand wasn't really succeeding, so I thought, "Okay, I'm going to place my bets and my time on this new brand instead."
There are nine different languages for this channel. This video has 25 million views across all the languages, which is kind of crazy to think.
So yeah, that's that. Then a few more other random channels I made. I made a channel for animation, Teenage Stories for young girls, and that didn't really succeed too well because it was just too competitive. There was already this market for this kind of content.
Lastly, then it was Sobl. That's the channel which we can talk about a lot. I think it's the most successful one in terms of the financials and the views.
If we go back to your third channel, why do you think My Animated Stories is crushing in that field that's so competitive? How are they so high above everyone else?
Yeah, that's an interesting thing. What I studied... how do I say this? Many things.
Firstly, they are just very good at titles and thumbnails, appealing to these teenage audiences. Maybe they go a bit too far sometimes, but that's obviously anyone's own question.
They are great at making quality animation. They do invest a bunch of money into that animation; the style looks good. Lastly, the amount of content they post is very impressive. They used to post every day, every single day. They'd post a new animated kind of video. It's very impressive.
So yeah, I think it was those main things. Basically, because they posted so much, they kind of crowded out the niche. Viewers have fresh content every day, so why would I go and look at something new?
On those first three channels, how did you grow that team of animators? Was it all the same team channel after channel? Were you always looking to hire?
We built a new team per channel. The model I have is we build a new team for every single channel. The reason for that is, as you know, any YouTuber who's tried to make a second or third channel, it's very easy to lose focus on one thing. The main thing needs to be the main thing; that makes sure to not get distracted.
So we hire a different director. A director is somebody who has some content strategy experience but mostly is a good person at directing animation. Maybe they've had some background training in animation, probably have some writing skills, so they can shape the scripts, and they know some basic content strategy.
At the same time, we teach them that. Below that, yes, then you hire the animator, the writer, the voiceover artist, maybe a sound designer. All those roles come below that, and sometimes we mix them across channels, but mostly they're separate.
For Mr. Spherical, did you study like, "Okay, this is how the history and geography world of YouTube is," so there's definitely a gap for animation in that niche, and then you went at it? How did you study that niche before going all out? Because doing an animation channel is a big investment. How were you so sure to get into this one?
Yeah, it was mainly this channel that used to post content. They don't post anymore, but when they stopped and then we started, that's kind of how you consider the timeline.
So three years ago, and yeah, this was the main inspiration.
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Back to the pod.
Why? I would say it was a mixture of having money already stored up because I had a video editing agency that had accumulated money. I had like $20,000 to $30,000 that I was able to invest in these brands.
Secondly, I think just generally really wanting to make a successful brand, just being obsessed about that and doing it in a place I care about, which is education. So it was a mixture of those that made me go, "Okay, I'm going to go all out in this."
I did have some idea that if it doesn't work out within a few months, then I will stop, but it worked out pretty quickly, so that was fine.
How much did your first three channels cost? The first and third were not successful, but the second and fourth were mega successes. So I'm curious, what's that model looking like, and if you can talk about revenue?
Sure, yeah, pretty painful. The first channel did... it was a year and a half of running it, or two years, roughly. That was a year and a half, and that cost me $30,000. The revenue was around $1,500, so it just only really crossed the AdSense mark at that point.
That was a big mistake because I went way too persistent with that. I was like, "I want to make it work. I want to do everything I can," and then I spent way too much money. I should have stopped that around $10,000 and realized it wasn't working.
When you say $30,000, what is the cost?
These distribution costs for these 8 to 10-minute animation videos typically cost around $3,000 each. This channel, as you can see, we've got a bunch of these 10-minute videos and, you know, 20k views, so you're making $20 on a $3,000 video.
So yeah, as you can tell, that's kind of how it works. The cost of distribution is mostly animation costs. I think like half of that is animation, and then the rest is a mixture of voiceover, scripting, some research, sound design.
So yeah, that's typically the distribution of how these run. It's generally the same for other brands too.
We'll talk about AI later, but I'm curious if AI helped you reduce costs significantly in animation.
Yeah, not yet. I think in the future, there's a possibility it will, but for now, we're going to focus on scaling up what we currently have. If there's something in the future that works with animation and AI, then we'll definitely look into it.
But for now, we have a really good team, and we can be very specific with what we want to do. If you can animate it yourself compared to... because AI can right now, it's still a bit wishy-washy. It does some weird images that you don't want and stuff, so not for now.
Interesting. So first channel, minus $29,000. Then second channel, what happened there?
Yeah, the second channel was Mr. Spherical, which did succeed. That was roughly... but it was pretty tough, though. It was like eight months of breaking even. I think I was negative $10,000 for that as well.
Finally, after eight months, we kind of transitioned from shorts. I mean, obviously, animation is expensive. Animated shorts? That's next level; you just can't make any money on those.
So yeah, we basically did that for eight months, broke even. After that, we had some pretty strong months. We had like sponsorships, and we got $10,000 a month in net profit.
Now we've kind of not focused on the channel as much, so it's declined a bit, but if we get back on track, we can get to $110,000 a month in net profit.
Mr. Spherical is a great place to be.
Yeah, it's a great place to be. It's a dream for a lot of people.
True, it's pretty nice.
What do you think was the breakout point from being break-even to making $10k profit?
Yeah, it was all about sponsorships, actually. That was the only reason.
So the shorts... yeah, we launched with shorts, and then we gradually started to do long videos. Once we did long videos, we knew we could do an integration.
This was actually our second most popular video, our first long video. It's not eight minutes because we cut out the ad, and it wasn't fully eight minutes, but either way, it's a long video.
Yeah, this was the first video that we did, and that's the difference.
Yeah, so like you got to get sponsorships with animation. I think there are not many channels that can succeed without sponsorships. There are some, but mostly, you know, you got to do animation with sponsorships.
Yeah, because what's the RPM on animation videos?
It's pretty low. For Mr. Spherical, it depends on the year, time of year. Now it's like $2.50 to $3, but in February, it's like awful. It's like, you know, $1.50, and that's just insane, right?
Exactly. That's what I always thought. Like, an animation channel is hard. What would you say is the toughest part of growing an animation channel?
I would say it can be really hard to find somebody to run it because, as we mentioned before, you need somebody who has animation background and experience, but you don't want someone who's too traditional.
As we know, everyone says this: you hire somebody from traditional media, and then they use their own style and approach, and then it's wrong or just not aligned with what YouTube should be doing.
So that's the issue. It's hard to pull somebody from that field because they need to know animation and then train them to actually do the style as you want. So that's kind of the challenge that we faced. That's the main issue.
Secondly, is the money. You got to be really thoughtful about what you launch because you can very easily throw away $30k.
On the third channel we didn't mention, my Teenage Story, I also lost $30k as well.
Yeah, and then a bunch of other channels as well. I think in total, I spent like $90k on my channels that haven't succeeded.
But yeah, it's pretty intense.
But then on to the winner, one channel number four, Solar Balls. What happened exactly?
So that was a cross-promotion mostly from Mr. Spherical. We launched the brand with three videos.
Why did you choose space planets?
Yeah, that was mainly because we already saw there was an interest in this. There were already comics about space, you know, planets with faces. We saw, "Okay, well, we can do something ourselves with animation."
We could convert it into a cartoon illustration and then into actual animation. That's generally a strategy I think other people can take. If you find popular formats in illustration, you know, with AI animation in particular, you can probably do a really nice job of remaking that in a video format instead of an image format.
So that's how we did it. Then combine that with Mr. Spherical, which gave us an idea. We kind of had a similar style, as you can see across the channels.
Cross-promoting it as well really helped. We got 100,000 subscribers in 11 days, so it really grew really fast.
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I remember that!
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay, and a lot from Mr. Spherical. After that, browse picked up right on all of that, is that what?
Yeah, that's right. Browse picked up really quickly. It was like, you know, one and a half days, two days.
We weren't relying on Mr. Spherical. I mean, it was just growing 3,000 subs a day from browse. It was crazy.
I think that's like a general lesson. I really do think that if you find a true winner that's going to go to the moon, then it often does come pretty early if you've got the right pieces together in terms of the style.
So yeah, that was a really good sign. Whenever I see that now, you know it's a winner if it wins early. If it doesn't win early, it can still be a winner, but obviously, it's just more of a risk to reinvest into that, and you've got to have a lot of confidence to do that. Otherwise, you end up losing a lot of money.
So yeah, that's an interesting piece.
It's really interesting. Basically, you kept at it even if you lost $30k on that first channel, $30k on that third channel. But then this fourth picked up right away.
It could have died, but you kept at it because it is a very nice branded channel instead of, let's say, a random automated channel.
What's cool to see with this branded channel is it started two and a half years ago, and it's still going strong at half a million views per video.
That's really impressive.
Even more than that, it's like half a million views per video sounds good, but what's really impressive is that it makes a lot of money from other revenue streams as well.
So yeah, it's kind of a situation where it looks like one thing, but it's like five times that because of all the other revenue streams.
We can talk about those as well, which is pretty interesting.
Exactly. Maybe if you can break down basically what is the cost right now, and then what are those other revenue streams?
Yeah, so cost-wise, videos cost like $3,000 to $4,000 each. That's before the administration business team. Just like pure production, $3,000 to $4,000.
Sorry, $3,000 to $4,000. What is it exactly? Is it one animator? Is it five animators plus two editors? How's that looking like?
Typically, it's either one or two animators. It depends on the video. In terms of the time it takes, it is around a month for one animator. So that's a pretty long time for one video.
Two animators? Three weeks or so. So yeah, it's pretty significant for one video. We need five animators for the channel to post every week.
In terms of the rest of the pieces, we have one writer alongside my business partner, Alvaro, who is the guy who built the creative vision of this. He's a fantastic person, and he's really smart.
He's like a co-writer with the other writer. He's also directing everything, designing the show. We have not only characters that are interesting to people, but there is actually a huge form behind this.
It's like a show. Think of Disney and how they have a show, and then everyone loves the characters. We have a similar thing, and that's why we manage to sell a lot in merchandise as well.
I'll briefly just show you some pieces about this. The Sobl community has a bunch of fan channels. You see, you know, Marvel fan channels and stuff.
But it's crazy. There are just people who post. They make their own version of our planet, so this is their own stuff, and they get, you know, 200,000 views.
There are channels that... there we go. This guy's got three million views on fan content for us, and there are hundreds of thousands of views. It's crazy.
So it's a really big community behind this, and that means that, yeah, it's really, really powerful.
That is so cool! How does it make you feel to see that what you've created has actual fan-created, fan-made animation based on yours?
It feels really good. It feels very impressive because that's not happened before on many YouTube channels.
The goal there is to now kind of see that happen and then go, "Okay, well, how can we now start to move towards something more like Disney and how they've built their brands and characters, and Pixar and those kind of really, really big companies?"
Try and do something which is building a standard like they have.
Yeah, you're on the right track.
What's the revenue right now?
Around $100,000 or so a month.
So yeah, something like that.
In terms of the profit, it depends, but it's around half of that. So yeah, that's pretty significant as well.
In terms of the... there's obviously other costs that we have to have as business costs, like operations management, getting brand deals, other things like that.
But generally, it's doing very, very well profitably. As we mentioned, you know, trying to focus on getting to like how do we get to $20 million in five years?
I really believe that we can do that.
I believe it too. I'm really bullish on those types of branded animation channels. I love that as well.
The angle you're doing with educational content just basically increases quality content online, which is what I really believe in and am trying to do as well.
So yeah, you said you're making $100k revenue per month. What's the breakdown of that?
So the breakdown is around $30,000 to $40,000 AdSense for the English channel. Then there is around $10,000 for other languages. We have 10 languages: Arabic, Hindi, Chinese, Japanese, everything you can think of.
Then we have $15k a month in Patreon, which is pretty significant. We actually have, I think, the third largest Patreon for an animation channel, which is great.
Yeah, that's pretty decent merchandise. Then we have quite a lot of merchandise revenue. If we included the merchandise revenue, it would be more than $100k a month, like $150k to $200k a month.
But I'm just being conservative and saying... but yeah, including the merch...
One second, you're saying the merch from Solar Balls is between $50k to $100k a month in revenue?
Yeah, that's true.
Right now, usually more like $30k, but recently because of Q4, it's been $58k to $80k.
In the past 60 days, because we did Kickstarter, it's actually been a quarter of a million because we did $150k with Kickstarter and then almost $100k now and over $100k with the actual merchandise Shopify store itself.
Yeah, wow, that's impressive numbers.
What was the Kickstarter about?
Yeah, I'll show you that. So that's a Kickstarter for a new card game that we made.
I see an uptrend on card games. Is it because it's low cost but high reward type thing?
Yeah, definitely.
Yeah, it's a really high-margin product because you're selling paper, basically, branded paper. So that helps.
As we can see, it's $150k here with almost 2,000 people who backed it. That just finished like two weeks ago, so it's pretty recent.
Yeah, it went really nicely.
What was the milestone that you were aiming for?
We were aiming for... how much were we aiming for?
Well, it says $10,000. We weren't really aiming for $10,000; we were aiming for more than that.
But we said that our real aim was around $100k, so $150k was nice. We definitely did more than we thought.
I'll just briefly show you this. This is the past 30 days, or let's do the past 30 days. It's $88,000 for the store itself, and then the past 90 days is $120k.
So yeah, pretty crazy.
But this is one channel, right?
And those are plushies?
Yeah, mostly plushies and then also the Solar Cards, the card game itself.
See, a mixture of those two things.
Also, if the viewers are wondering why my head is now red, it's because I've been bitten up by mosquitoes in my garden here.
It's funny.
Yeah, so you're selling plushies, and that's hitting those big numbers.
I'm just curious, how are you making those plushies? Did you go where they're actually manufacturing it? How did it go about to actually start that merch?
Yeah, so that was a mixture of us seeing a potential to do plushies because other creators do plushies and YouTube and things like this.
We saw that and went, "Okay, let's try and figure this out." We went to a company called Creator Inc, which does creative services.
We work with them; we still work with them for the plushies. For the cards, we found a manufacturer and worked with them directly for these new cards.
So it's a mixture of both. There are quite a lot of creator companies that are there to help creators make merch, and that's pretty good.
But yeah, obviously, if you have big enough sales, then gradually you can start to do it yourself, and that is better for the margins.
What is Creator Inc?
Yeah, it's a company that does merchandise for creators.
So this is the company.
It's like behind the scenes?
Yeah, so they work with the manufacturer, and they basically help to get the design correct. Then they do the fulfillment, so they get a warehouse and ship it out for us.
So it's a mixture of those things.
Wow, interesting.
Okay, and was there an initial investment cost for that, or straight up?
There wasn't actually because we did a pre-order.
So we did a pre-order, which meant that we didn't need to pay up front. We received the revenue from the customers and then used that to pay the manufacturer.
So that's a really nice model, which Kickstarter also enables. You don't need to spend the money up front and risk nobody buying it.
You can first of all pre-order it, and then after that, you can decide how many to purchase.
So that's been really good, really, really helpful, and avoids too much risk.
So you mentioned Mr. Spherical and Solar Balls. Do you have more channels running? What's the YouTube empire looking like right now?
So we have 23 channels with over 100k subscribers. That is basically mostly languages, quite significant.
Yeah, 23 channels. Then we have, I think it's like five with over a million.
Those are run by many different people, as you can imagine. I can't run them all, which is good.
Most of the channels are different languages of Solar Balls and Mr. Spherical.
We don't have lots of different brands, but we do have other brands as well.
We have Human Body, which is a biology brand, which is animation too.
I'll just show you that as well. So BU is this one, a quarter of a million subs in English, roughly.
Some of the videos have done reasonably well recently, which is good. We have some bigger videos.
Then Worker Boy is a channel focused on companies.
So these are the main animation brands. We're also focusing and starting to build channels that are focused on documentaries.
This is a new channel we've just launched. It hasn't had the success I want yet. We've only done three videos, but we've got one video with 50k views, and the other's 5k views.
This is a new documentary-length format because these can also be very successful if you get a sponsorship. If you have a high RPM, which you do, these are like $15 RPM kind of niches, then yeah, it can be really significant.
All those channels combined, what's the total revenue per month?
Around 150 to 200k revenue.
Yeah, okay, nice.
So approximately $2 million a year to $2.5 million.
Nice, that's really impressive.
You mentioned also that you have 100% in your team. How are you managing everything? What's the organization looking like with you at the top? Do you have partners? What's that looking for people wanting an empire themselves?
So the structure is... starting with the... let's start with the team, and we can work up.
So we have somebody who runs each channel, and that's a director. That person does what we mentioned before, which is channel management alongside creative direction.
Below that, they have a team, which is like one layer beneath them, so they manage everyone. Above that, we have a few different ways it works.
We basically have an operations manager or operations director who is overseeing those directors, giving them support.
For example, if a director needs new training material, they want to learn how to do content strategy better, she will help to find them that information.
If they want to hire a new person or fire somebody, then she will help them with that.
If they just generally need advice on how to manage people, she helps with that.
So she's there as a director, and then above that is me, who is the chief executive, helping to move around the business.
I'm mostly doing new brands, working to incubate and start new brands, but also able to work on the business side.
We have two sides of the organization. One is creative and managing the whole process, and the other is then taking that creative content and doing the merchandise store, doing licensing.
We're now actually licensing the Sobl content in China, so Tencent, the company, is going to be putting the Sobl IP onto Tencent, kind of like TV and stuff.
In Russia, we're on the Netflix of Russia. They have like seven streaming services, and we're on all of them, which is kind of crazy.
How did that come about, the China part and the Russian part? How did that start?
Yeah, it first came because I just thought I'm obsessed with reaching more people with education by doing these new languages, right?
So we did a Russian language, we did a Chinese language, and it succeeded in both those markets. We got success with views.
Then after that, we realized, well, in these markets, there's less content. The Netflix they have in their country has less content to use, so they kind of also want to get creators' content as well.
In the English world, we don't really have that yet. YouTube is quite separate from Netflix, but it's gradually getting closer and closer.
So yeah, that's like an interesting piece. Their markets are kind of more close already, and ours are gradually getting closer.
So in the future, are you talking with Netflix?
Not yet, but yeah, I think in two to three years, definitely I think we can.
We see like an animation glitch. Have you seen Glitch Productions, the Digital Circus?
Definitely, yeah, yeah.
So something like that is actually working really nicely for them. They're on Netflix, they're on YouTube.
I really think we're going to see similar things happen for our brands and other brands too.
Why do you think Glitch was so successful? I'm curious; you've probably studied them.
Yeah, I haven't studied them too much actually yet. I've just really recently come across their work, so I'll let you know for the next podcast. I'm going to study it soon.
Yeah, it's very impressive though.
You have such a huge team and so many things going on. What's your week looking like?
Yeah, so right now, on Monday, I start by trying to spend the week focused on the creators for impact, which is my version of doing Team Seas, Team Trees.
We bring together creators and do impact campaigns, so that's been like the Monday, thinking about how to do that strategy, building a campaign.
We just launched a month ago. Tuesday is typically focused on new brands and deep work.
So, you know, I try and think about strategy in the morning, then have some calls about new brands and improving them. That's mostly the day of Tuesday.
Then Wednesday, it's kind of like business calls. For example, let's check the finances, let's check the recruiting. Who are we recruiting at the moment? Do we want to hire this person? Do we not want to hire this person?
Then also just other pieces like that. Thursday is usually meeting people from outside the company and talking to you and other cool people who are in the economy.
Friday as well, usually similar, and then my administration for Thursday or Friday, like whatever that's going to be, like legal documents and stuff like that.
Nice! I like that every day is something specific. You don't mix things all over the place. Maybe I should do that. That's a good organization; it can help.
Yeah, it's kind of crazy once things scale. It's just overwhelming to do everything in the same day because you're like 10 different channels in one day. It's like, wow, my mind's going insane or something.
So yeah, it's good to start splitting it up.
Yeah, I feel you. I have so many different things going on.
Back to your first day on Monday, Creators for Impact. Can you talk more about that?
We hear a lot about creator-led businesses where creators use their influence to start billion-dollar companies, right?
But you are working on Creator for Impact. Can you tell more?
Yeah, so Creator for Impact is my... basically after building the company, I want to build Creators for Impact, which is bringing creators together who want to have an impact.
Whether that is raising money for the oceans or just generally educating about a particular topic, like let's say psychology, and they want to help their viewers' mental health.
It might be, "Let's try and fix this part of our country's politics," because let's say there's legislation they want to get passed, and they want to go, "Okay, let's try and help to push it by getting our viewers to also implement a law to stop burning plastic in our country."
That's an example. In Indonesia, we just did Team Indonesia, which is a campaign where we got famous creators and celebrities together, and they talk about burning plastic as an issue.
That's obviously damaging the environment, and we want to fix that by getting the country to actually have proper waste management.
Right now, there are many households that don't get any waste collection, so basically, they're just left with plastic, and they can't do anything with it because nobody's collecting it.
We're just doing a campaign and getting people aware that this is an issue and encouraging them to talk to their local leaders and try and solve it.
How many creators did you have on that campaign? What was the end result of it? I know it took you also a year to prepare.
Yes, there was a lot of thinking and planning. We had 15 creators, and they collectively had 60 million followers and subscribers, so a mixture of Instagram and YouTube, mostly on Instagram actually.
They had around 60 million, so we got pretty significant reach. I think 10 million to 20 million views and impressions, which is reasonably good.
I want to do way bigger in the future, like level up, but for the first campaign, I think it's reasonably good.
In terms of the outcome, in the capital city, we made a pledging system. The two mayors that were running to become mayors, like it's an election period, they're running to be mayors, and they basically pledged they're going to fix the waste management in their city.
They're actually going to stop this burning of plastic and stuff, so that's really good. If they push through with that, then you know, we actually nudged the capital city to fix its systems.
The creators were there to do that, so yeah, we'll see how it goes. I'm not sure yet; it's only just finished, but that's what they pledged, and we'll see and follow up with them.
No, yeah, I respect that a lot, using influence for good. What's next?
Yeah, so I'm currently thinking that through. I'm not exactly sure, but I'm curious to do something in AI because I really want to defend creators.
I'm concerned that the platforms, YouTube and Google and Facebook, they might use the content of creators and then put it into machines and just not pay the creators for that.
Then just, you know, make their own content and just publish that on the platform. So I'm thinking, you know, is there a way that we can do a campaign where creators go, "We don't want that. We want to make sure that you actually pay us for our content or just don't use it at all."
I'm curious about that, so I'm thinking about it. Next year, I might do something around AI for the English community, not Indonesia, like all of us in the US, UK, etc.
Do you see it as it can negatively impact the ecosystem?
So yeah, by copying your persona, but do you see other parts where it can be...
I mean, like people losing jobs? What are you thinking?
Yeah, lots of different thoughts. On the one hand, I think it's great because we can test new ideas for animation without many issues of cost.
I don't need to spend $30k to do an AI animation; I can do that with like $1k or less, so that's great. That's good news.
I think the... as creators, we can all compete with Disney and big companies much better with AI because we can use those tools to make premium content. That's really exciting.
I think the main issue that I have personally is as soon as a tool stops being used by people, us creators, and instead it becomes like an agent itself.
It's able to just fully make its own content and then publish it. Fully make its own content and publish it, then that's where it becomes competition, right?
A tool usually just stays a tool. Like, you know, if you've got a hammer, it's not going to start to become a person that walks around hitting stuff.
It remains a tool, but AI is very unique. It's the first tech that can also become competition as well.
This is a really important point for us to think about as creators. We want it to be a tool, yes, and YouTube loves to tell us it's a tool.
But soon they can make it into an agent, and they can make it a competition if they want to.
I want to help defend creators and ask creators to defend ourselves to make sure that they're not going to do that in a way that really damages our businesses.
So that's a concern I have, and I want to do something about that.
I see, yeah. I think about that a lot because what you said, I do think AI can really change how we produce content much faster, higher quality.
We can compete with Netflix, that type of thing, which goes with my mission to increase quality content online.
It also lowers the barrier of entry, which means that it should technically lead to even much better content online.
But then on the other side, right now, what we're seeing is insane. What we will see in six months will be crazy, but we're not thinking in five years.
In five years, everything's going to change. Everything! Like what you said, there's going to be agents that can learn by themselves and just create content and think of ideas by themselves.
You will think he, she, or it is real. I don't know how to call an AI anymore, which is crazy to think about.
So then where does that lead in content creation for us humans?
What I'm thinking, I was wondering, is I wonder if streaming is going to have an uptick. It seems to be increasing, but the thing with streaming is that you're like, you know, 8 hours, 12 hours, 15 hours talking to people.
You're creating a relationship with them, and I don't think AI can do that.
Yes, AI can replicate that, but humans won't be able to connect as much with an AI doing the same thing as, say, IShowSpeed doing his thing.
Personality, that type of thing will become super important. Storytelling, that type of thing, unique content.
I do feel streaming might be a big thing versus AI.
But yeah, I totally agree with you.
Yeah, I think that's it. Streaming can be really big.
I think in general, I think of it as like what are the ways of defending ourselves against AI?
I think the first thing is, yeah, personality or connection. For example, the way I think of it is like three pillars of AI defense ability is like a phrasing I have.
So first of all, it is, yeah, personality. If you have a personality that people connect to, then that is a way of defending yourself because you know people can connect with them better than AI.
The next one is trust and authority. Let's say we have Kazak, which is the biggest science channel, 20 million subscribers.
Even if somebody makes an animation version of that with AI, then they don't have the same authority with the brand. The brand is educational; we know it's trustworthy.
We go for it, and we watch it. In education, I think trust and authority are going to be really important, and you can still defend yourself if you have that.
Lastly, is community. I think it's like a community is kind of self-reinforcing. You have people who talk to other people, and that makes a community stronger.
Even if the creator is not involved, the creator can build that community that is self-serving itself. I think that's really powerful as well to just keep engagement, keep a connection, and AI again can't do that very well.
So those are the three things which I think for me I'm strategizing and making sure I implement, and I think is really, really helpful to think about as well.
Yeah, we'll see how it goes. We'll talk about it on our next episode the next time you come, and we'll see how AI has changed the game.
What is your big, let's say, dream for Creator Impact?
That's great. The big dream is that creators are both able to sell products and they build their businesses, and at the same time, they realize, "I have a platform here, a very special opportunity to help my viewers and their future."
If I want to, I can talk to them about mental health, and I can help them become a better person now and a parent in the future because their psychology is just more developed.
I can help make sure that this powerful government isn't putting legislation in place that's going to hurt the people.
If we have 20 creators who say, "This legislation is not very good for the people," we want to defend them because we are creators who care about our audiences.
So that's my vision. I really want the creator economy to have lots of people who really want to do that.
It can be very simple, but just using their influence for impact as a norm in our economy.
Talking about the creator economy, about creator-led businesses, you said you want to have a $20 million YouTube empire. Is that $20 million a month, a year? What's that goal, and how are you going to achieve that?
Yeah, okay, $20 million. So that is the intellectual property value of Solar Balls, just one brand.
I want $20 million with one brand. That's not a yearly profit figure; that is a valuation figure.
So here's how it breaks down. With different channels, usually, you can sell a channel for like one times earnings, three times earnings, which means you're paying for the profit that you estimate in three years.
In animation, you can do more. You can do like 10 times or more.
If we say 10 times, then that means $20 million is $2 million a year. If we're going to be doing that, $2 million in the year is therefore going to be over $100k a month, like $150k a month in profit.
So the goal is to get $150k a month in profit for that brand, and that should be a $20 million valuation brand.
I think we can do that in three years, but for conservative sake, I said five years.
After that, the big goal is to basically become the Disney of the digital age. We're going to build more IP, more animation, and just do that at a rapid pace.
Then we can have significant impact by having, you know, five of those brands worth $20 million each or 10 of those brands worth $20 million each.
In five years, I think we're going to be in a pretty interesting place in that respect.
Are you focusing on animation? Is that the full focus? Do you want to go with creator-led face? What's that looking like?
Yeah, so as long as we can build animation brands that are really able to build a community, then we can defend ourselves against AI animation.
But if we can't do that, then we're not going to be able to defend ourselves.
So we have to be very selective and choose the right brands, but if we do it, then we have great potential with that.
We are going to do documentaries as well. I think documentaries are also possible. You can have them on YouTube, you can have them on Netflix, you can have them in, you know, Chinese Netflix.
You can have them everywhere, so we're going to build documentaries also, but animation is the key.
Yeah, I think it's the best opportunity. You can do merchandise, you can do in-person theaters, you can do whatever you can do.
So much, it's crazy.
If you had one piece of advice for someone wanting to start an animation channel, what would it be?
First of all, make sure that the financials make sense because it is a niche where you've got to make sure the financials make sense. Your cost is going to be high, so choose a niche that's big enough as the first thing.
Secondly, it is to try and build a brand that has characters that people can relate to because if you do that, then there's an opportunity for you to license that content to streaming platforms.
You can easily build a community around those characters and get fan content like we have.
Those are the two things that I think if you do, then you're in a really good place with animation brands.
I was just curious, what do you think will become of the creator economy in the next five years?
In the next five years, I think we're going to see creative content increase in quality, as we've already seen in the past few years, which means that creators can start to be on streaming platforms.
They can start to be licensed in other ways. What's really interesting is we already know that's happening, but what's really interesting is these big companies like Disney, Netflix, whatever, they had the issue of their own revenues declining.
So they need to find cheaper ways of making content. If we are making more premium content, then we are actually in a good position to say, "Hey, we've got this content. You can pay us this licensing fee for two years of putting it on your platform."
That's a good deal for them because it's cheap content, but it's designed for watch time. Creator content is really good at getting watch time while being low cost.
That's a really simple point, but one that I think is going to mean the economies are going to mix, and we're going to see a mixture of them.
So Netflix has an ad tier; they already have that, and that's kind of a good example of becoming a bit more like YouTube.
YouTube is going to implement this TV UI for series content, and that's also going to be a way of YouTube stepping up one level as well.
Again, you have so many things going on. What is the process to find, let's say, the right ideas or title thumbnails for those channels?
How are you optimizing to get the most views?
Yeah, I mean, it's first of all market research. We've used One of 10; we have a subscription, so we're using One of 10.
There we go. We're also generally looking at our own catalog of seeing what's worked and having a good idea of how we can do iterations of that. That's a good way to do it as well.
Then, yeah, generally also a bit of testing of ideas that we're not really sure about, but we like to try them out, and that's also just an experimental thing as well.
So that's mostly the techniques we use.
Second question: if you had to invest in one YouTube channel today, which one would it be that you think is on the skyrocket mode?
Interesting. I mean, Solar Balls, which we already have, I'm already pleased that we have that. I think you can 10x that.
I think something like Glitch, like another animation brand, which is already succeeding at being premium for YouTube and then also licensing elsewhere.
I really think there's great potential for these channels, so I'd say Glitch.
Let's say Glitch.
Yeah, and last questions. You've talked about your goals here and there, but what's the end game? What's your big dream for the next 10 to 20 years?
I know you have a long-term vision.
Yeah, the big dream is to build a company that builds and launches a new brand every single month. That's like really quality, like Solar Balls, and really valuable.
So let's say every month we're building a new brand that, after three years of launch, is worth $20 million. That would be insane!
We could become a quarter of a billion-dollar company. That's definitely possible.
That's the big dream on the company side. On the impact side, I want to use that money to then invest in organizing creators and bringing us together to have an impact.
Creators care about different things, so helping them have an impact in where they care about without being the only person posting about that thing.
Nobody wants to be like, "Oh, you know, I care about this issue, and nobody else is talking about it."
So help them and just build a really strong organization that helps creators do that.
That's the big dream.
Oliver, you, like I said at the beginning, are extremely impressive. You're running a beautiful empire.
I think you've given a lot of value today, and I'm looking forward to seeing how it grows in the next few years.
Thanks for joining us today!
Yeah, it's been really good, and I'm looking forward to talking next time.
Awesome, guys! Click on this next video, and have a good one. Peace!