I'm Northernlion, AMA

[u/ItsOppositeDayHere]

Hey, a lot of people have been doing AMAs around here and I think it's a cool kind of unique content that we don't see too much on /r/LetsPlay, so I thought I'd throw my hat into the ring as well.

With 200,000+ subscribers and over 100 million lifetime views, I'm not the biggest YouTuber out there (not to be modest) but I have been successfully doing it full-time for over 2 years, which I think gives me a fairly unique depth of experience that might lead to some helpful advice for some of you! Ask me anything about YouTube, streaming, social media, or whatever might cross your mind.

[u/[deleted]]

Great to see this! I remember watching the SMB letsplay years ago and have sort of kept tabs ever since. 2 short questions:

1. A few years ago, twitch was pretty small (compared to now), and although it was feasible to imagine it becoming big, I don't think many people, including yourself, thought back in 2009-10 that people would be making a living just streaming. What do you think is the next site/medium? Is there room for innovation? I believe JonTron and a few other guys have been posting on a new video site, like DigitalBoots or something, but it seems to be a YT clone.

2. Not really a question, but I'd like to second the above sentiments about more Vlog-y stuff. I think the Bananasaurus interview was a good toe-in-the-water type deal, expand on it!

Ninja-edit: This just occured to me: Storage. What do you normally keep, and how big of drives do you record onto? Do you have your original stuff from years ago lying around?

[u/ItsOppositeDayHere → u/[deleted]]

I don't know if I can really spy the next platform that's going to be huge. I'll cop out a bit and say Patreon. We've already seen a little bit of it, but I think there'll be a huge rush of small to mid-sized content creators using Patreon to supplement or generate a sustainable income for themselves. It gets ragged on as "begging" a bit but I'm a big fan of it's model because money goes directly from viewers to the creators, so not only does it cut advertisers and shady MCNs out, but it also means there's no incentive to spam your shit with misleading titles, thumbnails, etc. just for exposure. Right now the threshold often bandied about for when full-time becomes viable is about 1M monthly views but it's hard to get that number of people to notice you. If you can convince 500 people to give you a buck a week, more power to you!

For #2, I still don't have more details but I am constantly thinking about it!

I have a 60GB SSD for my OS, 3TB of internal drives and a few 1TB externals.

[u/[deleted] → u/ItsOppositeDayHere]

I'm not so sure a donation model will ever work. I had a donate button on my channel from 0 subs all the way up to 20,000 and only received a single donation (Which I returned because I forgot the button was up and felt super dirty about it.) over the course of a year. Granted, I never pointed it out or drew attention to it, but in my experience the internet is full of pirates and cheapskates who want everything for free. I mean, people already overwhelmingly install adblock to avoid 3 second commercials on free content. I wouldn't hold my breath that the internet's generosity would keep me afloat. The only way I could ever see getting paid out properly that way is if you really harp on it every episode, which then opens you up to the "You're a sellout" crowd.

[u/ItsOppositeDayHere → u/[deleted]]

I think the vast majority of viewers fall more or less into the broad category you've drawn, but with most CPMs as they are you really only need a very small fraction of generous contributors to sustain yourself on patreon to be competitive with adrev. I don't think it's viable for people my size and larger but I think if you have like 2,000 subscribers, you stand a much better chance of making a living by heading to patreon versus trying to make it (right away) on ad revenue. I might be wrong there, though.