In my life, I have had different entrepreneurial moments, but the one I want to share today is when I made a YouTube channel in 8th Grade.
I believe the year was 2011 and at the time YouTube was still a relatively new platform. One day I was bored sitting at home and decided to record myself playing video games, the video game that I was playing was Call of Duty. It was a simple how-to video with tips on how to get better at the game. I uploaded the video and didn’t look at it for a couple. When I came back to the video I had 600 views. I know…600 views is not a lot, but for something random that I did for fun this was not the reception I was expecting.
Inspired by the 600 views I had gotten, I decided to upload more how-to videos on Call of Duty.
After some time, I began to expand and made how-to videos for other video games. Some of my videos got popular and two videos on my YouTube channel had about 20,000 views each. While I did not have many subscribers I did have a lot of views on my videos. Uploading videos were something I had done just for fun, I never thought about making money from it. However, one day I received an email from YouTube stating that since my videos had so many views I could now monetize them. If you don’t know what that means, monetize = money.
As a 14-year-old kid, the possibility of making money on my YouTube videos seemed unreal at the time. I asked my parents to verify it and then to help me set up the monetization for the account. After that, I was on my way on to making YouTube money. About a week after I set up the monetization on my videos, I finally surpassed the $100 threshold that you must pass for YouTube to pay you. At the time I didn’t understand, but this was one small step into a much bigger journey. 14-year-old me dreamed of buying a house, fancy cars, and big-ticket luxury items. Likewise, 14-year me did not understand copyright laws all too well, so after uploading footage of an unreleased video game onto my YouTube channel I received a huge copyright strike and YouTube deleted my account. In addition, someone flagged that same video as illegal, so I had a double charge that is irreversible.
This is an actual screenshot of what it says when I try to log into my old YouTube account
Although my YouTube career was cut short, my entrepreneurial spirit never died. One of the main reasons I enrolled in ENT 3003 was to satisfy some remaining credits and to learn a little about being an entrepreneur. However, so far this has been an interesting class and I hope that once it is over I have ideas on what business product I should make....or what YouTube channel to pursue next.
These are video statistics from my YouTube channel. As you can see I did not have too many subscribers, but I did have a lot of views. And it says 0 uploads because my YouTube channel was deleted. One day I hope to revisit YouTube and make videos again, but for now, I will focus on graduating and getting a job.
Hey Kyle I really enjoyed reading your entrepreneurship story! I too had a Youtube channel at one point but never really posted clips of me playing videos (mainly because I wasn’t that good). While reading this I had high expectations and thought you still had a Youtube channel but however that was not the case. That is unfortunate that posting that unreleased footage got your channel deleted but you were also very young and did not understand the laws of posting certain videos. I’m curious which Call of Duty did you post clips about? Great story!
ReplyDeleteKyle,
ReplyDeleteI love watching youtube videos, too bad yours is not up still. The closest I was to doing videos was when vine was still around. It was mainly fooling around but I remember it was fun and creative. I really liked your courage to pursue it and keep it going. I strongly suggest that you go back to it.. more than 100k views must be because you're good at it.