On Wednesday night, the University of Oregon’s Cultural Forum hosted an event in which two professional YouTubers shared insight on how to become successful and earn money on YouTube. The two YouTubers, Greg Benson and Stuart Edge, answered the following questions before the event.
Greg Benson:
Do you think being a professional YouTuber is something young people can or should aspire to be?
I think anyone can aspire to be a professional YouTuber if that’s their passion. It’s not the easiest thing in the world to make a career out of YouTube. It can be more than a full time job. In fact, it usually is. The more time you put into it, the more time you get out of it. But, if that’s what someone has in their heart and what they really want to do and they don’t mind putting in extremely hard work and long hours to get there, then sure, why not?
Is there a set of steps people can take to become successful on YouTube, or is success more serendipitous?
Luck is certainly an enormous part of success on YouTube. There are three things basically that you need. Luck would be one. Another would be talent–some tangible form of unique talent. And then the last would just be the willingness to work really, really hard. That’s not going to guarantee you success, but it’s going greaten your chances in the long run.
Do you ever get a bad reaction to your videos and how do you approach these situations?
There’ve been plenty of pranks and videos that I’ve put up that have offended people for one reason or another and I’ve received a lot of hateful comments, but you kind of have to take those with a grain of salt. I know what my intentions are. I know I never mean to hurt anyone. I always try to do the right thing and if people just don’t like a certain video then I shrug it off and move to the next one.
Stuart Edge:
Do you think being a professional YouTuber is something young people can or should aspire to be?
No. I don’t think you should aspire to be a professional YouTuber. Because there’s only so much that you could do. I think what you should do is figure out what you want to be, like a professional singer or a professional magician or whatever it is, and aspire to be that. And then use whatever social media to get to the biggest aspect of that. Which, it’s kind of all the same thing–whether you say YouTuber or magician. But I think you need to just have that mindset of always going for the bigger picture.
What advice would you give to people who are trying to start out on YouTube but have limited resources?
It’s not about the resources, because I started out with limited resources. Really it’s if you can tell a good story. You can have the crappiest camera equipment. You can edit on the simplest editing software, but as long as you figure out a way to tell a good story then that is all that matters.
Is there any advice you want to give to college students that are either starting out or wanting to get involved with YouTube?
We all look up to people and are fans, but there comes a point where you need to be the one that people are going to fan over. In a nutshell, just work hard. Make it happen.