My future, part one

Okay, I’ll be the first to admit: if you don’t know me, chances are this entry won’t be interesting. It’s a look at my future with some questions being raised.

Well now, aren’t I the one eating his words? If you read my last entry, you may have found me try to be cool, reassuring and confident that we can all find jobs and there’s no worry there.
Tomorrow my first dole payment is coming through. Now, hopefully it’s backdated eight weeks, but we’ll see if that application goes through. The grounds for it are a bit shakey to say the least.
It’s funny. I’ve never really found that much difficulty finding work during the Summer when I’m back in Belfast, but here we are in 2009 and I’m more qualified than I ever was. With a big fat 2.1 under my belt (sorry, I just feel the need to brag about the fact I got away with three years of ridiculous behaviour and still landed a half-way decent degree out of the equation) and a number of different jobs, getting work shouldn’t be any problem. Yet, it is. Last week I applied to fifty odd jobs, jobs that I have worked before or done similar jobs to, yet the competition is destroying me. I can’t even get a retail job, something that I hated doing when I was 17.

Perhaps I should be looking at this from another angle and declare myself “overqualified” and take the rejections as a sign that I should be looking for graduate employment or work over seas. We’ll see.

It is however early days. Whilst I am fearing that I’m letting the best days of my life slip by, panicking does nothing.
More and more often I’m getting ridiculous ideas.
Firstly, I’m thinking about making money off of youtube videos.
How you ask?

Not everybody uploads youtube videos purely to share the hilarity of their mates dancing around to Britney Speares.
Shock horror, some youtube users make piles of loot with their own channels.

They usually to this one of two ways:

1) They become a youtube partner and take a share in the advertising revenue. For every 1,000 hits you get around $2.50 - $5.00.
2) They post links to their website which has its fair share of ads, some merchandise, premium content or just a big ol’ paypal donate button.

I might be wrong but I suspect 1,000 hits are a lot easier to achieve if you have a video that grabs a little bit of attention. Something that raises a smile, makes you chuckle, gives you an erection, pleases your ears, gives you the need to take a dump or just generally something you can watch without clawing your eyes out. A quick search on the internet will show you the most popular youtube videos

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/top_10_youtube_videos_of_all_time.php

Most of these are professional music videos, but every so often something amateur with a catchy name (like guitar) or just plain
entertaining will garner a lot of attention.

However to have any real staying power, you need to be reasonably consistent with the videos you’re sticking out and you need to have a fan base.

Ever wonder why people say “please subscribe”? It’s because the more subscribers they have, the more people they have watching new content, the more views they have, the more money they make.
I’d say the tricky thing is making something watchable, but that’s something I’m yearning to do. Besides, you have little pricks like this guy making videos that attract viewers in their thousands:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_oCyzja0sg&feature=fvw
Now I don’t know if that is a chipmonk voice (like him sped up) but I fully cannot deal with either of the things he says or the noise that’s made when it is said. Now here is a guy I’m a big fan of:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hG2otLyvuCQ&feature=channel_page

If you’ve never heard of him, he’s the Angry Video Game Nerd.

Whilst he’s expanded into doing different things (Now that's bullshit, cinemassacre etc.), he’s most famous for the AVGN series, where he reviews a ton of crap games for the NES, SNES, Mega Drive and Atari and yells at them constantly. Sometimes he’s funny, sometimes you’ve played the game and you remember just how awful it really was, how they really were a “Shitload of fuck”.

On average, these guy’s videos get about 300,000 views. Some of them have had millions of views.

That’s right. Millions.

Work that one out
1 000 000 / 1000 = 1000
1000 * 3 (for arguments sake) = 3000

For reviewing old computer games, he’s earned himself 3,000 dollars with one video. On top of that, he’s got the merchandise, his own website with more advertising revenue. For having a bit of fun and making a product people like, he’s got himself a healthy income.

What’s more is that he gets invited out to big gaming events to interview people and make a documentary out of it. Whilst James Rolfe isn’t famous in the conventional house-hold name sense, he’s got fans all over the world. Fans that cover his theme tune. He could probably find a couch to sleep on in pretty much any city he wants all over the world. Dare I say it, he could probably get laid with a hot nerdy chick off the back of his videos. I mean come on; if I got laid off giving flyers out to people on campus, I’m sure this guy can get laid from being in videos with millions of hits on youtube, even if they are about him drinking generic American beer and yelling abuse at nonsensical Atari games. For Yanks that’s probably what they consider bad boy charm.
Lastly, for AVGN he’s got a lot of flatterers. By flatterers, I mean imitators, hacks even.

There’s the Irate Gamer, Microsoft Sam voiced IGSRJ and even a Happy Video Game Nerd (who goes more for good retro games and admits his inspiration). Whilst the Irate Gamer has more people irate about him than actually like him - because of his charisma-less delivery, awful jokes, blatant theft of material from AVGN and an overzealous policing of the comments on his videos, he still has hundreds of thousands of hits.

Now just for a second, I’m going to go on about videos that get a lot of viewers. VLOGS.

Think of the diary room in big brother but real people all over the world showing you a glimpse of their life or professing an opinion of something. Not everyone’s cup of tea, I am aware but I’ve been looking through a few of them for “market research”.
Typically the ones that have a lot of money feature reasonably hot girls. I’m assuming that’s because a parents are putting child-lock filters on little fourteen year old Timmy’s computer, meaning he can’t access redtube like the rest of us and prefers to beat off to some Japanese/American girl whilst she explains her choice in fashion. If that isn’t the case it’s because women are interested. There are VLOGs that probably only garner the attention of pervy old men, wierd internet trawling chicks, or people clicking through randomly. I don’t know, youtubers are wierd, this guy gets results and all he does is point out why other youtubers and ninja turtles are “douchebags”:
http://www.youtube.com/user/TheArchfiend
So that raises a few questions? Will I make some VLogs? Perhaps. I’d rather be creative, do visual some tours of Belfast, go to places that mean a lot to me. Even do things like film buskers as part of the journey. I could film comedy skits written by me and my friends in the big ‘fast one. However VLogs could go hand in hand with this blog of mine, pointing towards my own website and some other gems on that in terms of writing and maybe some random comic strips/art.

I wouldn’t want to do this youtube thing full time unless I was churning out great videos every time. If I’m going to be in Belfast for any length of time I want a job with around 20-30 hours so I can work on these projects. If I did it full time, my nature of being a perfectionist who says “fuck it, I’ll post it anyway”, would kick in and there’d be tons of videos I’d have created that I wasn’t happy with floating around t’internets. For that reason I wouldn’t want to dedicate every waking hour to videos. Even if I had a cool website with some cool merchandise, it’d be a hollow victory. I’ll not deny the fact I’ve spent a helluva lot of time in the last month on youtube, facebook, redtube, zoklet, Wikipedia and google because when I’m bored I don’t even notice. The internet somehow has bestowed itself a sense of belonging into me since I was ten because I felt like I have been doing more and learning more than simply watching bland TV shows. Really, I should have been out doing exercise or learning to play musical instruments but laziness and obsession has somehow been ingrained my personality from as long as I can remember. As has the internet.

Whilst being creative with internet submissions definitely eliminates some laziness, it also gives something back to the internet. It continues the endless cycle of bullshit videos and pointless wads of text. I’m adding to the addiction.

Time for a tangent.

Holy fucking series of tangents batman, aren’t you supposed to be talking about your future?


http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/03/bishop_on_networking/

The bishop of Westminister as high, pompous and pious as he probably is, made a reasonably valid comment recently. He basically pointed out the gaping flaws with the internet and social networking.

Admit it, something has struck a chord with you about how much I use the internet. You, or at least somebody else that you know spends far too much time on the internet. I’m not the only poor sap. Whilst I do spend a good bit of time with my friends IRL, so often am I keeping up with friends that I haven’t seen in so long by txt or facebook. Sometimes it’s unavoidable. Just because I’m not in Denmark right now doesn’t mean that my Danish friends didn’t mean a lot to me when I’m there. Sure, we don’t make daily impacts on each other’s lives but if you fall into a group of friends and form what feel like tight bonds, you don’t want to let geographical distance separate you. Friends in England are exactly the same and when I’m away the Northern Irish ones become the ones that I speak to long distance. It’s just a way of keeping in touch with each other. Things might move on without you realizing and people may change, but there’s still a good chance if you get on well online/txt after a successful relationship/friendship offline people can appreciate that you’re both staying in touch.

What the archbishop was lampooning is the number of friends thing on myfacebotwit. How a lot of people stress about how many friends you have. We all know that we don’t talk to about half the people in our facebook friends. Sometimes when people add us, we chose to accept them. Rather than ignore, it’s easier to accept them out of politeness, or because we fear we are committing some kind of modern day social faux pas. Inevitably, you’ll end up randomly clicking through barely known friend’s pictures and getting some sort of false sense of knowing them. They might make you laugh with a witty status update and you think “wow he/she is really cool”, only to realize that in real life you just have no real bond.

That’s the issue. False bonds. False bonds are even stronger with randomers on the internet. Through forums, youtube comments etc. I’ve got the odd “online friend”. Some I have the intention to meet because I’ve done it before and it was interesting. Admittedly, you have mixed results.

On one occasion the person dealt to us and was a bit of a weirdo that’s reasonably well known in Lancaster as being just that. However, just don’t tell the person your address or real name and it should work out okay. Meet in public. If you’re a woman, don’t get raped.

To divulge a little bit more truth, the willingness to plug myself into the matrix we call the internet for hours upon hours without achieving much is regrettable. The only thing I think I’ve improved by spending long hours on the internet is my writing skill. This brings me to the two other paths in my future:
writing and martial arts.

Find out more next week.