Cal Newport interviewed two content creators on YouTube to discuss the very different journeys each took to maintain a successful channel. Both started making content around the same time and became viral after making videos performing crazy stunts and making wacky inventions. One of them, James Hobson, deployed the typical playbook for media companies and prioritized rapid growth and investment, taking out a mortgage for a big warehouse and hiring staff to scale his channel. The other guy, Colin Furze, instead didn't go that route and kept his channel relatively modest and low-key, continuing to film mostly by himself. Both have achieved great success and have more than 12 million subscribers, but Cal thinks Furze's approach is more sustainable and easier to replicate for aspiring content creators.
"Furze’s solo success is a quirky challenge to the traditional narrative that survival requires continually growing, and that a small number of well-financed winners eventually eat most of the economic pie. He demonstrates that in certain corners of the creative economy an individual with minimal overhead can work on select attention-catching projects and earn a generous upper-middle-class income. Beyond this relatively modest scale of activity, however, the returns on additional investment rapidly diminish. As Hobson’s experience suggests, there’s no obvious path for a D.I.Y. video creator to turn his channel into a multimillion-dollar empire, even if he wants to. Furze seems to be maxing out the financial potential of his medium by staying small."
Do you know any content creators who continued to maintain a modest, small-scale channel even after gaining some success? MatthiasWandel comes to mind for me.