Reflecting on My YouTube Career: A Journey of Highs, Lows, and Rediscovery
Why hello!
Whether you’re discovering me for the first time or you’re a long-time follower happy to see me post again, welcome to my content and community. In this re-introduction, I want to reflect on my YouTube career—a postmortem of sorts—to accompany the first episode of the Multiverse Arcade Podcast (check it out here).
I've been a “YouTuber” and content creator since 2008. What began as a hobby gradually evolved into a business, then morphed into something I struggled to identify with, and has now become a platform for my creative expression.
Where are we today?
RADAUSTIN27’s Channel Stats as of June 2024
Currently, my channel is experiencing stagnant growth, teetering on generating no views and continuing to lose subscribers. Why, you may ask? Well, I stopped posting content on the channel for about two years. Additionally, in the three years prior, my content was inconsistent due to the decline in general interest in Call of Duty Zombies.
The Highs and Lows of Call of Duty Zombies
Call of Duty Zombies was supposed to be my “big break” on YouTube, the golden ticket so many YouTube gurus promise. While it never turned into the runaway success I had hoped for, it was an incredible experience filled with highs and lows, affording me once-in-a-lifetime opportunities for which I’ll always be grateful.
However, there wasn’t a fairy tale ending. I didn’t become a millionaire, nor did I even make a livable wage from YouTube. What derailed my success was my inability to commit to consistent content, focus my efforts, and scale the business.
The Battle Within
Over the years, I’ve noticed a pattern: every 6-8 months, I get anxious if I’m not creating something “great” or generating “lots” of revenue. So, as you can imagine, I’m anxious a lot. I’ve often been my own greatest barrier to success, plagued by feelings of “never being good enough,” “I don’t deserve it,” or “this content is garbage.”
For the life of me I didn’t want to get stuck in Call of Duty Zombies content, but by constantly doing other types of content it ended up forcing me into Zombies because it was the only content that worked.
The Shift in Content
To be clear, I’m not claiming my content was high art. Ha! Maybe the posters I designed, but my content primarily focused on news-based Call of Duty updates and story line explanations. That content had no long term legs. When the news dried up, did I lean into my strength in story explanations? Nope.
Instead, I pivoted to live streaming, Let’s Plays, movie reviews, and even entered the corporate workforce. All of which were terrific experiences, but didn’t make YouTube a success for me. Hindsight is 20/20, as the saying goes. I’ve spent much of my life trying to figure out what brings me joy and what I can do for a living that doesn’t make me want to scream. It took nearly half a decade of YouTube under performance and two years in the corporate world to regain my perspective on what I want to do.
Discovering What I Want to Do
The two years that followed my departure from creating YouTube videos professionally was an incredibly insightful experience. I worked in the public sector helping educational institutions create content, manage their social media or update their websites. Well, on paper that is what I was supposed to do. I was shocked by the bureaucracy, lack of effort or care in one’s work, and absolute disdain for anything other then the status quo. I saw 20+ employees and colleagues leave because the education industry has changed so dramatically from what it once was.
It became clear that the “hustle” YouTube culture has completely poisoned my perspective on my own work ethic. Often times at both jobs I’d have my work done for the week by noon on Monday, but had to find ways to stay busy. That fake busy work led to me me falling in love with videography, photography, and editing all over again.
Getting to test camera, camera settings, special effects and more had my creativity flowing again, I just needed a direction to put it in. That’s what lead me back to my own photo and video business and returning to YouTube content creation.
Rediscovering Joy and Purpose
Despite the struggles and setbacks, my journey has taught me valuable lessons about resilience, self-awareness, and the importance of aligning my work with my passions. Moving forward, I aim to create content that truly resonates with me and my audience, embracing the creative process without the constant pressure of hitting arbitrary milestones, pleasing the egos of administrators, or being busy for the sake of being busy. I believe time to be my most valuable resource, wasting it gives me a moral crisis inside a cubicle.
The Greatest Highs
There were incredible highs during my YouTube career. Here is a shortlist of the ones that come to mind.
Covering Zombie Chronicles and Meeting the Call of Duty Developers
How could a person not be completely starry eyed at the opportunity to fly out to LA, play all the remastered zombie maps that they have loved from the past, and meet the people that have made the game that has dominated most of your thoughts for the past six years (at that point)?
I was completely in love with the whole experience and time has continued to age it well for me. Nothing will ever be like that reveal experiences. Which is great, because life has so many more experiences like that to come.
Participating in the ZWC tournaments
I was able to participated in ZWC 1 and 3 and i will be forever grateful to Matt and Jose for putting on those events. I saw first hand how my content actually impacted people in real life. So much of my career I undervalued my work and felt like I was yelling into a void.
In addition, I made so many friends within the zombies community. ZWC created a long lasting memory for me that I still look happily back on.
Solving the Der Esiendrache Easter Egg first in the world.
Getting to solve at least one main quest easter egg in Call of Duty Zombies “first” was incredible. It was a milestone because I had spent years to the point playing, loving, and reporting on the game mode. Solving it helped legitimize my channel, push it over the 100k subscribers mark, and came after getting out of a terrible relationship.
An honorable mention to being “first in the world” to solve an easter egg was the Tortured Path Easter Egg. In WW2 zombies DLC 3 you need to beat all three maps consecutively to get the cutscence to play. My team ended up beating everything sequentially but not inside the same online lobby and game. Cameron Dayton DMed me saying that we were technically first in the world to complete all the easter eggs, but we didn’t get the cutscene.
I completely forgot about it because “First in the world” means next to nothing in present times. First, everything we find in the live stream era of easter egg hunts come from the collective group think of the community. There is no “one person figures everything out”. Slowly many people find many things allowing for a group to piece it together. Being first in the world, is really being the first to understand all the work before and finish the job.
Secondly, “First in the world” use to mean views, increased revenue, increased subscribers, and increased overall success. None of that is true, since the biggest channels can reupload the trailers without even playing and dominate the search engine results due to their size.
But hey, for a normal player like John (Juan) on my team to be in some crazy YouTuber hunt and get to the end, I understand why he counts that as a win!
The success of my Let’s Explore Series and of my WW2 Zombies Videos
These were milestones that showed me my videos could be successful at a scale of hundreds of thousands of views. For WW2 zombies it helped reinforce that I didn’t need Treyarch zombies to be successful. Obviously it was still zombies, but the breadcrumbs were there. WW2 zombies was a new audience, a new story, and a different era.
It also allowed me to meet and befriend Cameron Dayton, the Zombies director at Sledgehammer games at that time. He has since moved on, but it was an incredible experience.
The Greatest Lows
Having my videos not break 300 views once I entered college in 2013
College was a very confusing time for me. I was pursuing a degree I didn’t realize I hated, trapped in a toxic long-distance relationship, and constantly hearing that college would guarantee me a good life. None of those things lasted or turned out as promised, but my generation has experienced this disappointment ad nauseam.
I struggled to stay motivated after Origins dropped in 2013, but I picked up steam again when Exo Zombies released.
Using my last few hundred dollars to invest in an Xbox 1 to cover Exo Zombies
Shockingly this was the best worst console purchase of my life. I purchased the Xbox 1 to cover Exo Zombies because at the time Xbox had early access rights to the DLCs. Outside of Exo Zombies, I don’t think I played the Xbox 1 more then 10 hours. After getting years out of previous consoles, this was the most expensive paperweight in my entire gaming collection.
Even though it is my paperweight today, it is responsible for restarting my channel, getting me to refocus on zombies (as best as I can focus on zombies), and started a chain reaction that led me to many of my highs mentioned above.
Was it painful to see my last few hundred dollars as a broke college student go toward this? Absolutely. Was it worth it? Yes. Was I devastated by the final numbers in my bank account at the time? You bet. The pit in my stomach when I made the purchase still comes back to me every now and then when I make an expensive purchase.
Getting sucked into the Black Ops 4 Zombie community
This was one of the toughest times of my life. A game that had brought me so much joy and a community that helped me pursue my dreams had become my worst source of stress. I’ve always struggled with reading all the comments on my videos, and being introduced to Reddit only made things worse. My mental health went into the toilet as I found myself doom-scrolling long before it became a widely recognized term in 2020.
Everyone seemed frustrated at that time. There were so many difficult truths to swallow about Zombies, entertainment, and the world around us. Differences of opinion became battlegrounds online. I faced death threats, DDoS threats, doxing threats, and a torrent of vitriol, no matter what I posted or said. If I leaned one way or the other, there was always a group ready to slam me. This relentless negativity changed how I shared my opinions and shattered any confidence I had in my own ideas.
Removing “YouTuber” from my personal identity
After watching my channel decline due to my inconsistency and the mental toll it was taking on me, I spent months grappling with the question, "Who am I?" I had grown up on YouTube, from age 14 to 26, experiencing the wild ride of views, money, and attention during my formative years. So when my channel didn’t do well, I believed it to be a reflection of my own personal value. “If the channel is bad, then so am I”. “If the channel is dead, why don’t I?”
What would I do differently?
What I wouldn’t give to go back in time to do things over.
If I could start it all over? Cover indie horror stories and video game theory crafting. I believe Game Theory absolutely did it right. They made content that I would have thrived in. To collaborate with them would have made me proud of the content I made. I’d approach redoing YouTube by following their model. No question.
Now let me give up the fairy tale of rewritting my choices from the start.
What were the key inflection points of my YouTube career where I learned something valuable?
Don’t be so up tight
Sponsorships use to be an old taboo in early YouTube. Now we can’t get through a video without 2-3 sponsor reads and three ads. But believe it or not, back in the day a community would believe you “sold out” if you took any sponsorship for your videos.
That stupid mentality influenced me for years and continued to impact me in my decisions to take sponsorships. If I wouldn’t use the item personally, I’d never promote it. While I still feel similar today there is way more nuance in the new sponsorship culture of today.
As long as the sponsorship isn’t completely awful, it is okay to take the money to fight another day.
Don’t Be Afraid to “Play the Game” ethically
There is a clear line I draw in the sand with plagiarism and other morally wrong strategies for content, but dear lord was I trash at creating click bait titles and thumbnails. Well, clickable titles and thumbnails is what we call it now. Whenever I’d make those clickable thumbnails and titles in the past (everything was accurate) I’d get walloped in the comment section for being a click bait monster. “UNSUB!”
The odd thing was…those were some of the most watched video and ended up gaining me the most viewers. Overtime the entire ecosystem on YouTube changed while I didn’t. Clickability is so important, I’d focus harder on thumbnails, titles, and video concepts.
Commit to a Strategy and Stick with It
If i had a dollar for every new channel I started or new series I tried to make a thing on my YouTube content, I’d have about 24 dollars. It might not seem like too much, but dear lord did it constantly confuse my community and ruin any sense of regulatory to my content. I made movie channels, let’s play channels, live stream channels, and more. I can only laugh at all the dumb directions I went with my channel instead of accepting myself.
If I had stuck to story driven content, improving my craft, and keeping an open mind about new opportunities, I have no doubt I would have been at least two times as successful statistically, if not much more.
Learn as Much as I can about Editing, Film making, and Blender to Set my Content Apart
Learn, learn, learn! Stick to skills that grow over time and compliment my work. You would be surprised how useful it is to know Adobe After effects or a 3D software for content creation. Those skills create motion graphics, backgrounds, video assets, new story telling techniques, and so much more.
What’s Next?
Try, try, and try again. I’m looking to focus on story content from all forms of media. Research a bunch, share my insights, and hopefully help my community learn some valuable things. Here’s toward failing forward over the next ten years of YouTube and content creation.
