Only a million fans from success
Is the next big YouTube tech reviewer a junior sitting in pre-calculus at Northeast Dubois right now?
Is he the guy that has been cooking at Happy Hour in Celestine for the past two and a half years and runs cross country for the high school?
Maybe; anything is possible with the equalizing effect of the internet and technology.
“Most people don’t understand the capabilities of technology these days,” Noah Schepers, that NE Dubois junior, explained. “It’s not just for consumption, we can profit from it.”
Online perseverance pays big dividends in this age of sincere effort combined with creativity and congeniality.
Public relations experts may be pushing press releases to newspapers and media companies, but tech-savvy Millennials now often get the latest news and reviews from short clips on YouTube. And, those clips made by young entrepreneurs are garnering huge audiences who trust their peers over traditional media.
Noah wants to be one of those trusted sources. He began producing tutorials and reviews in his bedroom in March. “The first thing I put on YouTube was about my photo editor,” Noah explained. “I had just recently got my MacBook and I just kinda showed a technique on how to emboss text.”
The tutorial video about Pixelmator — a less expensive alternative to Photoshop for photo editing — has a couple comments from viewers and has been viewed about 280 times.
“It’s really nice to get comments back on my YouTube channel,” Noah said. “It’s kinda cool to get that feedback.”
He added a few more tutorials to limited success and then reviewed a set of earbuds he purchased to replace his Apple EarPods. The 2-minute and 29-second video had 3,345 views at the time of this writing. Additionally, random viewers have left Noah some positive remarks about his performance and the editing of the video.
“I think it was more popular than some of my other reviews because most of the reviews of those headphones were not in English,” Noah said. “I think there were only like two other videos in English before mine.”
Noah is crafting his own persona in the videos and it reflects the friendly, precise, and informative style of popular reviewers like Marques Brownlee.
This style is big business for those who persevere through the years of anonymity.
Brownlee, considered to be one of the most influential reviewers on the internet now, is a 20-year-old student at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey. His YouTube.com channel, MKBHD, boasts over 1,886,000 subscribers, and the 680-plus videos he has created have been viewed over 171,831,000 times.
His income from these videos is estimated to be between $119,000 to $994,000 annually based on the the pay he could be receiving through Google advertising placed on his videos. Google doesn’t reveal the amount advertising partners are paid.
Not bad for a 20-year-old college student, but Brownlee is just now coming into the apex of his success five years after uploading his first video to YouTube. At his 100th video, Brownlee only had 78 subscribers of his YouTube channel.
By comparison, Noah is progressing faster than Brownlee. He has uploaded 27 videos and already has 81 subscribers to his channel. It’s a long way from Brownlee’s 1,886,000 subscribers, but fame can be swift when the right conditions exist.
Plus, the growing popularity of these videos may be a driving factor for a the right person to experience a faster rise to popularity and Noah may be the right person. His videos are well produced and edited, and he has a good presence.
He is limited by a high school budget, so sometimes he has to get creative. When he reviewed the screen sizes for the newest iPhones, he resorted to creating cardboard cutouts to demonstrate their comparative sizes. “I don’t have enough money to actually buy them,” he said. “Why not have a paper cutout.”
It takes Noah about two days to shoot and edit each video once he comes up with an idea. He shoots his videos with an iPhone 5 mounted to his mom’s camera tripod with a mobile phone stabilizer. Then, he edits them on his MacBook with iMovie and Final Cut, adding music and graphics before uploading them to his YouTube channel.
At first, he scripted all his videos but has since started to ad lib his lines because he learned his delivery seems more natural.
Where did he learn to create these videos?
“If I had a question about something, I went on the internet. I researched it and figured out how to do it,” Noah said. “That’s how I learned to edit my videos and how to create websites.”
His parents, Lori and Brennan, are supportive of Noah’s efforts and even critique his performances. “I did a video once where I was waving my hands around a lot,” he said. “They told me I needed to stop waving them so much.”
Noah, 17, hasn’t made any money from his video work yet. Google doesn’t pay content partners who are under 18 years old for the advertising dollars they collect.
Until he starts making money, Noah would like to earn money by building websites. He has been building them since he was 10. Through his dad’s connection with Indiana Furniture, Noah built a framework for the company’s website. “I made some of the building blocks for the gallery of their furniture,” he said.
He is undecided about where he will continue his education after he graduates from NE Dubois in 2016, but he thinks he would like to continue building websites. He enjoys living in Dubois but admits the one factor that would push him to leave the area is the lack of high-speed internet. “If the internet was better, I could stay here,” he said. “I like it. It’s quiet.”
He can make videos anywhere if the accessibility is available.
“Hopefully, I can make a career from this; creating YouTube videos and websites,” He said. Right now, I am having a good time.”
Noah can be followed on Twitter @sch3p and at his YouTube.com channel.
