My YouTube History

What you’re about to listen to, watch, whatever, may sound… weird. I may come off as arrogant, whiny, over-confident, entitled, exhausted, salty, overly-invested - any number of things, really. The truth is, I care about what I do here on YouTube, and on the internet on the whole, a lot. A whole lot. More than I care about just about anything else, short of my family and our well-being. I took what looked to most as me just having a silly little side hobby playing video games and took it to - how they say in the film world - over time and over budget over the past 14 or 15 years. Part of me never would have believed things would get where they are today, but the rest of me was never going to settle for anything less.

So naturally, there’s a lot of feelings involved, in every direction. But frankly, I’ve worked my ass off more than I could possibly convey to get here - so I have a right to care about it.

I’m simultaneously so god dang proud of what I’ve accomplished but also constantly feeling like I’ve never done good enough. I can feel like I’m making the best content on the web in a specific category while also feeling like I have so much to improve upon and learn from others.

I’ve found great success over the past few years - in ways that simple YouTube analytics could never convey - but I’ve also failed time and time again. But I got back up and got back to work.

But before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s start back at the beginning. This is the story of my history on YouTube, and in a way, my time on the internet - at least, in the public light.

Did you know this channel used to be a Pokemon channel, a Halo channel, and other things? We’re talking about that.

Before we go too far, I did want to note that this video is kind of a companion piece to an interview I did for Creator Mindset about my career, and was inspired by Tama Hero’s recent “the rise and fall” of her channel video she did. I’ll have both linked below.

My name’s Adam, though I go by “EposVox” online. Currently, my primary content centers around tech education with an expertise lens of streaming-related topics and capture card reviews. I had no idea this would be the field I’d end up in, but in hindsight I’m not sure it could have been anything else.

Pre-YouTube Era

The video-sharing website YouTube.com was originally founded in early 2005, but my history with online video starts a couple years prior to that. And my history with general ‘creating’ online starts even sooner than that.

This “Pre-YouTube era” is mostly full of cringe, but it sets the tone for my path towards where I am. I had a lot of interests colliding here. First, I was always inspired by shows like Jackass and Viva La Bam and wanted to record my shenanigans with my friends.

I begged for years to get a video camera from my parents and eventually I got a little miniDV camcorder for Christmas, but then it’s like all my inspiration got lost. While obviously there’s personal responsibility for my lack of interest past getting the thing - which applied to other interests in my life such as sports and learning guitar - but I felt lost in finding the right guidance to actually figure out what I was doing with videography.

I filmed random stuff, including video games on TV, but mostly family events and vacations. The plan was for my buddy and I to film some skate videos to get “sponsored” - the cool thing that supposedly people were doing at the time. The problem with that was that… we weren’t good skaters. I couldn’t do a kickflip, and we never really learned anything cool. We lived in the suburbs away from any real hardcore skating scene. Eventually my city got a skate park downtown, but between that being late in my skating interest and my social anxiety combined with fear of performing in front of large groups of people, and this never really went anywhere aside from a couple cringey videos mostly consisting of photos. Yikes.

Second of course, came my interest in video games. PC, console, handheld, it didn’t matter; I had been playing video games since I was 9 months old and could never get enough of them. Around this time, specifically, I was really into RuneScape (what’s now called OldSchool RuneScape) and Pokemon ROM Hacking and sprite editing. I was very interested in that scene, doing my own sprite edits and custom eggs for forums, and dabbling with ROM hacking.

I didn’t make anything serious and you probably weren’t familiar with my work, but I took everything I did very seriously. I still remember an argument with my mom over sharing the family computer where I whined that all she did was play Solitaire, and she said all I did was play Pokemon and I got very angry and shouted “NO I’M NOT PLAYING GAMES, I’M MAKING THEM.” I was a kid.

A little while later came along a platform called XFire. This was the coolest thing for PC gaming as it let you manage game servers, friend lists, in-game chat overlays, and screenshotting and video capture tools. It was basically what Steam eventually became (and then departed a bit from), before Steam was really a thing. I was in a few “clans” for the shooters I played that would upload video clips to XFire. This was where I got hooked on screen and game capture for video. Clips of Halo: CE, Call of Duty 4, RuneScape, classic Combat Arms, and more. It was a lot of fun, even if I, again, wasn’t making anything good or worthwhile. I quickly became the only member of my group who could take clips from XFire and post them online elsewhere, to Google Video and later YouTube. That’s how my first YouTube channels got started: Uploading my clan’s clips from XFire to YouTube, alongside random attempts at “montages” that I would make, and silly clips recorded to our terrible phone cameras at the time.

Exploratory Phase

This transitioned into my first phase of YouTube, what I call the “exploratory phase.” Here I had a bunch of different channels, all with super cringey names like “PyroGoth13” or “Darkspells3” or “MindFreaks” where I’d upload the random crap my friends and I recorded to my camcorder, along with the game clips through XFire and Bandicam or HyperCam2. Classic.

I also got into some trouble here, as I was also re-uploading content.

Well, let me explain.

You see, in these first years of YouTube, your ability to view content was just as dependent on the site’s ability to deliver it to you as it was on your internet connection. Keep in mind, this is before the Google buyout. So super popular, high-traffic videos could be tougher for some to watch than other videos. There was a bit of community interest in re-uploading popular series to make them more viewable and so one of my channels had a long streak of re-uploading music videos and Red vs Blue episodes. I didn’t do it for the views, there was no money even involved at the time, it was purely to get more eyes on the content. And it was well-appreciated, I was showered with comments thanking me for the re-uploads.

But obviously this was all just theft and copyright violations and did not last long.

Then I landed on my first “serious” YouTube channel: MindFreaks13.

On this channel, I posted everything. Skateboarding clips, random phone clips, terrible “montages” I made that were like 5 frames per second, screen captures of cool stuff, and so on.

My first ever uploaded video was a video called “CoD4 Funny No Gun Kill.” This had a TON of views, at least for the time. I think around 100k. This was a 7 second Call of Duty 4 clip showing the “default weapon” killing someone, which was just empty hands. It was such a weird thing that was less-known-about at the time, that it attracted attention. And yep, it was a clip from XFire. I didn’t even have CoD4 for PC at the time.

By this point I’d graduated from the family Windows XP computer to my own amalgamation of PC parts I’d turned into my own Windows XP powerhouse, with the help of a family friend. Fun fact: I thought I’d “upgrade” my PC combining parts from 3 or 4 different desktops I had. Spread the parts all out on my floor - my carpeted floor - and tried to build something. No idea what I was doing. Couldn’t get anything to boot. My mom took it to one of her co-workers who was a techie who built a working computer out of it all. Gave me a couple free games, too. Used this old eMachines chassis. Wish I’d kept it, was a solid workhorse of a computer… until I decided to take advantage of the free Windows Vista upgrade period, at which point it slowed to a crawl. I didn’t mind at the time, even if it was frustrating, but at some point my mom tried using it for something, got so frustrated at how slow it was and went out and bought me a new Acer Aspire prebuilt the next day. This one, in fact. I need to clean it up.

I later grabbed my first self-bought graphics card for it: the Nvidia 9800GT. I still have it, though sadly without the original BFG shroud. It kept rattling so I removed it, then eventually trashed it. Little did I know BFG would become a bygone relic. I bought the card specifically to play Halo 2 Vista, which I did not get for another 4 years after I’d stopped using that PC, but the GPU served me very well for games like Dead Space, Borderlands, and so on.

Solo Gaming Era

But by 2009 or so, it had become a dedicated gaming channel for me. I had figured out this whole screen capture thing using FRAPS and Camtasia (and later Dxtory), and regularly made videos on Pokemon, DC Universe Online - I had a long let’s play of that - and some console Call of Duty and Halo videos in later years.

I picked up my first capture card in 2010 - the AVerMedia C027, I have a re-unboxing of it on my channel linked below - and shifted my focus more towards Call of Duty and Halo videos since that’s what was popular at the time.

I was also super into the Minecraft beta and alpha, and a few of my high school buddies ran a server that I played on and made recurring videos on.

Huge influences of my work at the time were the “first generation” of gaming YouTubers: Seananners, Hutch, BlameTruth, and so on. The early YouTube gaming days were a wild west and most of it toxic, outside of Seananners’ channel, which was like a beacon of peace, but I still have a lot of nostalgia for those simpler times. Every new video was amazing.

YouTube got weird at this point in time. Channels were finding ways to insert specific frames into their videos to force custom thumbnails, and later getting custom thumbnails as part of the Partner Program, and making misleading thumbnails featuring women in bikinis and sexually explicit material. YouTube had to act fast and develop strict rules for these things.

Later on in 2009 and 2010, we saw the end of video “Categories” and a complete restructuring of how the YouTube homepage and recommendations system worked, as a result of the “Giveaway Extravaganza” phase. Channels by the names of xJawz and WhiteBoy7thSt from the Call of Duty community had found a way to exploit YouTube’s homepage for maximum profit. They’d upload a very successful video announcing a giveaway of PS3s, Xbox 360s, gaming headsets, and so on, hit the homepage under the Gaming category. All good there. But then, just as the video would fade from the homepage due to decreased traffic and age, they’d change the title and change the category to “pets and animals” or “travel” or something, and be back at the top of the homepage for that category. This went on for months, with them regularly making videos raiding their local Best Buys and Gamestops buying up all the gaming gear and giving it away - clearly earning enough back to cover all of that and then some. As a result, YouTube completely changed how the homepage works and categories basically serve no purpose anymore.

Around this time, YouTube started to see an influx of MCNs or Multi-Channel Networks show up to operate within YouTube. Originally, YouTube’s monetization or Partner Program was very exclusive, with no set requirements but very few channels allowed in. Eventually my MindFreaks channel got partnered and monetized, but you had to go through excruciating steps to prove that you had the rights to monetize any particular video, and wait potentially multiple days for it to be approved.

Even as the Partner Program opened up, you still couldn’t monetize gaming content - you didn’t have licenses for that. So in order for channels to monetize gaming content, you had to join one of these MCNs which licenses the rights (or at least would be held responsible) for gaming content. The big one in my scene of channels I followed was Machinima. It started as a little venture headed up by former G4 people and some hollywood people, but eventually turned into a huge production studio along with multiple network channels, paying both “directors” or creators running their own channels and contributing content, as well as creators to come work at their LA offices. This included creators like SeaNanners, Hutch, and Mr. Sark - who ran the Machinima Respawn crew.

Ultimately this all influenced me to completely change my career path and goals. I had already been accepted to the local major university’s computer science and engineering program when I decided I wanted to pursue a career in media. I spent a year there in the “Communications” major, which wasn’t a real, worthwhile program, before transferring schools. But we’re not there yet.

Rebrand

Next, we enter my first rebranding phase. I had spent quite a while building up experience making various gaming videos - including trying out various “show” formats inspired by videos I had watched - but not yet finding my own way, just emulating what I saw. But I was having a blast. This was what I wanted to do. More than anything. I was a mostly unchallenged, bored kid in school with minimal interest in much of anything besides playing video games. This helped me channel my creativity and explore my technical proclivities. Learning capture and recording software, video recording hardware, etc.

I was also inspired by my previous failures to “fix” my computers and really started learning about PC hardware and building and fixing computers myself.

I used the money from the YouTube videos (CPMs were pretty great back then) and saved-up birthday and Christmas money to buy the parts for my first custom PC. I had it good, too. A 750W power supply, the glorious Cooler Master HAF932 PC case - I wish I’d kept that - Crucial Ballistix Tracer RAM with LEDs… ooh boy. And then at the center, a Christmas present, the AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition CPU. Ooh boy. It’s super cheap now, but for 2010 for someone with no money, 4 cores, 3.4GHz, it was a monster. I still have it, too!

I decided to abandon my “MindFreaks” name from my old clan days and wanted my own identity. Branding has always been something I’m just absolutely terrible at, and still am. So I went with the most obnoxious, era-appropriate 1337-sp33k name I could come up with. “tehD3M0L1SH3R” with numbers, a dollar sign and the all rights reserved symbol. I know. I know. I had little shame about it at the time, but it’s so stupidly cringey.

And I always got annoyed because people on Xbox Live and etc. would pronounce it “the demolitioner” which doesn’t even make sense. Anyway.

Come November 2010 I spun up a new YouTube channel under that name and switched to it full-time, starting with some unboxings of my new PC components, a “review” of Minecraft as part of my “RageQuit Reviews” series, as well as random Call of Duty commentaries, Let’s Plays I’d never finish, commentaries over random shooters I’d try like Just Cause 2, Monday Night Combat, urban Terror, and so on. Plus all the classic Halo, Call of Duty, Counter-Strike Source and Team Fortress 2 content.

This was me going at it, really chasing what I thought would be my career. The “gameplay commentary” format was pretty set in stone by this point, and it seemed like the defacto content for gaming on YouTube, and being unable to look more than a week in advance I just assumed I could make completely random, poorly-produced videos for the rest of my life. Lol.

The views were all over the place. Most of it bad. Hell, there’s some videos that even now only have like 50 or 60 views, 10 years later, and that’s just… wild. Though there was this one video I made on using a HDMI splitter to take my Xbox 360 HDMI feed and split to both my TV and my capture card that blew up and stayed popular over time. It has like 69K views and mostly, judging by the comments, seemed to make people think you could play split screen on two different TVs or something? That’s never been possible, but whatever. Recorded on my iPod Touch 4. 720p baby.

At the time, I was using a really crappy Logitech webcam mic, which picked up a lot of reflections off of my desk and monitors, and later a Blue Snowball that I invested in. This Snowball had to have been defective, as it picked up way more background sound than anyone else’s - though my poorly configured HAF 932 PC sitting on my desk definitely made a lot of noise with those giant 200mm fans - and made my voice sound way deeper than it is. Plus, my voice was just way deeper in high school, I made a sort of conscious effort to lighten it to stop getting so many comments about it. But because of this, many comments I received were about my voice. “Audible chocolate” it was called once, and I was often compared to the “Golden Voice dude” - an internet sensation at the time where a homeless man with a lovely radio-style voice was filmed and later landed radio jobs or something. This will be important later.

Also I moved my desk to the other side of the room, extended it, and set up my 40” TV - my first personal HDTV that I saved up for a long time to buy. It was like $600 in 2009, and came out right before HDMI 1.4, so I never had ARC support which is the bane of my existence to this day. Yes, I still use that very TV today.

I spent a long time making videos like this. Random gaming videos, videos about my PC builds, random stuff I found online. I recorded this Nyan Cat website that kept scaling the Nyan Cats infinitely and called in “OVER NYAN THOUSAND” and this video blew up. Kinda viral. Got 500k views pretty quickly before abruptly dying, allowing me to join the Partner Program on this channel and earning me some good money to upgrade my computer a bit. I was still using these terrible dubstep intros, though.

I continued making videos like this constantly through 2011. I started introducing more webcam footage and screen capture into my videos as I started experimenting with making tutorials and reviews. Hint hint.

The standard practice at the time, for whatever bizarre reason, was to do every video as a one-take. You didn’t edit your audio, you didn’t fix things, you just left it there, raw. So my videos were full of a lot of “uhms” and “uhs” and “So yeah”s as I learned proper mic presence, and I’d say really random uncomfortable crap at the end of videos, as I didn’t know how to end them.

I also made a video project for my senior English class where we recreated some scenes from Hamlet. I had a blast making and editing it, but I clearly had no idea what I was doing. I’d love to travel back in time and coach my younger self on lighting, set design, and so on.

Then came the end of my senior year of high school. Some major things happened around this time. First, in one of our Skype groups, my high school friends kept sharing some of my old Minecraft videos from the MindFreaks channel to tease me and out of embarrassment I just outright deleted the channel. Yes, I deleted it. I didn’t unlist or private the videos, I didn’t delete specific videos. I deleted. The Entire. Channel. I regret that decision to this day. Years of videos, experiments, my entire DC Universe Online series, all gone. And between the Google Account change a couple years later and GDPR stuff these days - despite the common saying being that nothing is ever deleted on the internet, I’m pretty sure there’s no way I can get that channel back now, nor it’s content.

It wasn’t good content, but it was important to me. I like to archive and document everything, and I was terrible with preserving and storing files back then, and it pains me how much I lost over the years. If I had a time machine, legitimately one of my top priorities would be taking an external hard drive and dropping in at various points in time to back up all of my computers at the time. And scanning in my journals and crap that I always threw away every time I felt embarrassed that someone could find them, too. In this scenario, I do assume time travel is a read-only kind of thing. If somehow anyone has a magic way to retrieve years worth of videos deleted in 2011, I’m all ears.

I was still using my AVerMedia capture card for all of my console footage. For Xbox 360, it was mostly fine, with this weird HDMI splitter I had. But PS3 had HDCP encrypting its HDMI feed and I didn’t know about (and they may not have been available) the cheap HDMI splitters which stripped HDCP at the time, so I had to use component cables for it. But my favorite platform to play Call of Duty was PS3. However, I had a terrible time getting any sort of splitting happening - using the cheap equipment we already had - working for component cables, so I had an awful time with it. The capture card was designed as a TV tuner of sorts, there was no passthrough for game consoles.

Through my last couple years of high school, I had no-lifed the hell out of Halo 3 and Halo: Reach, I was a HUGE fan of the classic MLG Halo days, having grown up watching Arena on G4 and MLG on EPSN for Halo 2 and such, and spent some time doing competitive Halo on the local LAN scene. It wasn’t much, and I never really documented it, but it was fun.

Come July of 2011, my family took a vacation to South Dakota, and when we got there, I was greeted with the news that I had finally been accepted into my first MCN: A small Machinima competitor by the name of Yeousch. I was over the moon. I only had 100 or so subscribers, but this gave my work a feeling of legitimacy and made me think I could actually turn it into something. It unlocked opportunities to collaborate with more creators and upload to the network channels, as well.

As the summer ended and college got nearer and nearer, with me being a huge bundle of anxiety stuck in my own head, and way too over-caffeinated - I drank only Sunkist and zero water - I resorted to trying out vlogging with my iPod Touch to ease my mind. I talked about my anxieties about starting college, I showed off my desk setups and configurations, which gradually started moving towards dual PC setups plus my laptop, and talking about more life topics in my gaming videos. I was a mess, but it was cathartic and allowed me to connect with viewers more.

Man, I miss Call of Duty 4 ProMod. There aren’t any ProMod servers anymore and I don’t understand why.

Around this time I also got caught up in Athene’s Together to the Top campaign, feeling like it gave me a sense of community and such, though from the outside it definitely looked like a cult. Honestly, he and his team were making some innovative content for the time, even if it didn’t last long.

As I settled into my first year of college, I decided to do a wild experiment. For most of my life, I only had dial-up internet or really crappy less than 1 megabit DSL due to the ancient phone lines in our home. Senior year we finally got decent broadband, but the upload speed was still only like 4 to 5 megabits per second, worse over wifi. Uploads were slow and streaming - which was slowly becoming a thing - didn’t seem realistic.

But at university, oh man I had never seen symmetrical 100+ megabit speeds, even over wifi, before and was blown away. I began using my morning lectures to upload and schedule my YouTube videos. One day I was working on a paper in the university library and decided to stream… that. From my laptop. Just as an experiment of streaming over such fast internet. No audio, just my screen, typing an essay in Microsoft Word, my webcam may have been on I’m not sure, to Justin.tv. This was early September 2011.

And someone found me. Two people, actually. They were browsing random streams and were wondering what the heck I was doing. Turns out, they were good friends with one of the bigger Call of Duty YouTubers who regularly put out montages and was involved with that scene, commentaries, etc. They had a ton of subs, and this was a huge opportunity. I got invited to their Skype group and friend group, along with another creator who went on to run a very successful Minecraft YouTube channel, too. Through this group, I got to join in on their live streams, which resulted in some wonderful promotion for my channel, building me up towards 300, and building me a strong Call of Duty audience.

Early October I got to celebrate hitting 500 subscribers while on another family vacation, which was sweet.

Come late October 2011, I finally managed to talk that Call of Duty creator into doing a “dual commentary” with me - the collaborative format for gaming channels at the time that helped introduce new channels to the bigger channel’s audience. Modern Warfare 2 was the main game at the time, and I really did not like it and did not get along well with it, so I got a friend to let me use his gameplay in my place. We had an amusing conversation mostly about my voice and what I did on my channel and that video quickly launched me past my first 1,000 subscriber mark and nearly to 2,000. Which was a big deal at the time. However, a familiar anxiety set in.

You may have noticed that despite most channels at the time being primarily one game - usually Call of Duty - my channels were full of many different games. This was because I had a terrifying fear of getting locked into a specific game, one I might get burned out on, and not having the freedom to play or do what I wanted. Even this early into YouTube we were already seeing channels do this - with channels like SeaNanners branching into other games and topics as the Machinima day job grind burned them out on Call of Duty.

This could have been a pivotal moment for me. While I had a lot to learn, I was making successful content and had a stand-out voice, I could have just cranked out Call of Duty content all day and probably found solid success there. But I panicked, I rebelled against the very thought of being stuck as a Call of Duty only channel and refused to post the game for MONTHS, instead leaning on Minecraft, the launch of Windows 8, and Halo to fill my content. I returned to Call of Duty later, but basically only after killing off what potential viewership I had gained from that collaboration.

That YouTuber actually consulted me off and on looking for tips to make more personable gaming videos and the like, until they got hired on as a Machinima Director and never really spoke to me again - until years later when they needed OBS help. And then only stuck around for that conversation. I’m not even mad, as this happened quite regularly over the course of my career, but still feels crappy to be left in the dust.

But honestly, these were some good times on the channel. I spent a very long time making videos on games I was having fun with, talking about my college experiences, and making new friends both from that friend group and from my network, as well as some friends I had met that watched my videos.

Along the way, I began sprinkling in more software tutorials - Windows 8’s launch, Sony Vegas Pro edits and tutorials, things like that. I also experimented with Cinema 4D animation for a time. Yikes.

A notable video from this era was in November 2011, called “I’m clearly a TF2 Hacker…” in which I get accused of being a hacker during a pub match of TF2 and have a lot of fun messing around with them. I even uploaded the unedited 45 minute game session as further proof. Back then, anything involving “hacking” for games was easy clickbait and that video always remained one of my most-viewed videos on that channel, sitting at over 500k views now. I took from this to then user “hack” related keywords as tags in all of my videos, which led to random videos being taken down for “violating community guidelines” when some trolls false flagged a ton of my videos and Fullscreen (which Yeousch had been absorbed into) would do nothing to protect me or get those videos back.

I had spent the next year burying into games and making videos. Between the stress of my first job and first year of college, going through a dramatic breakup with an abusive ex, and learning to deal with my own… crap… this was the perfect outlet for me. The internet saved me.

I got hired for my first job on Skyrim’s release day, so I went out that night and picked up a copy from GameStop to start making videos on it. Along with that, to challenge myself to keep up with content while also having my first job and college, I decided to try doing a “Vlog a Day” challenge for November. I didn’t make it far, but had fun with it regardless. I got a lot of use out of the iPod Touch’s camera. Still only using that and my 720p webcam for recording.

Also my monitor at the time was a 1440x900 16:10 monitor, so any PC gameplay footage I captured either had to be run in 720p windowed mode, or stretched out to fit 16:9.

I was constantly experimenting trying to get the best quality, though. Testing new recording programs or built-in recording features in games. I also experimented with motion graphics doing Kinetic Typography videos, and voiceover demo reels, dramatic readings, and so on.

Come January 2012, I also attempted to start a new series I called “Setup Showcase” where I showed off other people’s epic gaming or content creation setups, critiqued them, and so on. My lack of experience and polish worked against me, and it never made it past the first episode, but given the timing, I’d like to think it served as the inspiration for a little series called Setup Wars. Or maybe great minds just think alike.

It was around this time that I got access to custom thumbnails for YouTube. Or at least I finally started making them. They…. Were terrible. Truly. I didn’t preserve them, but they weren’t really worth keeping around anyway. Granted, this was still at a time where custom thumbnails at all were stand-out, but ohhhh boy. The things I could do going back in time and teaching my younger self.

In February 2012 I went on my first date with my now wife, Chu, and everything began to change. I even knew it at the time, even if I couldn’t explain it. I literally went to my best friend the next day in-between classes and told him I had just gone on the last first date of my life. He thought I was joking. I was not.

Perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself. After our first date, Chu and I spent quite a lot of time hanging out at a local park (good for getting me out of my head) and playing video games together. I got to record video of what we were doing, capture clips of our gameplay, and in a way, a lot of it was just… natural. For the first time, I could truly and openly just share this part of my life with someone else, and involve them in it. While things didn’t change a ton immediately - I still posted random games I was checking out, commentaries, setup videos, software tutorials, etc. I was slowly starting to develop a brand. I even made a channel trailer. I was branding it “Let’s Play Together.” Originally that was just a show idea for videos I made with Chu. Showing them Minecraft,  and later we got really into Guild Wars 2 together.

After the spring semester ended, I took the summer semester off, cranked out a TON of live session videos that weren’t worth much of anything but are fun to have archived - including me finally checking out Halo 2 Vista - and I transferred to a new university that I attended with Chu, this time majoring in Journalism. I was completely unchallenged and bored in my previous program and the school being close to my home meant I took every advantage to drive home on breaks to work on YouTube, and eventually just stopped attending classes. I needed a change and this was what I needed.

A year went by with this channel still being flooded with attempted let’s plays, commentaries, eventually I tried turning it into a Team Fortress 2 channel in 2014 before getting burned out on TF2, Destiny, more Let’s Plays, live stream VODs, and then one final run at making it a dedicated gaming channel at my first apartment with unboxings, new commentaries, Halo 5 tips and tricks, and so on. I’ve always held onto this channel and wanted to keep it running alongside my main in some capacity, but never really got it off the ground.

And that’s okay, because while I’ve now scrolled through this channel catching up to the current day, you’ll notice the Let’s Play Together branding disappeared. I was completely unhappy with my 1337-sp33k name, lack of professionalism and years of history of crap content holding me back. I thought that if I was going to not fail at “this YouTube thing”, I needed to rebrand. Again. I had to become someone else. Something else.

Rebrand, P2

Yes, also in February of 2012, I worked with Chu and a good friend of mine at the time to come up with a more professional name, one that would be usable moving forward and I wouldn’t be ashamed to email companies to request review samples or sponsorships with, one I’d actually want to be known by.

Remember those comments I mentioned about my voice? A frequent phrase came up a lot: “Epic Voice.” My buddy Jake was running that through Google Translate into different languages and found that Latin for “Epic Voice” was “Vox Epos.” I prefer the 2 to 1 syllable formatting for catchy names, such as a channel I loved at the time, EthosLab, so I flipped it to “EposVox.” And made a new channel. Google Plus hadn’t been fully integrated yet, so at the time there was no way to actually change a YouTube channel name.

EposVox was born February 19, 2012.

I tried to launch strong with a “Halo Reach Tips & Tricks” video, though I had little to offer in originality. I was mechanically strong in shooters, but not a strategic player nor a coach. Instead, I looked to what might be successful based on previous content, as well as took every opportunity to make content on the things around me. So my next few videos were actually tech: Video editing in Photoshop CS6, installing different Linux distros in a VM, a new setup tour, and an unboxing of my new capture card: The BlackMagic Intensity Shuttle.

Then came more Halo. Boy do I love Halo. Halo 3, Halo: Reach, and then… Halo 4. KontrolFreek - whom I had an affiliate account with at the time - actually chose me to invest in. They sponsored a Halo Reach tournament that I would host live on Twitch, which I had also began using sparingly. Prizes included a Halo art book, other Halo memorabilia, and the winner won a full copy of Halo 4 pre-ordered to their home. This was a blazing success. I have no clue what views were like on Twitch, but chat was POPPING the entire time, I got to spend time with friends like BBKDragoon and Blizzardball, and meet more friends like Ditty who won the whole thing - many of whom are still friends today.

I continued posting some of my usual commentary and live session format videos for a while, but a new, better format was on the horizon.

Co-Op Gaming

Boy do I wish I knew how to better capitalize on the magic we had at the time. In 2012, you didn’t really have major group or buddy gaming content like is popular today. The Yogscast were popular, the Game Grumps MAY have been around, but that’s about it. It was not an established content niche yet. Meanwhile here I was launching an incredibly successful co-op let’s play series. Chu and I played through PokeMMO - a community project that takes the original Pokemon ROMs and spins them into a full online world. There’s no real co-op features, but you can play side-by-side with your friends and battle them, etc. Both as Pokemon lovers, this was a great opportunity to spend time together and record content and… This was HUGE for the channel. The series was fun, enjoyable, and brought in a ton of views. I also learned a TON about editing, too. I had both of us record video and audio, synced them up, and innovated on various POV swap and split-screen views for the gameplay. Even had to deal with the issue of Chu being stuck on a 4:3 monitor for a while.

I was making quality co-op gaming content and didn’t know how to sell it. Or at least, I think that was the problem. It was very early into things and I didn’t go all-in on it, it was just one type of content I posted. I maintained some solo gaming videos, and this was when I really started emailing companies for review samples. 2500 subscribers? No big deal, I spent my time at my weekend internship looking up company PR contacts and emailing them. I got RAM, a SSD, and eventually a full AMD CPU and motherboard - though this would be a mistake. I posted the most barebones of unboxings of both the CPU and the motherboard - with no hint of what benchmarking might be - and sent it off to AMD to never be heard from again. And I mean never - I only just started working with them again in 2019, and that was after a colleague basically told them I had to get samples to help with his testing.

Around this time I also got the original Elgato Game Capture HD for Christmas - had just released, and seemed like the answer to all of my crazy issues with capture from my BMI Shuttle, and component for PS3. And it was, for the time.

Naturally, Halo 4 remained an important part of my channel, but I kept sprinkling in tech videos. I had no real interest in being a “tech YouTuber” at the time, but I did enjoy playing with and learning about it and wanted to share that on my channel. I was still very much chasing the “gaming channel” dream - with co-op videos not only with Chu but with others becoming more prevalent in that.

And then I got a Logitech C920 webcam. A major upgrade for the time - and still the most common webcam today. I unboxed it, tried it out, and compared it to its predecessor the C910. This planted a seed for a major content pillar I have today. More unboxings, but even more co-op PokeMMO videos.

Sometime along the way here, YouTube fully integrated Google Plus into the website. This caused a lot of frustration, but also introduced many helpful features such as comment moderation, channel manager roles, and the ability to rename channels. So naturally, I completely rebranded the channel to “Epos & Chu - Let’s Play Together.” I didn’t market us as a co-op gaming channel enough, and I was too stubborn about doing “whatever I wanted” and sabotaging any niche hold we might have, but this was one of those pivotal moments where I could have really made something stick for us.

Which is sad, because at the time I wanted sooo badly for us to be a co-op gaming YouTuber couple. I wanted that to be “our thing” and become our job.

But the tech videos never stopped. That itch only got stronger. I had to improve my setup, upgrade my gear, tell everyone about it.
And then BAM. OBS, Open Broadcaster Software, alphas and betas released. Suddenly we had a free alternative to FRAPS and Dxtory for recording and streaming video games. And it was good, but complicated. Everyone had so many questions. I sat down one day in May 2013 and started recording tutorials to show others how to use OBS. Finally we had something great, I wanted to teach everyone how to use it!

That first tutorial would go on to get over a million views over the next few years.

The gaming content wasn’t slowing down, though. By this point, the channel was half co-op PokeMMO and half solo gaming, with sprinkles of tech unboxings, vlogs, and tutorials. Windows 8.1 launched, had to talk about that, and I had spent that summer streaming raising funds to order my own Nintendo 3DS with a capture board installed from Japan so I could record Pokemon X and Y later that year. Plus, I participated in a big gaming commentary competition, netting me some more cool prizes and tech to check out.

As all of this was happening, I was stuck in the worst kind of MCN situation. In late 2012, I met the requirements on EposVox to join a MCN. I joined RPM, a small-channel-focused division of Maker Studios. I just wanted to monetize and thought I’d figure out the details later. I was being robbed. My contract was a 50% split between my network and myself, with an autorenew cycle that I missed by a matter of days to cancel. So while that was fine in the first year as I was making the channel, by the time I was able to get out of it, the MCN was taking considerable earnings from me while providing me basically nothing.

The network shut down not long after I left.

Once again, however, I failed to lock into a niche. The channel was branded as a co-op gaming channel, but I was still trying to run it simultaneously as a “me doing whatever I want” channel, with big chunks of pointless let’s plays of Halo 4, Devil May Cry, and Tomb Raider showing up eventually, as well. I was having a blast, but content-wise the channel was a mess. No one knew what they were subscribing for and I failed once again to capture what could have been a very successful content niche and instead ran away from it, afraid of being locked down.

Important experimentation happened during this failure, however. I spent a long time experimenting with a news format show I called “ENN” (or Epos News Network) - yes, I know - and later ReHash, which set the stage for my current successful news show, Streamer Newz. I also ran a weekly comment discussion series called “Forum Friday” which I am actually bringing back soon. So while I failed in one area, I learned important skills and lessons that would benefit me years down the line.

As if a co-op gaming, solo gaming, and sometimes tech channel wasn’t enough, I decided to throw my hat in a completely different ring. With our super successful PokeMMO show going along, but coming towards an end and my hype generating for Pokemon X & Y as I saved up for my 3DS capture purchase, I tried my hand at being a PokeTuber. Another already pretty-saturated market with major players in it who no-lifed Pokemon way more than me and knew way more than mew, but I wanted to do it anyway. We had PokeMMO running, and I had begun challenging viewers to battle in it, I had a 30-part Pokemon Liquid Crystal playthrough running, and I started making Pokemon News videos for upcoming anime changes and the new games. Every leak, every trailer, every bit of news I would rush to make a video on, no matter what I had going on at the time. Plus I started trying some Nuzlocke runs, exploring other ROM hacks that I was interested in - something I’ve had an interest in for most of my internet career - and even started making Pokemon TCG videos!

One of my local stores would regularly have new card sets early so I would run down and buy up a ton and make opening videos. These were actually pretty successful and I had a blast doing it - in fact, I still have a small hoard of unopened TCG stuff that I open for myself from time to time building my collection.

Sadly I also used this opportunity to sell off my original childhood Yugioh card collection. I regret that decision heavily now, but I needed the money at the time.

Following my mini-career covering Pokemon news and playing ROM hacks, I completed a full, year-long playthrough of Pokemon Y on the channel. Between some slight Pokemon burnout and my 3DS capture dying - Katsukity mods were notorious for terrible USB ports and I didn’t have the money to ship it back to Japan to be fixed at the time - that came to a pretty abrupt end. I failed at being a PokeTuber. I learned a lot about the editing workflow and building video and stream layouts and such along the way, however.

I did spin off the Pokemon TCG opening gig onto its own channel - chasing those glorious “kids views” which used to be a gold mine at the time, but the channel never gained a huge enough following, and it just wasn’t financially responsible to keep that money sinkhole going. I failed at that, too.

In summer of 2013, I streamed a major life event. My proposal to my wife. My parents were out of town, and Chu was coming to spend the weekend with me, and so I had planned a stream. However, like with many things, I decided to do all of this very last minute and so the execution was rushed. I was doing it in Minecraft on our “Voxcraft” server we were making videos of at the time. I had no sense of polish and zero time to do it right. Honestly, it was pretty cringey, but it was special to us and that’s all that mattered.

This brings us towards and into 2014, where my priorities start shifting and things get uncomfortable. While I had a lot going for me in life, and YouTube was still fun, I was struggling. At this point I was deep into college taking on a full course load, working 20 to 30 hours a week in retail, working a weekend internship at a local radio station and broadcast group, trying to find success on YouTube and building a relationship with my partner. I was getting burned out and frustrated in every direction.

My wife and I were way more busy with school, so our only recording time was also prime “everyone in my family getting out of school and work and coming home” time so we didn’t film much together, the gaming content on the whole was performing very underwhelmingly compared to the tech content I had been sprinkling in, and I was getting burned out in every direction. I had multiple existential crises where I just couldn’t figure out or decide what I actually wanted to do with this - the thing all of my energy for years had gone into - or if I wanted to do it at all. Games had become a chore, something that I felt I could not play unless I was making content with them, and I repeatedly failed to find success doing what I wanted. 2014 was a year of soul searching.

2014 was a big year in that it was Chu and I’s first convention that we attended as press. There was a local general gaming, anime, etc. convention each year here in Louisville called “Fandomfest.” We attended in 2013, but I got us press passes for 2014’s convention, which happened to line up with my birthday. And then I broke my pinky toe the night before and spent the whole weekend walking around on a broken toe. On my birthday. But it was a lot of fun, and while the content we produced from it wasn’t amazing, it was a good time.

My job situation also changed significantly. I got fired from my first two retail jobs - including a sweet gig at GameStop that I basically walked in and asked for and was given - due to… very poor decisions - worked at JC Penny for a while, then moved to Staples EasyTech for a little more pay and doing something closer to what I enjoyed. I was successful at all of these jobs - usually getting promoted or more responsibilities each time - but I hated going. I hated the idea of working for someone else, of “wasting my time” at those places when I had dreams I wanted to chase - and wound up having poor attendance by the end of it due to anxiety attacks.

However, I had begun working for a new MCN in late 2013. At first it was a volunteer basis working for a friend, later I got hired on to run a sub-network within that network and recruit channels, make a community content hub channel, and so on. By fall 2014, I was YouTube certified and helping consult with bigger partners in the network to help them grow and I was developing a full, multi-hour educational video course to help creators. This got me a stable paycheck that matched my weekly pay from my job at Staples, so I quit and went full-time as a contractor for the MCN while running my YouTube channel. I also started phasing out the internship, as well. I failed at traditional jobs, but found my way into a job that would help me achieve the dreams I wanted. And I got to quit right before Black Friday, which is the worst day in all of retail work. Phew.

Techtuber

I took the end of fall and Christmas holiday talking it over with Chu, and finally decided. I wanted to make a real, strategic push to become a full-time YouTuber. And to do so, I had to stop fighting against my apprehensions about focusing on a niche, cut off the dying limb that was my unsuccessful gaming content, and rebrand as a tech channel. This was tough not only because I had spent basically 7 years at this point chasing the dream of being a full-time gaming channel, but because it also meant putting an end to the co-op gaming videos which was something special between Chu and I and had been a big “thing” in our relationship from the start - a scary thing to just decide “it’s over” and not have that impact our relationship.

I had a couple tech videos release at the end of the 2014 year as a warm-up, and on January 1, 2015, I completely rebranded and renamed the channel back to “EposVox” for tech reviews, tutorials, and unboxings. Still not super focused, but at least it was one umbrella category to start.

Lots of viewers were confused by this, with me getting comments on the first upload asking what this channel was and how they were subscribed to it, but it smoothed over. I went hard, focused on tech and gaming-adjacent tech topics, unboxing new audio gear, reviewing it, covering new capture cards like the new Elgato HD60, comparing video cameras, showing what apps I used on my phone and laptop, and even my very first capture card review from someone other than Elgato: the original Magewell “Cam Link” of sorts that I had to leverage my network backing to even get a review unit for.

I also chased the trend of random subscription box openings like Loot Crate and 1up Box for a while because it seemed like easy views - but those never did well long-term.

I mastered using my Canon T3i camera, learned how to make product reviews, and started getting better at tutorials. I was doing it, even if I was a bit aimless.

I’m really proud of quite a few videos I made during this period given my lack of experience, and I even started working with real sponsors during this year. I had spent so long failing at having a charismatic on-microphone presence with the gaming content, but it turns out once I was on camera and had to physically be involved in the presentation, I learned much more quickly. My early videos were still awkward, especially with cheap mics and tripods that were too short, but I learned a ton about production that year.

The channel grew quite quickly during this time. Turns out a consistent upload schedule and consistent content focus helps with that. It’s funny, but by this point I had coached and consulted for and taught so many channels how to find success, but I ignored it for myself time and time again, as I would have rather been unsuccessful than lock myself into a niche… I guess?

I reviewed so many little meaningless products that most newbie tech channels review because they don’t have access to anything else. We’re talking controllers, phone cases, bluetooth speakers, things most people really don’t care about, but it was content and I was learning on-camera production for the first time, so it was an important step. I did get my first phone to review that year - the LG G4 - so that was pretty neat.

And my next two capture card reviews. I really enjoyed making these. Who woulda thought?

Then came summer 2015 and that’s when my little experiment into tech YouTube solidified into the real deal. Let’s step back a minute, though.

In late 2014, I was approached by a good friend that was involved in a big gaming scene about coming to a gaming convention he was a part of running the next year. All expenses paid, VIPs at a gaming convention in Galveston, Texas, the first real travel opportunity for Chu and I, hell yes. The problem being that by summer 2015, I was no longer running an “Epos & Chu” co-op gaming channel and no one had really heard of us. But it was still a blast, everyone was super nice, and I got to be on panels with and meet creators like DaymDrops, Ken Domik, Aviator Gaming, MeganPlayz, and so on.

This wasn’t tech related, though. While we were there, my channel was still exploding.

You see, the week before, Windows 10 had officially released. Well, it was still in the process of releasing. And I got access to the upgrade within the first wave. I used my new 1440p monitor I grabbed from an Amazon returns store for cheap, and stayed up until 8AM the next day recording about 14 different Windows 10-related tutorials. I scheduled them to go out that weekend while we were gone.

By time we got to our hotel in Galveston, the videos had BLOWN UP, with my channel doubling in size from about 9k subscribers to 18k subscribers. It was insane.

I was now known as the tutorial guy.

Once we got back, I did the same thing, but for the new upcoming version of OBS: OBS Multiplatform, what would later be renamed as OBS Studio. I spent two days straight recording a full mini-course of tutorials for the software and released them over the next week or two. These are still some of the most successful pieces of content on my channel - or at least were for a long time. Between the mini Windows 10 course and my first OBS course here, I was already getting comments calling me “professor”, “prof”, and “OBS professor.” 

This was cool at first, but a familiar anxiety creeped up and scared me away. I didn’t want to JUST be “the OBS guy” and I didn’t want to be stuck making OBS videos forever. I stopped making OBS videos for quite a while, though I still made quite a bit of content creation-related videos due to the nature of wanting to make videos on the cool toys I used to make my videos.

I passed on yet another obvious opportunity to niche down and grab success way more quickly than I did.

Summer 2015 also saw another major life change: I graduated college with my bachelor’s degree in Journalism. College didn’t beat me. I leveraged being on my parents’ health insurance one last time to have my wisdom teeth removed, and while recovering from that I took on more roles at the MCN I did contract work for and presented them with the value I offered their company, and requested a raise. Double what I was originally making, in fact. A bold move, but enough to afford me the required income to move out of my parents’ house and into my first apartment at the end of 2015.

A one bedroom townhome seems fairly small and restrictive to me today, but it was huge for the time - coming from having my entire existence crammed into a single bedroom before - and unlocked a world of possibility for the videos and streams I could do.

2016 was my “grind year,” as I call it. I spent the year challenging myself in every way possible - living alone for the first time, managing a healthy work-life balance with literally nothing else to stop me, and working to improve production value in my new space while also trying to crank out videos as quickly as humanly possible, targeting daily uploads for a while.

At this point, I took some inspiration from Lon Seidman and his super efficient “do it live” workflow as I set up my first dedicated recording space and attempted to cover every product and topic I could with as little unnecessary work as possible. I skimmed Consumer Reports and tech magazines while doing laundry at the apartment complex’s laundromat for extra topics and inspiration, and worked basically every hour of the day that I wasn’t spending with Chu. I covered products I’d never tried before, took on silly sponsorships of questionable value, and started dabbling in OBS tutorials again.

Here I also had a big Linux tutorial spurt. I’d always been interested in Linux, in fact I had already been using Linux since the ‘90s where I used Red Hat Linux at my mom’s work for the first time - and there were some virtual machine-related Linux videos already sprinkled in the backlog of content. I partnered up with System76 - one of the best companies to go to for dedicated Linux computers - and offered them an educational course in exchange for a sponsorship - and went to work making a ton of Linux videos for the new Ubuntu 16.04 LTS release and other Linux-y topics. In exchange, I received one of their Lemur laptops - a laptop I still use to this day for Linux coverage, though I wish I had requested one with Nvidia graphics for easier screen capture - and I was supposed to be paid, though I never actually received my payment.

Around the release of the Linux course, I began releasing a new collab series with Rio or TheGuyOrDie, wherein we built cheap render servers for our videos - since we both had batch-based workflows and needed to render out many at once - using cheap used parts from eBay. Also, Elgato had two major capture card releases: the HD60 S and Pro. I began covering Photoshop and Premiere updates more, attempting a tech news show again, and picking up more capture card, microphone, and webcam reviews. The path of content creation and streaming-focused content was narrowing in.

Only this time, I didn’t ignore the call. I embraced it. Mostly. I really enjoyed making videos about all the new content creation toys hitting the market during this time - webcams, microphones, macro pads, capture cards, new OBS updates. Playing with and figuring out these tools was what I enjoyed, so naturally I wanted to make videos about them.

I also landed a partnership with Intel making streaming education content as a part of their “Intel Streamers Bootcamp”, and a sponsored mini-course with Elgato - further solidifying the “Streamer Teacher” role. That name kept popping up again. “Thanks, professor!” “You are the real stream teacher!”

I also launched on Vessel that year - an alternative, paywalled video site which functioned like Patreon and YouTube combined. This platform basically funded the LinusTechTips office move to the first of their current warehouses, and seemed like the right place to be, so I was grateful to get invited. It closed about a year after launching after getting bought up, and I made maybe $30 from it. Oh well, was still cool.

I also suffered a tragic, massive data loss that year. I told myself it would never happen, but I had a couple hard drives die and relied way too much on my Raid0 array in my main workstation to house my work. It corrupted. As I scrambled to preserve what I did have, I uploaded to Amazon’s Cloud Drive service, which was new at the time and promised unlimited cloud storage. My goal was to back up everything there, start my storage from scratch, and download back. This did not go as intended. Despite my used storage quota increasing at what seemed like the appropriate place and the app claiming things were uploaded, the vast majority of my archives that I uploaded to the service simply were not there. When I re-downloaded, I discovered the horror that not only did I lose a ton of footage from the raid crash, I basically threw away even more trusting Amazon’s service. Years of footage archives that I still find myself wanting to reference were all just… gone.

Not long later Amazon backpedaled on “unlimited storage” and starting charging more than competing services for basic storage tier plans.

2016 turned into 2017, we moved to a new apartment where I had not only our computer office space in our living room, but I had a whole dedicated bedroom as my “production studio” - combined with upgrades in gear meant I was getting more creative and having more fun with production than ever. Streaming and content creation were definitely at the forefront of my channel’s focus, but I still covered plenty of other things - to varying degrees of success.

The launch of the Elgato Stream Deck was a big deal for my channel, as it was something that not everyone “got” or understood at first, but I could only see limitless potential, so I made all kinds of content on it.

Around the apartment move, I also tried briefly having Chu and I run a daily vlog channel. I started this side channel in 2012 to vlog our relationship - more or less - and posted to it sporadically over the years. In 2016 I started posting more regularly, and then I had us vlog the entire apartment move with the plan of that being enjoyable content that would post consistently for a while.

We filmed so much on 3 different cameras and two smartphones that I was too overwhelmed by it all and took an entire YEAR to actually edit and release it. Adding a DAILY vlog channel on top of my normal workload just wasn’t the right call. We actually experimented with having Chu learn Adobe Premiere Elements to take on some of the editing, but we were just too busy to make it work.

Full-time Streamer?

Spring 2017 came, and after nonstop frustrations with the MCN I worked for, feeling under-valued and then literally not being paid my agreed amount in March 2017, I quit. Angrily. I was done stressing out over someone else’s failed vision and trying to make my YouTube course happen, which still hadn't been released 2 years after starting it.

Suddenly I had a significant amount of free time in my daily routine, with no idea how to fill it, so I turned to the thing that had always been around at significant points in my career and I previously wished I had more time for: Streaming.

I wasn’t planning on making it a significant part of my routine. Initially, I just took advantage of some extra free time to game and stream it for fun, but then I got an itch I hadn’t had in a little while. I wanted to make a new series of OBS Studio tutorials, this time answering basically every question that a new streamer could have. In order to do that, I needed to stream a whole bunch to identify pain points.

This idea turned into my “OBS Master Class.” I originally planned nearly 60 videos, including sample case studies using various hardware configurations and digging into more creative ideas - but I eventually had to cut a lot just to finally get the project done.

I spent 3 or so months streaming full-time on Twitch. 4 to 8 hours a day, 5 days a week while Chu was at work. I already had a following built up from my other tutorials and streaming history, and things only grew from there. I streamed whatever I wanted to play: Anything from Call of Duty Modern Warfare Remastered to Nioh to DmC Devil May Cry, and so on. I met new people, gathered new viewers, experimented with various audio hardware and cameras for streaming, and had a blast.

Embarrassingly, I put basically zero effort into my stream layout or branding. No layouts (really), no consistency between channel graphics and on-stream graphics, and hardly any graphics used at all in the first place. This would change over time, but the presentation differences between what I do now in my live shows versus then is hilarious.

But this was intentional. I was constantly changing and testing things for the course, and generally wanted everything laid out as a newcomer would (at least until the end of the course when I got to layout discussions) and so on - but admittedly, I could have probably impressed more viewers with more effort there.

All of this streaming was right around when Twitch’s new Affiliate Program launched, and I got in basically right away. I was able to monetize my streams and gain priority for transcoding - allowing viewers with weaker internet connections to still view my content - and that strongly incentivized me to keep no-lifing streaming.

By fall, however, I was in full force producing the actual Master Class content - eating up all the time I was originally spending streaming - and I was getting burned out, resulting in streams being reserved for editing sessions or random one-offs.

That marked the end of my brief full-time streaming career. It was fun for the time, but I can’t say the core content was really all that entertaining - just me blankly staring at gameplay and cussing a lot - nor that I’d ever really want to be a full-time streamer as a career path… but that’s a conversation for another time.

Stream Professor

During this streaming stint, I was still producing regular YouTube content. I scripted and scripted and scripted some more until I decided I had a worthwhile set of content for a true “OBS Master Class” and prepared to shoot.

I leveraged review samples and agreed-in-advance sponsorship funds for the course to further upgrade important gear so I could shoot for hours on end. I shot the course using my Panasonic G7, an Atomos Ninja Inferno to work around the 30 minute record limit, a Sennheiser MKH-416 microphone, SoundDevices MixPre-3 audio recorder, and Aputure c120d light with the mini light dome. For about 6 weeks that whole kit was set up in one place as I recorded day in and day out before proceeding to edit.

All-in-all, it took about 6 months to script and record the OBS Master Class, with a couple more months for editing and scheduling releases through the beginning of 2018. I had originally built the course around being a multi-hour, single-video course, which wound up being a 5-hour video. However, I also split up the whole thing into individual videos and released those for better search traffic. I still have the Premiere Pro timeline of the full 5 hour edit framed in my office, as I’m so proud of what I pulled off there.

This was it, the true start of me being the “Stream Professor.” I was called that numerous times once comments start rolling in, and I quickly became known as the “stream education guy” or the “OBS tutorial guy” - even by the OBS team themselves, which provided a lot of validation to my work.

I embraced this to a degree at first, leveraging “tech education” in my branding a lot, but I was still running away from locking in on a streaming-focused niche. I didn’t want to be “just the OBS guy.” I didn’t know why, but it still scared me. I really think over the next couple years, I continued to slow my success by refusing to do this, honestly hurting my channel.

2017 also saw me being brought in to cover an Intel esports event, IEM Oakland, for Intel, along with a few other creators. This was a bit out of my element, but was definitely a “bucket list” achievement to attend an esports event in-person and I met some awesome people there.

In 2018, I got last-minute invited to fill a slot on another project for Intel - this time, the Intel Extreme Rig Challenge. This was, at the time, a recurring event Intel hosted among major system integrators to see who can build the coolest and most powerful custom rig using Intel hardware. I flew out to Portland, toured a bit of Intel’s headquarters, and judged and hosted the event stream with Linus and SoldierKnowsBest. This was when I met Linus in person for the first time, him having been a constant inspiration in my tech endeavors for over 5 years by that point.

2018 also checks another “bucket list” item as I had a sponsored opportunity with Intel and Halo Wars 2, getting me my first Halo-related press-kit, which included a nice CPU I got to contribute to my best friend’s first gaming PC build. He’s still gaming on it. Win-win.

As 2018 passed and 2019 came, I focused my channel more and more on capture card reviews, webcam comparisons, and streaming guides - but still maintained generalized tech content. Here’s the thing about me producing videos these days: I never run out of, nor have to sit down and think about “video ideas.” Honestly, the whole concept just seems foreign to me. I have multiple never-ending to-do lists and video idea lists for tutorials and experiments in every area of tech content. I am, however, bad at prioritizing, so I often just work on whatever is in front of me or seems easiest to tackle at the time. Which means I frequently would miss good timing or opportunities to pull viewership on specific streaming topics because I was busy derping around on an irrelevant project.
I started to identify this as a problem.

I attended two major events in 2019. The first was Dreamhack Dallas - a giant LAN party with a Halo tournament at the event! Chu and I got to enjoy Texas once again. Another bucket list item checked off: see competitive Halo played live, in-person! Unfortunately it wasn’t a major tournament and I didn’t get to stick around for a lot of it, but I hope it’s not the last Halo event I attend.

I attended this event through Nvidia, who flew me out there to talk about the new NVENC video encoder. I brought my old GTX 660 - the first graphics card I used with NVENC for recording tutorials and such. NVENC has been a huge factor in my workflow and it seemed appropriate to get people to sign it at my first Nvidia-related event.

Second was the big one. LTX 2019. The LinusMediaGroup team decided they wanted to spare no expense when it came to getting other YouTubers to attend their little expo and made it bigger than ever. I met basically everyone in the tech YouTube scene, either that were invited or that paid to attend, and Chu and I had dinner one of the nights with Linus and team, which was pretty awesome.

It’s weird to say because I wouldn’t have originally said that anything was really at risk, but I left with the feeling that LTX “saved my career” - and I still feel that. While it’s unlikely I would have quit or anything, I was feeling all kinds of burnout in 2019, feeling like I wasn’t getting the results out of my work equivalent to what I was putting into it, and felt isolated and like I might not belong in the tech scene.

LTX made me truly feel like I was part of the tech YouTube community, that people actually wanted to work alongside me, and that we were in this together. I was on cloud 9 for MONTHS after the event, and was devastated that the pandemic meant the expo couldn’t proceed, as I’ve had so few opportunities for meeting up with my fellow tech creators.

I was given a meet and greet slot alongside Wendell - whom I’d been collaborating with all year since he’s relatively local to me, which had been awesome - and hosted a panel alongside Linus and Scottie from StrangeParts, which was a damn good time. I got to meet Barnacules and collaborate with Steve from GamersNexus and the HardwareCanucks guys.

Through 2019, though - and especially following LTX rekindling my spirits - I felt like something was missing with my work. I’d spent years being known on a lower-key level as “the OBS guy” or “the stream education guy”, but I didn’t really seem to have that widely-known authority role yet. I mean, I did enough that Nvidia brought me in for an event, but that was only a taste of how established I could be.

And could you guess by now what the problem was? Branding. Of course. Once again, I was too afraid to stick myself in a corner, in a specific niche, and failed to brand myself in the way that really identified what my work was about to others. My elevator pitch at the time of “quality tech education and gaming nostalgia” - while accurate, was too nonspecific. I needed to do better.

Plus, I’d allowed myself to risk losing that authority in the first place, as new streaming education channels began to show up. I spent years being the only one really talking about streaming tech, OBS, capture cards and webcams. This was my rock that I built and fought for - my own personal niche that I carved out for myself to stand out from the major tech channels when I started, so it freaked me out when suddenly a couple competing channels appeared, grew faster than me, and started claiming that authority for themselves - all because I failed to brand myself around that idea. That’s all it took.

I set a serious goal for 2020 to establish myself as an authority on streaming and content creation in the tech space, and set out steps to do that. This started with yet another rebrand: This time, embracing the thing I’d been called for years by this point: The Stream Professor.

Eras:

• Pre-youtube
• Random
• Solo gaming
• Rebrand
• Rebrand, p2
• Co-op gaming
• Pokemon
• Tech beginnings
• Techtuber
• Stream professor