10 Million Subscribers, World Records, and Billions of Views

My name is Jack, I'm 27 and live in Nottinghamshire, England. I started making videos for fun when I was 11, then at 13 I discovered YouTube and started uploading them there.

Originally the videos were strange "comedy" sketches filmed with my school friends, gathering only a few 100 views. But in 2012, they developed into short action films and animations. Some of these videos got a little bit of traction and they actually earned me enough money to buy a computer, which while still very basic, was a big upgrade from the cheap laptop I was using previously.

In 2013, at age 16, I started a new YouTube channel where I began posting Minecraft content which was a very popular game at the time. It wouldn't have been possible to record Minecraft content if I hadn't been able to save up for the slightly better PC.

After a year of almost daily Minecraft videos, I reached 100,000 subscribers, and was earning just enough money to not need a part time job while also studying at college. After finishing with school, I decided to take a "gap year" and focus on YouTube while I was still living at home and living expenses were relatively low. This proved to be a good decision as my YouTube channel continued to grow and I am still doing it full time over a decade later.

My content has developed a lot in that time. I no longer do Minecraft/gaming content and instead I'm involved in a range of different genres like commentary, YouTube data, Geography, and car journalism. The business has grown a lot and I now employ several people to keep things moving efficiently.

I recently surpassed 10 million combined subscribers & 2.5 billion views across all of my different channels. My largest singular channel JackSucksAtLife reached 4 million subscribers near the end of last year.

I am confident that YouTube will always exist and thrive during my lifetime. TikTok is very popular, and I am sure it will be for a number of years, but YouTube allows you to develop much deeper long term connections to specific creators which encourages you to keep coming back and watching their content/personality grow.

TikTok and other short form content provides short term satisfaction, but it is still long form content that the average user will find most fulfilling. Plus, YouTube is so massive and has so many different genres that there is something that interests everyone.

My team plays a huge role in my business, and I would really be stuck without them. I hired my first editor, Kai, in 2018 which allowed me to focus on recording more content as editing a YouTube video takes several hours/days depending on the project!

My girlfriend Becky started editing for my main channel in 2020 and from here I believe we've really taken the quality of the content to the next level; she is now a much better editor than I ever was myself! 

Everyone I work with discusses ideas with me which often get put back into the content. Everyone on the team has an influence on things.

My content has changed so much since I first started uploading to YouTube in 2010. 14-year-old Jack making action films with fake guns in his garden would never expect that he'd have entire YouTube channels dedicated to things like Geography or electric cars years later.

My general ethos has been to constantly try new video ideas that I think are fun concepts, and then if they get a good response from my audience, I can try similar themes and continuously develop them further.

My Geography channel started as a one off Geoguessr video on my original channel, followed by a few more episodes because the first one did well, then once I knew there was enough of an audience out there that was interested, I made an entirely new channel focused only on that topic. This channel now has over 500 videos and 1.5 million subscribers 3 years later.

As new trends constantly pop up on YouTube, I will often try them myself if they appeal to me, and then keep doing things until they stop working. 

When YouTube released "Shorts" (their own version of TikTok), I immediately gave them a try and now after seeing some success they are consistent extra videos released multiple times per week on top of my existing long form schedule. YouTube is just about trying different things and going with what works/what you enjoy.

Search JackSucksAtLife, JackSucksAtGeography or Jack Massey Welsh on YouTube.