In the modern age, social media is playing a crucial role in society. It is used everyday whether you are using it to communicate with people like Snapchat and Facebook, share on platforms like Instagram and Twitter, or to be entertained on platforms like YouTube or twitch.
These platforms rely on people to create the content on their platforms, which some create content as a job. These people are called content creators.
This seems like a dream job that a lot of youth that grew with the internet desire. Being a content creator doesn’t look hard to do on the surface but there are many things that we don’t know.
To get more behind the scenes, I talked to two local creators.
First, Adam Buckley, is the personality behind the 535K subscriber YouTube channel ADoseofBuckley. The channel primarily does rants about music and pop culture.
Then, Kevin Robinson, who is a live streamer and speed runner, goes live on the platform Twitch. Kevin goes by the name Muttski. His main content is playing games, primarily the Final Fantasy series, and does some shortform content on Instagram and Tik Tok.
One thing to note is that every creator has a different experience when growing their image. To understand where our creators come from, here is some of their history.
Adam Buckley was first in radio broadcasting. He graduated from Fanshawe college and started to work for a radio-adjacent company, acting as an in-store DJ broadcasting to businesses across the U.S. However, this work often included “Carson Daly-Esque type stuff” like birthday shout-outs and song requests.
For Buckley, this failed to scratch his creative itch. Around 2009, his friends were suggesting podcasting, which was starting out with average episodes of about two hours.
Buckley didn’t want to talk for hours and decided to create YouTube content structured like “longer radio bits” that could be deliver in the language he wanted. He challenged himself to produce one piece of this content weekly, initially seeing it as a way to keep his broadcasting “muscles” in shape.
Kevin Robinson was a former high school English teacher and began his career in Houston, Texas, after accepting a desirable job offer. Having moved without friends or relatives nearby, he started streaming on Twitch as a hobby to “fill the void” and meet people online.
The practice of reacting and responding to people on the fly during streams also helped him build skills needed for teaching. He streamed on Twitch as a hobby for seven years.
A major point in any content creators’ career is when they can take it full time. For Buckley and Robinson, they shifted at opportunistic times in their career.
Buckley’s shift to full-time content creation was from external factors. After a few years of making videos, it started to feel like a chore and wasn’t enjoying making them. But in December of 2019, he revamped his format and enjoyed making videos again. Shortly thereafter, in January 2020, he lost his nine-to-five radio job due to company restructuring.
Around the same time, Buckley launched a Patreon after years of audience requests, initially skeptical that he wouldn’t get many people to sign up. To his surprise, 1,500 people signed up on the first day, giving the ability to generate an income that was “certainly enough money to live off of”.
His girlfriend encouraged him to pursue the channel full-time, arguing that looking for traditional work was a waste of time and instead he could spend time growing the channel.
Kevin Robinson’s transition was slightly different. His switch to full-time happened when he and his wife, who is originally from Sarnia, Ontario, decided to settle in Canada. While waiting for his permanent residency to be approved, he was not allowed to work for a Canadian business.
Streaming then became his best option as he could generate an income while being out for a year, making the move “way easier”. Robinson has now been streaming full-time for the last three years.
A semi unique part of content creation as a job is the flexibility in schedule and because you have no boss, there is no one that gives you a concrete schedule to follow. So how does Buckley and Robinson deal with it?
Buckley maintains a work week focused on preparation, starting his research on Monday to produce a video for release on Saturday. He tries to gather as much information as possible on a topic before producing a video unlike some YouTubers who rush to publish after a story comes out with little information.
Once his research is complete, Buckley completes a video from start to finish in a single day, usually starting at 9 a.m. The entire process, including writing, recording, and editing, usually takes six to eight hours for a 10-minute video, not including the time spent researching.
Robinson’s schedule has daily uploads on his short form content and has streams as well. His stream schedule is loose, either streaming early for his audience in places like Europe, where they are around 5 hours ahead of Eastern Time, or later for the North America audience. He is most consistently streaming between 9 a.m. and 12 p.m. 3 to 4 days of the week.
His short form content, while mostly to get some viewers drawn to the stream, is important with his mostly daily uploads of his quizzes and other gaming content.
Creators can face many challenges while posting on platforms. One of the biggest things Adam Buckley must deal with is copyright. While most of his content is related to music, some companies don’t like when too much is used even though small clips (10 to 20 seconds) are mostly allowed.
If copyright becomes an issue, companies can do many things including taking the revenue from ads and even taking down a video which is a big deal.
Kevin Robinson brings up recent challenges with his platform of Twitch. He brings up that some of the things they do on the platform is “kind of scummy” and is turning people to stream on YouTube.
Robinson also mentions that since he has mainly streamed Final Fantasy content, he expresses that he wouldn’t do as well by a big margin if he streams anything else.
Despite these challenges, they still love what they do. In addition to their content creation, Adam Buckley volunteers at a boxing gym in London training people to compete in local, regional, and national events. Kevin Robinson hopes to get back to his original career of being an English teacher but still stream as a hobby like he once did.
