LESSONS FROM A YOUTUBE STAR
The online entrepreneur plans to go ‘wherever the eyeballs are’ to build a virtual relationship with viewers around the world
YouTube star and tech entrepreneur Casey Neistat is in Toronto this week for the Influence Toronto 2017 influencer and entrepreneur conference. He sat down with the Star to talk about his YouTube channel, which has more than eight million subscribers; his new venture with CNN — Beme News; his advice for young entrepreneurs and influencers just starting out; and thoughts on what drives credibility in the news industry. His responses have been edited.
Can you tell us why you think people are drawn to you?
I was on YouTube for almost five years, and in those five years I was able to accrue about 400,000 subscribers. Then I switched what I was doing to a daily upload, a daily reality show about myself. In the next two years, it went from 400,000 subscribers to eight million subscribers. So I learned a lot about what a subscriber relationship looks like on the platform. It has a lot to do with building relationships with the person on the other side, in this case me. No matter how good the work was that I made before I started my daily show, people couldn’t have the same relationship with the work that they could with the individual. So I attribute a lot of that growth to the fact that people were able to develop a relationship with me via this daily reality show.
How do you draw that line about what you’re going to make public about your life versus what you’re going to keep private?
It’s entirely intuitive. I’m a very open person, I’m not someone who really holds back much. Honesty and transparency is the only way you can get to know someone.
You’re here at Influence Toronto 2017 — is there a message that you’re hoping to leave for young entrepreneurs?
The thing that I hope to drive home is just how unique of an inflection point we are at in the media industry right now, and this inflection point will not last. The opportunities to succeed right now will not be there a decade from now . . . We are seeing a gigantic turn in the media, where it’s going from these big, powerful companies to the individual creator, but I don’t think it will be as open, as fair and as accessible looking ahead. It will become more and more constricted . . . now’s the moment.
You’ve recently launched Beme News. What are your goals for that?
When CNN bought my company, the opportunity was to leverage all of the resources that they have as a news organization and then the resources we have as a technology company, young people trying to do interesting things. Together, we want to build something really new. Next year, 2018, is when you’re going to see really meaningful stuff and Beme really defining what it is. But I’m very excited about it.
Are you going to be launching on other platforms or are you sticking with YouTube?
For Beme, we’re platform agnostic, so we’re going to go wherever the eyeballs are. That’s true for my career as well. YouTube is the richest, densest social media platform out there, not by a small margin, so that’s the main focus of where I disseminate my work.
What is it about YouTube that’s kept you there for now?
YouTube is this incredible, porous, wildly open, global distribution platform where you can put up anything you want and reach whatever audience is interested. It is this sort of Xanadu, this idealistic place for distributing content. It doesn’t mean there’s not hiccups and faults, but it is everything that I ever wanted distribution to look and feel like.
In this era where we’ve got all these people calling “fake news,” do you have advice for the bigger news organizations on how to combat that, create more trust?
When I think of the future of news media, I think it’s really about personality-driven content. I trust a journalist and therefore I will listen to whatever that journalist has to say.