EliasM.’s Site

Community Connection

For my community Connection I reached out to a popular Youtuber who covers content for one of my favorite games (team fortress 2).

The youtuber I reached out to is called great blue he has been on YouTube since 2013. Great blue makes content for a game called team fortress 2. He has about 133k followers at the moment of this post.

(link to his Channel at the bottom)

Team fortress 2 is a game where you work with your team to capture and objective, you have 9 available choices of characters to play as all with different skills and abilities.

I started playing team fortress 2 in march of 2022 at the request of a friend and as soon as I started playing it I was hooked. I began to watch it on YouTube and found out about great blue. After watching him for a while and really enjoying his content I was given this assignment. I decided to reach out to him over Gmail and much to my surprise he responded within a day.

Here is the response:

Q: Hi Great Blue, my name is Elias and I am a grade 9 student at Riverside Secondary School. I was hoping to ask you some questions about being a team fortress youtuber, as I have interest in one day becoming a team fortress 2 content creator, I was hoping to have you answer 6 questions for me if you do agree to participate. I look forward to your response and thank you for your time.

A: Hello! I’d love to answer any questions you have.

Q: Thank you so much for responding, here are the questions.

Can you explain your roles and responsibilities with your current position?

What obstacles have you faced to get you where you are today?

What advice would you pass on to someone interested in what you are doing?

Why are you passionate about your job or role?

How long did it take to get you to where you are at?

What inspired you to pick this career?

Thank you for your time.

A: 1) The responsibilities for my job are to create YouTube videos for the Team Fortress 2 community on a regular basis. This includes brainstorming and researching ideas, writing scripts, trimming audio and video, and adding motion graphics to make a coherent and entertaining final product.

    2) The biggest obstacle for a YouTube career is time. While there is a fair bit of luck that plays into the success of each individual video, most people will not be able to start producing high quality content right out of the gate and need quite a bit of time to gain an audience and personal experience. For me, it took around 3 years before I achieved much growth on the platform, and even longer before I was producing videos at the quality I wanted.

    3) Without a doubt, the single best piece of advice I could give to anyone new to YouTube is to do it because you enjoy it and not because you want to grow. Even though you won’t be growing much at first, you will learn so much about yourself, your preferences, and YouTube as a platform. For instance, if you start a channel but realize you don’t enjoy the full process of content creation (the boring stuff like audio editing, motion graphics, search engine optimization, and maintaining consistent uploads are the biggest killers here), that’s important to know before jumping headfirst into a career.

    4) I’m passionate about YouTube because it’s a way to express and share my wealth of knowledge and unique perspectives about a game I’ve spent a lot of time with. I have over 5,500 hours playing TF2, and I personally believe it is one of the best video games ever made; being able to talk about it for a living and take advantage of personal skills in speaking, writing, and design has been my dream job for years.

    5) As mentioned earlier, it took about 5 years total to get to my current size. I started making regular videos in early 2018, and for several years I very slowly built my channel while making live commentary videos for fun. My milestones are 100 subscribers sometime in 2018, 1,000 at the end of 2019, 10,000 at the beginning of 2021, and 100,000 in August of last year.

    6) YouTube has been my dream job for several years now. I watched YouTube a lot growing up (specifically Markiplier, Game Grumps, JonTron, and several other older gaming channels), and being able to grow an audience and make a living talking about something I enjoy became a goal. While I attended college for a more traditional career while growing my channel (which you should definitely do), I decided to make YouTube my full-time job as I personally enjoy it more and am more passionate about it than the alternative.

 

Thanks for reaching out! These answers should all suffice for your assignment, but if you have other personal questions about YouTube or TF2 in general I’d be happy to answer them too.

 

 

Screen shots of the messages:

I have learn a lot from my talk with great blue

About how you must learn about your career before jumping right in and how if you want to do YouTube content for a career you must not jump right in do it for fun not for a career at first.

I have also learned that YouTube is not as fun and games as it appears on the outside and it require work like any other job.

I now know to be careful when choosing a career and to think before acting.

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