Here is the full transcript of YouTuber Max Fosh’s talk titled “How To Get The World’s Most Sought-After Job” at TEDxOxford conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
The Unexpected Journey to Viral Fame
In May 2022, I turned up to a field in West Sussex with 600 square meters of tarpaulin, and I was there for work. Over five hours, myself and three esteemed colleagues drove 400 pegs into the ground. It took five hours. And three days later, our handiwork had been seen by over 400 million people, from New Zealand to Israel.
What I had done is that I had written a massive “Welcome to Luton” sign right next to Gatwick Airport. “No, please, that does not deserve an applause.” Now, obviously, when I was putting it into the ground, I had no idea what my handiwork would look like, so I needed to check that it was all in the right place. So, I did what anyone would do, and I got a flight from London Heathrow to London Gatwick via Amsterdam.
I didn’t even get off the plane, and so when I was flying into Gatwick on the left-hand side, 20 seconds before landing, there it was. There was my handiwork. Border control was a bit of an issue because, according to border control, I hadn’t even left the country and flown from Heathrow to Gatwick. So when the border control asked what I was doing, whether I was here for work or pleasure, I said that I was here to see my handiwork half a mile up the road.
She looked at me, smiled, stamped my passport, and went, “Oh, you naughty boy.” Now, it’s weird to think, but this is my job. I am a YouTuber, which is the most sought-after profession for young kids at school today, more so than an actor, more so than a scientist or an astronaut. I am a YouTuber, and I’m essentially professionally silly for a living.
A Journey Beyond Tarpaulin
I’m not confined to tarpaulin-based videos, no, no. I ran for London Mayor in 2020 with my main manifesto point being, “Don’t vote for me.” I came 19th out of 20, which is remarkable. I also served roadkill to food critics without them knowing, and I technically became the richest man in the world for seven minutes, being worth 500 billion pounds.
Now, as I said, I am a YouTuber, which is an incredibly sought-after job, but I’m going to use my 15 minutes here to talk about why the internet and social media have meant that right now is the best time to be a creative person. More than ever, people are being paid to do what they love. Now, the first reason why I think right now is the best time to be a creative person is because the barrier to entry is so low. Let’s talk about the old days.
This is the Beatles in the 60s in Hamburg. Now, the Beatles performed every night for four to five hours in nightclubs across Hamburg to really hone their skills. There, they found a manager who opened their eyes and upped the world to the audiences on the radio. Now, previously, if you wanted to be a creative person, a musician, an actor, there were gatekeepers.
There were people who would decide whether your talent was worth being seen by the world. Whereas now, that’s not the case. Previously, you needed to get a slot on a stage in a nightclub, but there are a limited number of those. Not anymore.
The Democratization of Creativity
And we’re seeing already on social media, people are monetizing what they’re passionate about. You can literally do anything. For example, this is Francis Bourgeois. “I’m sure a lot of you here will know who he is.”
If you don’t, he’s a professional train enthusiast. He gets paid to look at trains and talk about how much he loves them. The second reason why I think there’s never been a better time to be in the creative industry is that now, anyone can go viral. “Not in a medical sense, I am talking about online,” and the first time that I went viral was in 2019.
This is me dressed up as a fake model called Maximus Bucharest. The idea that a friend of mine had was that London Fashion Week was happening just down the road, so we went to Primark, we dressed me in the silliest things we could find, and I ended up looking like that. I ended up being invited to shows, I got into after-parties, and that video that we made got 30 million views. It was on a channel by Zac Allsop, we were both starting out.
Virality and the Human Element
This went viral and allowed me to do what I loved because suddenly, I had an audience. Now, we’re going to talk about why it went viral in the first place, and that’s to do with the algorithm. “We hear lots of things about the algorithm.” The algorithm seems to be some abstract thing that we kind of look at, “oh, the algorithm’s hurt my video, the algorithm’s not working.”
The best thing that I did was change the word “algorithm” to “people,” because these platforms, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, whatever, they want people to stay on their website. So what they do is they test each video, they serve it to a small number of people, and they see two things: how many people clicked on it, and how many people watched it, and how long they watched it for. So, for example, on this video, they served it to a small number of people, they realized those people quite liked this video, “let’s serve it to more people,” and thus a chain reaction started happening. There are all sorts of little intricate things that, for example, made this video go viral.
One of the things we talk about is the click-through rate, why someone wants to click on a video.
And I, as a YouTuber, spend a lot of time thinking about human psychology as to why someone would want to click on a video. And you might see there are two people who look exactly the same. When we released this video, we realized that the human eye, you’re being served loads of different videos, the human eye likes familiarity, it likes symmetry.
So, we had a picture with this wonderful woman here on the left, we just duplicated her, put her on the right, and for some reason, people wanted to click on that. “Anyone can go viral. Anybody.” And that is because these platforms have changed the way in which people consume content.
Previously, it used to be a closed feedback loop. You’d watch somebody, then YouTube or the platforms would serve you more videos from that person. You might watch a couple of those videos, and they’ll just keep serving you the same stuff. They realized, though, that consumers on these platforms weren’t really sticking around very often.
So, what they started to do, they introduced the recommended feature. Now, this was a game-changer for anybody starting out. Because now, anybody could get discovered if the content was similar to what somebody was already watching. So now, instead of it being a closed feedback loop, someone makes a video, someone watches it, they subscribe, they keep going.
Now, someone watches a video, YouTube says, “hey, you like this? You might also like this from somebody else, and this from somebody else.” And that keeps the consumer on the platform for longer. “And so now, anybody can go viral, even when they don’t have an audience.”
So, take this video, for example. This is a video from a guy called Liam Stevens. It’s got 3.3 million views. Now, you might think that Liam has a huge audience that wanted to see his next video. No. Liam has 8,000 subscribers. “And so, we’re seeing now that anybody can go viral.” Now, the third reason why I am so excited to be a creative person right now is data.
Now, it might seem quite counterintuitive to be thinking of something creative, something subjective, with something objective, like data. But you get one of these viral bangers if you understand the algorithm, and mainly if you understand this graph. “Does anybody here know what this graph shows? Any ideas?”
“Any ideas what this graph might show?” “Yeah. What, sorry?” “Watch time, almost.” “Yeah, kind of. Yes?” “Exactly. This is a retention graph, and this is something that I look at almost every single day.” This shows how many people were still watching at a various point throughout one of my videos, right? Let’s start at the beginning, okay? It says in the bottom here, 76% of viewers are still watching at around the 30-second mark, which is typical. I think that’s quite worrying because that means that 25% of you would have got up and walked out of this talk in the first 30 seconds if it was socially acceptable to do.
So, for me, that showcases that I need to work on my hooks. “We talk a lot on YouTube about earning the click.” You’ve got a video that comes up, you say, “oh, that seems interesting. I want to see how someone has broken into London Fashion Week.” You click on it, you immediately want to get rewarded for your click. So you’ll see a lot of YouTubers repeating exactly the title back to you. It’s basically being like, “yes, you clicked on this, and here’s a reward. I actually am doing this.”
So, back to the retention graph. I can see that I’ve lost 25% of people after the first 30 seconds, which isn’t great, but what is good is that I can see the line is particularly flat. That means that once I’ve got people, my storytelling is engaging enough that people are wanting to stick around. “Can anyone tell me what this dip in the middle might be?”
“Adverts, yes.” That was 60 seconds in the middle of the video where I was paid by a brand to talk about what they do. As you can see, a lot of people were skipping through and didn’t want to watch it, but what’s good for me to see is that people are coming back. The line is equally as flat as it was before the ad read.
So, it shows me that’s okay because I can still put ads in there and not lose people from watching my video. This data has never really been seen before in the entertainment industry and the creative industry. We can now see how audiences and consumers of our content are enjoying it second by second, and speaking to people in the TV industry, this hasn’t really been seen before. So, as content creators, as people who are creative right now, we are getting data that makes us better creators and storytellers.
The Golden Era for Content Creators
Now, the final reason that I think there has never been a better time to be a content creator is because content creators are being paid more than ever. In the last three years, YouTube has said they’ve paid out $30 billion to creators. There are two million YouTube channels that get paid by YouTube. That is two million channels, individuals, teams, groups, bands that previously would have tried to get themselves on a stage in Hamburg.
But, amazingly, due to the low barriers to entry, we are seeing so much more creativity in this world. So, you might think that it’s too late for you to start your creative journey. You might think it’s already too saturated. “There’s too many creators.” But that’s not the case. “The algorithm is people.” So, if you make videos that the people will like, so will the algorithm. So, go out, make yourself something, add to this world, and become a creative person.