A former DCU student has said that he didn’t need his degree to make a six figure salary.
YouTuber Paddy Galloway enjoyed college, but his passion for YouTube where he makes his income. He has been working online for over a decade and since then he has won several awards for his work.
The 26-year-old, originally from Carlow, told Dublin Live: “I liked DCU, it was a bit of craic. A lot of people fail to think about it, when it comes to college, it’s a nice limbo phase. You graduate from secondary school and you’ve a few years to figure things out."
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While Paddy says that a degree is important for a lot of people, when it comes to the world of YouTube it isn't essential.
“I've a team of five people in my company and I haven't asked anyone if they went to college,” he said.
Paddy started creating YouTube content in 2007 when he was just 11 years old. He discovered the platform when he was bored on his summer holidays from school and had nobody to hang out with in the countryside.
He said: “None of my friends lived that close to me, my closest friend was a drive away. I was sitting at home with a camera and computer, YouTube was very small at the time.
“I fell in love with how it worked, anyone, anywhere could post a video and thousands of people could watch it. I started posting videos, the first ones were very cringe, it was like me and my brother wrestling, I deleted all of them obviously."
While Paddy enjoyed creating content, he found that working with other YouTubers and helping them boost their videos was an exciting part of the business. So now, as well as having his own YouTube channel, he also works with clients, some of which earn up to $20 million a year.
Speaking about the start of his business, Paddy said: “I started to enjoy the strategy behind YouTube rather than content creation. I was fascinated with the data, algorithms and essentially, I've been on YouTube ever since.
“I’ve been a full time YouTuber for 10 years, it’s been my main source of income. You don’t need a big following to make good money. Just from my channel, I crossed into the six figure mark maybe when I only had 200,000 subscribers.”
Paddy has worked with massive creators such as Mr Beast, Jesser, Jordan Matter, Noah Kagan and Sidemen. He helps them grow their channel, gain more followers, views and income.
“Among the kids, Mr Beast is like Elvis,” Paddy said. “On my own channel I do breakdowns of YouTubers and they get big viewership so YouTubers get in contact with me. Mr Beast is one of the biggest YouTubers in the world and he just messaged me on twitter.
“Usually, I'm hired for data analysis. I’d go into their studio and see their data, views, how long people are watching for, how many likes, who’s watching. I’d find insights there to use in content. I’d one creator who was making about €100,000 a month from about 20 million views a month.
“From analysis, focusing on their content, coming up with better ideas and titles, we went from 20 million to 50 million in terms of six months. It basically doubled revenue by focusing on making better videos.”
Paddy has clients in the UK, East and West Coast America. He has a hectic schedule but believes it’s important to take time off.
“There’s crazy time differences,” he added. “Sometimes I'd be working at one or two in the morning.
“Throughout the pandemic I worked every hour of every day but this year I discovered this new fascinating concept called the weekend so I tried to see how that works. I try to take Saturdays and Sundays off.”
Paddy doesn’t fear that his career could take a hit because of TikTok. He reckons that the short videos and longer videos work together to promote themselves.
He said: “Short form has been around for a while now, for two and a half years, but since then longform videos have gone up. They complement each other, they don’t compete with each other.
“People want to watch long form creators. YouTube has YouTube shorts, lots of people watch them. Tiktok is banned in some countries like India where there’s two billion people.”
You can check out Paddy Galloway on Instagram here and YouTube here.
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