The Richard Branson of YouTube: Oliver Gilpin

Hacking real money from Shorts, hiring great international teams, and how to animate profitably on YouTube

The Creator: Oliver Gilpin

It's one step to be a Creator and start hiring someone. It's another step to then know how to incentivize them, manage them, and try and get to a situation where they're doing the right thing without you looking. That's kind of the ideal situation, and that's where incentives really come in.

Over the last few years, Oliver Gilpin has quietly built a global portfolio of animated, educational YouTube channels with millions of followers in more than half a dozen languages.

Oliver isn’t your typical Creator. While he’s deeply creative, and launched several of the channels himself, he’s been willing to do something more creators need to: hand over the reins to someone else.

Today, Oliver has around 70 people around the world working on his business - producing content, dubbing voiceovers, managing channels, and more - and all of them are incentivized, through participation in the success of their projects, to have an ownership mentality.

Did I mention that Oliver is a digital nomad? When I spoke with him, he was at Machu Picchu, in Peru. If I remember right, he was off to Southeast Asia after that.

How does he make animation work on YouTube? And how does he successfully scale dozens of channels in many languages while seeing the world?

For an excerpt from The Business segment of my conversation with Oliver, keep reading - click through?here?to read?the full interview.

Let’s get into it!

The Business

The goal has always been to do what Richard Branson did for Virgin, which is his holding company and has lots of different franchise brands in different niches in different industries.

The goal is to do something similar, but just on YouTube - so you have different niches, but the base of the business is that we know how to build media brands, scale them, and make revenue from them.

That’s why I started my first channel knowing I wanted to make many more. The first was OtherWorldly, the second was MrSpherical, and that really succeeded. Within ninety days, we had 100k subscribers from nothing, and no promotion, just purely growth. Within a year, we did a million subscribers.

Zero to a million.

Breakdown

Links

• Now Creatives Introduction
• MrSpherical
• SolarBalls
• WorkerBoi
• OtherWorldly History
• My Teenage Story
• Catgirl Maia

Observations

You’ve probably noticed that Oliver owns a LOT of YouTube channels. That’s because he does a fantastic job of two things I believe more Creators should be doing:

1. Hiring, incentivizing, and trusting talented people to run channels for him, and
2. Working to maximize the value of each asset (video or channel) he creates.

The secret to his approach is tapping into the global talent pool - a path less traveled by other Creators.

A lot of Creators are like “I can't hire an editor overseas because they're gonna be crap.”

Okay, well, I've just taken it to the next level - like, I'm hiring people to run my channels overseas, and they're doing great.

It's about how good you are at talent sourcing, how good your are at hiring, how good you are at just understanding what good talent is, really.

That's what it is. If you understand that, you can hire someone in the cheapest country possible, and you'll still find someone incredible. That's the key.

I think there's a stereotype that people in these other countries, like Philippines or Argentina, are going to somehow do worse work, when actually, no - if you incentivize them well, and they're getting double their average salary in the country, then it's going to be quite the opposite.

Actually, they're going to be much better.

This approach is largely available to Oliver because his portfolio of YouTube channels are animation channels. He’s not limited to real-life production, and therefore can hire the right people for the right job at the right price wherever they are.

Thus, he can have animators in - for example - Argentina produce videos for his English-language channel, that he then hires an American VO (voiceover) artist to voice and run.

That’s not all though.

By reinvesting some of the earnings from the English-language versions of each video into dubbing versions in other languages, he makes much more than he would have - in profit - if he had stopped at the English-language video.

The best part? He doesn’t have to manage this process himself - he basically hires a local animators and creator-CEOs for each channel, and incentivizes them to build it themselves.

A lot of other creators who do languages, they tend to hire an agency that does hourly pay or a fixed payment maybe per video that's dubbed. So they might pay, let's say $20 per minute of their video that's dubbed, which means if you do a 10 minute video, you pay $200, and then on top of that, you've got to do the editing. So you might want to re-edit some of the subtitles to different languages. You might want to have someone to do community posts to engage the audience and make a community within that language.

So you end up having quite a few roles to get split, and our approach is not to do that. It’s to try and decentralize it as much as possible.

Essentially, we try to find people who are good at VO [voiceover], have some basic channel management ability, have some basic editing ability, and they're usually a VO artist who is maybe a hobbyist starting to be professional. They are still in the “building their portfolio” stage and they're therefore a really suitable person to take the brand and treat it like their own channel, like treat it like they're a Creator themselves.

So this is a really nice approach, because these guys who are running the channels, it's like their own project, their own creation almost, which they're entirely managing themselves. They have control over it, autonomy, and that creates an ownership mentality that serves in them caring about it. So you get the whole package, basically.

YouTube recently released a feature that enabling a single video to have multiple audio and subtitle tracks, so that one channel can be the hub of a Creator’s global audience. Oliver, however, prefers to operate multiple channels - one for each language.

Why?

Read the rest of the interview to find out:

READ MY INTERVIEW WITH OLIVER GILPIN

Oliver loves collaborating with smart, creative people. If you’re looking to start a channel and have an idea - or find something else he’s doing interesting and just want to connect - reach out to?[email protected]?and?CHECK THIS OUT.

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