The British Creator Meme-ing History
Welcome Back & Learning History Thru Memes
Editor’s Note: Welcome Back!
Creator’s Digest is back! There are many reasons I stopped writing this weekly newsletter.
The main one is that I recently got laid off.
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Onto Today’s Deep Dive
Meet LazerPig.
LazerPig is a British YouTuber with almost 256K subscribers who covers history with popular memes. He’s never shown his face and has a rabid fanbase.
There’s little known about LazerPig’s actual name and identity as he never shows his face or identity in his videos. Instead he relies on photos, short videos and popular memes to enhance his voiceover audio of his videos.
It’s a fresh, fast-paced take on history which historically has been quite a boring re-telling of events. Especially when you think of history textbooks and how history is taught in school.
How They Started
LazerPig started uploading videos to YouTube in November 2020. That first video has 224K views now and the video is about the first (and second) tank in existence. LazerPig shouldn’t be as popular as he is just based on the content type but he is and he has a rabid community of fans from YouTube to his Discord.
LazerPig (or Pig as he sometimes refer to himself as) is what people would call a meme-lord. Someone who has a concrete understanding of meme culture and can appropriately place memes into their videos to effectively tell the story they want to tell. It’s a skill, art and mastery in and of itself. There are very few history documentaries or even shows that can keep your attention while teaching you something. Pig does that incredibly well in his long form videos that are often 14-20 minutes long.
When Pig started on YouTube with his first video, he didn’t have any community oriented things set up. No Patreon, no discord, no place for people to talk except for the cesspool that is YouTube comments. As LazerPig’s community grew, so did his adsense, subscribers and revenue. He started diversifying and maintained his consistency in uploads, something that many creators forget.
Consistency Builds Character
Consistency + Community = Concrete Creator. You must be consistent and you must have some sort of a community that believes in what you’re doing. It’s hard to say exactly when you should monetize your community and double down on being a creator but you know it when it happens. LazerPig first made a discord where he could talk to folks directly and then subsequently researched and then eventually launched on Patreon.
Let’s take a look at LazerPig’s subscribers and views that are identical and correspond to how Pig didn’t see a big takeoff until about 14 months of consistent uploads. His first video was in November 2020. His cadence is weekly but it can also be more frequent when he wants.
Making long-form history videos can definitely be time consuming but keeping a weekly cadence is great for any creator of long-form content.
Consistency paid off handily for LazerPig as his subscriber base grew just as he started making more and more relevant content. You can see from his most recent videos that he capitalizes on topical events and providing in depth analysis on topics that people are searching for.
That strategy of talking about things that are topical helped LazerPig gain almost 100K subscribers and have some of his videos hit 1M+ views. It’s not a unique strategy but it does help to cover topics. In this case, it was Putin, Ukraine and of course more tanks (LazerPig really loves covering tanks).
Launching a Patreon
The next great thing that LazerPig did was launch a discord. Discord allowed LazerPig’s community to engage with each other. They can chat in different channels, engage in contests and vote on topics LazerPig should cover in the next video. The discord still exists but after launching it and maintaining it for almost 6 months, LazerPig decided to launch an actual revenue-generating channel, Patreon.
Why Patreon? Well Patreon allows people to support LazerPig directly and pay for access to more content. It also gives people access to the discord after they’ve paid, it’s a win-win. Pig gets paid for making the art he’s already making and people can pay $3, $6, or $11.50 for more Pig.
At $2K a month, it’s a solid revenue stream for Pig and a great way to continue making the content he’s already making and providing exclusive content to patrons on Patreon.
Takeaways
Consistency is key → LazerPig’s subscriber growth didn’t happen until after 14 months of consistent uploading. Stay consistent and the results will come.
Diversify → After seeing a decent community building, create spaces for them to co-exist on their own. Discord was Pig’s solution to this and then Patreon so he didn’t have to rely on adsense for income.
Privacy can work → No one really knows what LazerPig looks like. It’s always just a voiceover. With that comes a lot of privacy because anyone on the street in London could be LazerPig. Becoming a decent YouTuber does not mean that you have to use your voice. You need a story to tell and the motivation and desire to tell it and publish it.
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