my Journey Begins before YouTube was ever even a thing I look back on my videos from 5 years ago and I and I cringe into my face dude there there is no strategy I just Chase whatever I like the thing that I say is like I never signed up to make thumbnails I want to make videos only thing that really hurt your channel is if you that's Mike and I wanted to sit down and ask him some questions because I found his channel completely by accident you see I just got done watching a video from
Curtis Connor he has over 5 million subscribers on YouTube and he's just one of my favorite commentary channels immediately after watching that video I get pushed another video that I hadn't seen before with Curtis's face on it Well turns out that video lived on Mike's Channel and at the time of me finding it he had about 5,000 subscribers so naturally I had a bunch of questions number one why is he not more popular he seems to really have this down to a science at this point when it comes to making videos number two unless they're
like really good friends how do you land an interview with a channel that is that much larger than your own but most importantly number three where do you go from here because unless you're going to just interview really massive channels all the time are you just kind of doomed after this is this your one viral moment ever what Mike shared with me though wasn't just fascinating it was really inspiring Mike certainly knows about the YouTube algorithm and he does think about it but what I gathered after speaking to him is that he's certainly not playing
by its rules Mike is making content he's passionate about content that he loves and honestly that's what I want for myself and all of you so I'm going to let him speak now and I do hope you find this as inspiring as I did take us back to the very start of your channel what inspired you to start YouTube my Journey Begins before YouTube was ever even a thing I was probably maybe seven or eight years old and uh I don't know the the whole context of this but I just remember my dad and I
were on the internet doing something and somehow we stumbled across some video and it was a Lego stopmotion animation my dad must have seen the look on my face because he was like oh we could do that and I'm like what are you magic because I'm not magic I can't make Legos come to life dad and he was like no it's just a bunch of photos just that play back really fast and I was like oh okay and I think like one birthday or Christmas later I had a SpongeBob said and like there were a
lot of times where I would just take the pictures of like a stop motion but then I wouldn't like edit it or anything I just like taking the pictures because I was like seven or eight fast forward a couple years and then YouTube came around and I had gotten into editing at that point and I was like hey Dad can I like upload my videos to this YouTube website and he was like this is how long ago it was he was like yeah I I couldn't get it to work but if you want to try
posting to YouTube then yeah you can I was like okay okay that's all on a channel that um we'll never see the light of day and I will never speak of again because I was so young I think I think we all have one of those I think if you're past the age of of 20 then you have that that one embarrassing channel from when you were young so I posted on there for a long time and I just picked up Lego stop motion and uh just just never really put it down I got to
the point where I I kind of wanted to infuse my myself and my own personality a little bit more and so then I started mixing these these storytime videos that I had seen like I I took inspiration from like odd ones out and um ice cream sandwich cute little animations and they just tell like a personal story and I was like well I don't think anyone's ever done that for Lego stopmotion before and so I just kind of started doing that and I do a little bit of commentary on the side and some goofy sketches
with my friends and stuff like that and uh here we are we noticed that it was like there was a point where it felt like you kind of started to take YouTube like extra serious yeah I definitely had a mentality switch for one thing YouTube started to get more and more um as a viable career option for just you know anyone it wasn't just the pewdiepies and the Mr Beast of the world I'm starting young up until maybe I was in my late teens early 20s I was fascinated by YouTube and I was uploading on
YouTube and I loved it and everything but in the back of my mind it was like this is cool for now but like I want to make movies and TV shows and so everything before that that period where I wasn't doing anything that was when YouTube was a side thing and I was like I want to um make movies maybe D uh maybe wri and direct and stuff like that I was being an extra a lot in movies and TV at the time I was like a like 14 hour days two days in a row
and while I was there um and I was just a lowly PA which if if you don't know that's a production assistant it's it's the lowest of the lowest job you can have in on any production and while it was there to the producer like appropo of nothing totally unprompted just like turned to me and was like you know I've been in this business for 26 years and I don't have a dollar in savings oh and I was like well some would say this is not a very good job to be in then no so
that initially got me thinking about it and then um maybe a year or two later I got to chatting with this guy he was a camera operator for like 18 years and I told him like yeah I'm I wanted to be in the traditional media for a long time but lately I've been thinking about just like going all in on YouTube and he looked at me and goes there's a lot more money in that and I was like well now maybe it's time to rev viate a little bit from then on I don't know just
between those two things happening around 2020 um so this is fun I I I haven't told anyone this around 2020 actually I know the exact date April 11th 2020 I uploaded my million subscribers special and ever since then it's been yes ever since then it's been on unlisted and I made it when I had 411 subscribers oh wow and it was it was a way for me to be like okay like I'm uploading this because I will I'm going to hit this Milestone and like I'm going to do it starting now I'm going to take
it seriously wow and so that was kind of my little Reawakening I guess you could say my little my little personal Renaissance moment and I I look back on my videos from 5 years ago and I and I cringe into my face collapses on itself but that's what you're supposed to do right if if you're not cringing at your old stuff then that means you're not getting any better over time so I think like the natural next question you are at at the time of recording this you are at 6,670 odd subscribers and when I
saw your video you were at 5,000 something odd subscribers so I feel like you've jumped up by like over over a th subscribers since I watched that the growth feels like it's coming in fast yep um I don't know when you posted this but because YouTube is bad about showing me dates on this but you even posted a short saying you just got monetized when was that Hello friends Mike Crocker here I wanted to jump on here real quick and uh and and and say a pretty a pretty big announcement as of today I am
a YouTube Partner I posted that I think a week ago now okay so very recently yeah very you hit monetization congratulations thank you how as an unmonetized YouTuber do you go about networking with other creators uh like that are in like the millions of subscribers at this point well that's the million subscriber question isn't it in a way okay there we go I think self-awareness is is really important when you're when you're a YouTuber I think part of being self-aware is knowing when to be humble and when to like like show off a little bit
so with that being said know that what I'm doing is pretty unique like animated story times are nothing new like my my Inspirations were other Story Time animators but no one has ever done it in Lego stop motion animation still right now I saw I've seen one other guy that does 3D uh Lego stuff but that like that's a whole other can of worms that is not stop motion that is 3D that is something else so I knew that I had this I I I was doing this this thing that was pretty unique and people
are drawn to things that are that unique and so I if I I figured if I could just get the attention of someone like Scott Kramer or Curtis Conor or Eric strifler they would also think like those are the kind of people that can appreciate something that that is that is really unique and that's where I started thinking about like value prop okay what what what is in it for them to come on my channel and like give me the time of day like essentially someone who's who's nobody I thought to myself like well you
know we all we all have those memories that are very near and dear to us and if There's an opportunity for an artist to be like hey like I W to I want to take like your personal memory and like put my own artistic spin on it and show it in a really unique way like would that be of interest to you I think most people would be like hell yeah that's interesting that's so that's so cool and all I have to do is sit there for 30 minutes and tell the story like yeah let's
go and so I think that's what really um what really sold uh Curtis and and everyone else that I've had on is like 30 minutes you get your story told in a really unique way that is really really cool how long did that video take you to like get to from start to finish this was nice enough to come on my little channel here and tell the story of some textbook Tom fery from his teenage years and and then I went in and gave it some more life via Lego stop motion animation I did all
the math I did all the math cuz che check this out man so here's my here's my little Studio setup right and you see that big iMac there which has now blurred out found that iMac at a dumpster but but it works great and it now just kind of serves yeah I know right and now it just kind of serves as my as my Netflix machine so I whenever I'm over there working I always have that on and I'm always watching something it's always something I've seen before so I don't get too honed into what
I'm watching so I can keep working and I went back and made a tally of everything that I watched while I was building all the all the sets for it and while I was um while I was actually shooting it and it took me 155 and a half hours wow that's just the Lego portion we're talking about just the Lego portion that's that's not pre-production and that's not uh post-production so yeah you still have to like come up with like who am I even going to talk to you're waiting on them to reply you sit
down you actually record with them and then yeah you have to edit everything too oh my gosh did you use a camera like one of those little ones that's on a stick cuz you had like little Lego Minifigures as well like it zooms out and there's two people standing there so you can't use a a phone or anything like what what do you use for that I use my Sony a73 which you're looking right now and then for that shot I use this baby okay this what thought yeah Pro Blends yep so that's how I
was able to get it through the two little double doors and um I love this thing man those best $1,500 I've ever spent you can get such unique uh perspectives with a good old Pro Blends what would you say to somebody who wants to make this kind of intricate maybe stop motion kind of content but does not have $1,500 for for a lens I would say start the way that you would start any YouTube channel like use your phone there's so many stop motion apps for your phone you can I've seen people build like um
like a little Lego insert so that their phone like stays you know upright um I mean I started off with just like a you know a point and shoot digital camera from like 2006 or something you just have to dabble in it and figure out if you even like it or not because some people it just takes way too long like the most common question I get is how long does it take and then it's always followed up with wow that must take a lot of patience and it does so yeah I you know you
have to have um an inherit patience or or at least a willingness to to become patient and you know shoot shoot at 10 frames per second starting out you know make it really wonky it doesn't matter just just love it first and then and then take it from there if that makes sense is Lego stop motion uh in any capacity like the the only type of content you are making or are you doing some other stuff on your channel as well the Lego stop motion stuff is definitely the bread and butter it's it's the thing
that um I think keeps uh people coming back but because they take so long I've been trying so hard to find a good system for like I probably shouldn't call them this but filler videos and that's like me you know sitting at my desk or on the sofa with my fiance and we like you know we'll look at like stupid uh listings on Zillow and just try to have a laugh or like watch a bad movie something like that like the you know the Crux of commentary stuff stuff and then um I really like making
sketches too yeah I I do a variety of things and I'm trying I'm trying to cultivate a little thing where it's like like obviously that the stop motion will always be like the cool stuff I mean the Channel's called Mike Crocker so I'm trying to um as attention horory as the sounds like Center it around me so I'm genuinely asking and I don't know the answer to this myself um no one I guess no one should claim they know the answer to this but do you feel like the channels like Curtis's where he can take
a month to make a video do you feel like that opportunity is there for channels more of your size where you don't have to make things that you feel like are filler no I definitely think there's a um there's a way to do it where you can take a month to to make something like there there are some people that I that I really really enjoy like NY Jakey Eddie burbach people like that I I swear they they just they remember once a quarter that they have a YouTube channel and that they should upload and
that's that's not like a you know it's not like a jab or anything but it's just funny how they they upload like four times a year and every time get like you know minim a million views or whatever so there's definitely a way to make it and if I if I wanted to go really hard just in Lego stop motion then um I'd probably have maybe a little bit better success but I I I'm just so idhd and I have to I just crave variety like I couldn't make just the same kind of of thing
over and over again so that's part of why I you know I do other stuff as well do you feel like the videos that don't do as well as say Curtis Conor interview hurt your Channel in any way I don't know if they hurt my channel they just kind of hurts my ego a little bit and that's about it you know I also think that like either like a a video does well and it helps your Channel or a video doesn't do well and then it just kind of stays where it's at if that makes
sense but I I don't think anything is really goingon to hurt your only that really hurt your channel is if you take a huge departure from what you've been uploading or you say some things that are questionable or something like that but besides that if a video like flops then it just it doesn't hurt your channel it just doesn't help it if that makes sense that's exactly what I believe as well uh I just I I wouldn't want anyone to watch this and feel like I can't I can't test things you know I have to
stay on this one little train and I don't think like when you look at some of the biggest channels on YouTube I don't think they got to where they are by staying with one little tiny thing and never branching out even in small ways you know like just at least tweaking their format if not adding new formats to their Channel yeah for sure yeah if someone could watch a mik Crocker video and it and it feels like it's coming from me then that could theoretically work if that makes sense what would you say is the
biggest hurdle that you've had to overcome oh my god dude these pesky bills rent oh don't even get me started on the bills Dan that's yeah that's fair up until like two minutes of us having this interview I was working on freelance stuff um I'm doing I'm doing some stuff for Home Depot which is pretty cool oh yeah um it pays me well it's a nice work life balance but oh my God I would just rather not do it at all and just focus on my channel but but like but like in all seriousness like
the work life is really hard like this is when you start a YouTube channel and to the capacity that like like someone like myself or or you and or anyone that wants to make a career out of it you have to treat it like a business and you have to work that business in around your your daily life and that's you know taking on a regular job but that's also like a social life like I I refuse to be one of those people that locks themselves in a shed for like three years to work on
their business and like isolates themselves like I love my friends too much and like want to wake up in five years and not have any so just just a balance man it's it's so hard and sometimes I'll have periods where like I lock in like extra hard for like a week and then sometimes I'm just like I don't even want to see a camera for the for the next week I it is Chill time so I I feel that uh I'm gonna ask you a question because I think this is something you're really good at
but I don't know if you've heard this term before so I'm just gonna be cheeky and say how important is Primal branding for you I I have no idea what that is okay so you're doing it right now I've noticed this microphone you're holding oh this is that is that is Primal branding that is just something that is PE people in your community have probably noticed I have to imagine someone's mentioned it in your comments have probably noticed this tiny little blue microphone yeah I I have this blue one my fiance has a pink one
whenever she's on same size and shape and everything I love that is it was that part of your strategy or was do you think oh this is just a little gag oh it was just a little gag dude there is no strategy I just Chase whatever I like and whatever I think is funny some things stick and and some things don't this is just one thing that's stuck I don't know you got to it it just goes back to experimenting and just you know following your instincts and everything it's funny because when I was um
earlier in my journey I was seeking like more advice and now I'm kind of at the point where like I just need to like I said follow my instincts more and I was on like uh like YouTuber advice subreddits and everything I would post videos for people to like critique and like review and stuff like that and something that a lot of people would would say is that like I think a critique for me is like the the little microphone is like cute but it's kind of distracting I would Nix that people said that all
the time and I'm just like hell no dude so wrong it's it's funny right it feels like when you do stuff like hold the tiny blue microphone I only need to watch one of your videos to kind of get the sense that oh that's like a regular thing you know and now I'm paying more attention like I'm starting to look for other quirks and and things with this new channel I just discovered and like what what else what other signatures do they have you know and uh for for us like like Rob Wilson here on
this channel like got really into Primal branding and so he decided to get these like blue glasses like I know dude I I watched the the video you guys uploaded today about um about tags and it's funny you mention that cuz I not I've always noticed that he wore those but specifically today I locked in on those glasses and I was like Rob always wears those blue glasses and it's just like you said it was Primal branding I didn't even realize it was working on me it it's just yeah you just start to get a
better sense of the person in front of the camera with so much to learn about YouTube and all the frustrations that come with that I wanted to ask Mike how he continues to stay motivated and stay on track without just kind of deciding to give up having a support system is really really really really a big thing uh I'm in a Discord server with a bunch of other uh small YouTubers some of them aren't so small now we're in this Discord server like every day just yapping about like our analytics ideas like all kinds of
stuff and we you know we've been having it going for two years now and it it just helps so much just to have someone to to just Yap at about this stuff you know I mentioned her a couple times my fiance Lauren when we first started and dating and everything like she just embraced immediately that like that like I'm a YouTuber and that's what I want to do and everything and uh you know sometime like I think we all get we all get down on ourselves sometimes and you know no matter how confident you are
and there have been times where like I'll be like hey let me ask you do you really think I can do this and she's like it's not even that I think you can do it I just know that you're going to one day and so that just really you know that compounding effect really really helps just from having a good support system that's my one big piece of advice yeah that is excellent advice I've seen it work the other way I've been I've been in just discords it was like anti support it was mostly just
venting you know and it it will bring you yeah it will thrash you it will make you feel this is this is why like I think subreddits and stuff can be really helpful for like getting information and things like that but if you spend too much time in spaces that kind of like go the negative when it comes to this stuff I can speak from experience it will make you feel negative about the thing that you are passionate about otherwise Y and I I I know it might sound a little bit hokey but like believing
in yourself you know and being around people that believe in themselves yes like you will manifest that success it will just happen because you are not worrying about just hating whatever it is that isn't working or just being down like like you mentioned earlier you post something on your channel it doesn't do well it doesn't mean it hurt it just means yeah okay it didn't it didn't move the needle forward but it's not like the needle like an anchor hits it and it falls through the floor yeah and sometimes seeing that 10 out of 10
on Studio it can it can feel like that but that doesn't mean that that is what's happening it's it's more or less it can be a learning opportunity I know when I see 10 out 10 I'm not in learning a learning mood I'm in a leave me alone mood I I think a lot of people look at it as like a toxic thing but I think if you could take a step back from it you start to look at your stuff more objectively this is just a system that's looking at your video and going like
yeah and it gives you hints it's like this is kind of the problem with this video not not as many regular viewers are watching it learned L the YouTube algorithm is really big and it's always changing but so is the platform of YouTube as a whole and people's perception of it and what this did was send us down a completely different Rabbit Hole during our conversation and it really came down to kind of the future of YouTube for all of us YouTube TM has been has been talking more about uh viewer satisfaction versus like watch
time and all these other metrics because like at the end of the day it's like yeah that is the most important thing is like is the viewer Satisfied by watching the video whether that's a 5-second video or a five hour video like it's so it's so subjective yeah I'm hearing through the Great Vine that like more and more people are canceling Netflix and YouTube is becoming like the streaming service that speaks to the satisfaction part because if we are going to as YouTubers compete with a juggernaut like Netflix at the end of the day if
people are sitting down and choosing to watch US versus something that's like a billion dollar production then you need to be making satisfying content because now you're not competing with the Channel Next Door you're competing with Netflix you're competing with HBO and that might sounds silly but it's literally true for for the average person in their living room especially if you are watching the bank right now and you're making sure that like you can afford everything like how many streaming services do I really have I'm kind of watching YouTube more right now so maybe I
will wait for my Netflix shows to stack up a bit I'm going to cancel Netflix right now like that's not a far leap to okay now what do I watch oh well my crocker just put out a new video and I you know I happen to be eating lunch so I'll watch this with with lunch uh it's it is literally we all have the a finite amount of time right in the day and it's literally your 15-minute video it's either that or half of a Netflix show and you know your video is going to offer
a complete experience and if you really care about it and you're putting your best foot forward suddenly you became that person's watch for the day instead of the Netflix show instead of whatever was on TV and anytime someone watches YouTube on your TV that means they're not watching Netflix or HBO on on TV so they they should be very worried now Mike's channel is certainly growing quickly but there's another Channel we talked about recently that had a lot less videos and has grown even faster that story is right here enjoy
