Really Freakin' Clever a YouTube hit for P.E.I. university student
A longtime video game fan has created a YouTube channel called Really Freakin' Clever and it's piling up millions of views.
Josh MacDougall of Bideford, P.E.I., has 77,000 subscribers and almost six million views of his show.
The show features MacDougall analyzing video games and what made them popular. One of the shows, a spoof of the video game Zelda went viral.
"That still is my most popular video. It's called 64 Things Wrong with Zelda and I think it's just below 800,000 views on its own. It's almost hard to think about how many people that is."
MacDougall receives a cheque each month from YouTube. It is based on the number of people who watch the videos.
The money comes in handy. MacDougall is university student studying drama at Mount Allison University in Sackville, N.B.
Focusing on the good games to stand out
MacDougall said it takes between 10 to 20 hours to create the shows, time he found he had when he entered university.
"I watched a lot of similar shows on YouTube and eventually it just came to the point where I thought I could give this a try."
MacDougall describes himself as a bit of a nerd but, but he's comfortable performing before an audience.
"The way I describe my show is it's focused on video games, but it's more focused on the games that a lot of people remember from when they were kids or when they were younger."
MacDougall said it is the games they really enjoyed like Super Mario, Zelda, Mario Kart and Pokemon. "I kind of look at them and give them a review and say why people enjoyed them so much."
The Really Freakin' Clever host said other shows he watched were making fun of bad video games, because there are a lot of those out there.
"That's funny but I kind of wanted from the start to set myself apart a little bit so it would be easier to describe how I was different. So I decided to focus more on the good games instead of the bad ones," said MacDougall.
"I can see on my statistics the age range and I have people from all over the world, pretty much from every age range from elementary school up to people in their 60s."
After MacDougall`s Zelda episode went viral, a lot more people started to see his work.
"A lot of bigger YouTubers started to share my videos around. It all just kind of escalated from there. It's like a snowball. Once you start getting a bit of traction, things get out of hand really quick."
Strong peer support
MacDougall's YouTube show is also receiving good reviews from other Canadian YouTubers.
Dan Speerin, based in Toronto, has a channel on the TYT network which is the largest news and politics channel on YouTube.
He is impressed with what MacDougall was able to create with Really Freakin' Clever.
"Josh is almost hitting 100,000 views per video so that's pretty amazing considering how many people. There's a billion YouTube users. It's a really competitive field. So Josh's channel is doing really well," said Speerin.
For MacDougall, he is happy with how the show is doing.
"It feels good to know you matter to people and they want to see more of what you want to offer. It's a really good feeling as an entertainer," said MacDougall.
"Basically I just want to grow it as much as I can and see where it takes me."
