Brisbanite Legend of Total War has amassed 470,000 YouTube subscribers and 325 million video views over the course of 10 years of using the platform. He began uploading a video series showcasing his Total War: Medieval 2 gaming skills and by the time the series finished a few months later, he saw the potential for it to become a career.
“When I first started YouTube, it was never the plan to make it a full-time job,” Legend said to me in this video interview. “I just wanted to basically brag that I could do this. But when you see a door open for you, where you see you might actually be able to turn it into a full-time job, that's when I decided to take it seriously and refine what I was doing to try to monetise it and do it full-time. It has worked so far.”
Legend says he’s concerned if a video he uploads doesn’t receive at least 30,000 views within 24 hours of his upload. He highlights YouTube is a good payer.
“Being paid by YouTube is actually the most reliable method of being paid that I’ve ever had,” Legend says. “Up until recently people said ‘you can’t do YouTube, it’s too unstable’. But I’ve never had more job security than with YouTube. They pay me exactly on time (per month on a per-view basis across that month).”
This sounds great but the journey to becoming a professional YouTuber was not an easy one.
Legend explains: “People don’t know the cost of doing this, the sacrifices. It has been the challenge of my lifetime. Often I’m left with a lot of regret as I don’t know if it was really worth it to get to this point.”
Legend’s work ethic has been incredible. He’s uploaded over 6,800 videos to YouTube. He says “unless there were technical difficulties, I haven’t gone more than two days without uploading a video since 2013”. From 2019 until recently he livestreamed playing Total War games every night from midnight to 6am at the very least, to match up with time zones of the majority of his audience in the US and UK.
To conclude his regular livestreaming regime, Legend played Total War: Warhammer 3 for 25 hours straight to raise over $23,000 for various charitable causes. He has continued to upload videos every day. He says his decision not to livestream consistently has “reduced my YouTube income by about 40 to 50%”.
Other modes of income from YouTubing include third party sponsorships, which Legend has always managed cautiously.
“From around 2015 I was getting offered sponsorships but I found I’d put in a fair bit of work to manage that and get like 50 dollars from it,” he says. “So instead I focused on building an audience and rejected around 95% potential sponsorship deals that came through, making sure that the sponsors I did choose were a good fit.”
The mechanism for getting paid while livestreaming is through “superchats”, where watchers of the livestream can donate money and optionally attach a message. Legend reads those messages out, which is a double-edged sword. He gets 70% of the money donated, with YouTube keeping the rest, but the superchats can stress his mental health by having to engage with a sometimes disruptive audience.
“I’d go onto a livestream and people might see that I’m not in a very good mental state and my audience might poke at me which I don’t respond to very well,” Legend says.
“So now I have a choice – I livestream and don’t read the chat which will hurt how the stream performs or I read the chat and there’s negativity there which hurts the channel.
“Now, with less live streaming, I make a lot less money but my work-life balance is much better.”
Another method of making money using the YouTube platform is linking to a creator’s Patreon, which involves a monthly subscription of varying amounts with different rewards attached. Legend acknowledges this source of income can be effective for some people, but it wasn’t for him.
“I think those sorts of sites are useful early on when you’re trying to scrape by but if you’re offering extra content there, you can put so much work into it for little reward,” he says. “This distracts from your main content on YouTube, limiting your growth.”
The threshold to reach before you can get paid by YouTube is currently 1,000 channel subscribers, with either 4,000 watch hours within 365 days and/or 10 million “Shorts” video views within a 90-day period. Legend has poured basically no effort into Shorts as yet. It appears to be an interesting case study for gauging audience interests as well as monitoring what competing creators are doing.
“The Total War audience is mostly men, in their early 20s to mid-30s,” Legend says. “These are typically speaking not people who enjoy Shorts when it comes to video games. “I'm monitoring what other creators are doing with Shorts and nobody is achieving any real success. They're sometimes getting good views but they're not making any sustainable money.”
Overall, Legend encourages all YouTube creators to engage in trial and error and pay attention to seemingly minor details in order to stand out.
“Implement effective tags, think of engaging thumbnails, do not be afraid to stand out. Everyone’s YouTube journey is going to be different. Consistency is the key.”
Check out LegendofTotalWar’s YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@LegendofTotalWar/featured
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