INTERVIEW: Vikkstar on the Sidemen and the future of YouTube

0:00This is a Triple J podcast. When it comes to the world of YouTube, the scale truly is something difficult to imagine. The top creators have got audiences larger than the world's biggest country. So they've got followings that dwarf some of the most famous pop stars and actors in the world and mind-blowing production budgets. So what does it feel like to be part of that world? To go from a teenager creating videos in your bedroom to having more influence than you could ever imagine. And will this world last? I'm Dave Marcazi. This is Hacks' Long Listen of the Week, a chat with popular YouTuber Vickstar from the internet juggernaut, the Sidemen. If you know YouTube, you know exactly who I'm talking about. Vikram Singhban, or Vickstar, has been massive for years. He's part of one of the most prolific YouTube channels

1:01in the world, the Sidemen. That channel alone has almost as many subscribers as the population of Australia. And that's not even counting the millions more followers on his own personal accounts on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. In this interview, Vickstar talks about everything, including his collab with the biggest YouTuber in the world, Mr. Beast. The cost of that was around half a million dollars. Just for one YouTube video. What it takes to climb to the top of YouTube, I had three different channels. I was uploading five or six new videos every single day. My, you know, 16-hour day would entirely consist of making content. He's thoughts on Australia's social media band for kids and how platforms have changed over the years. An algorithm deciding what they see, rather than their own interests. I don't love it if I'm being honest. And Vickstar, the DJ, how he feels playing the biggest events in the world. If he's ever thought about quitting social media altogether

2:03and what he sees as the future of YouTube, whether you're a mega fan or not, this is a really interesting insight into a world that dominates the lives of so many young people around the world. Here's my chat with YouTuber, Vickstar, from The Sidemen. Vickstar, welcome to Hack. Hey, thanks for having me. That's quite the intro. I've got to live up to it now. How does it feel? Just hours after finishing a set because you were performing literally, you said six or seven hours ago? Early hours of this morning. Feels good, you wake up in Australia, the sun's shining, everyone's happy. And you keep it moving. I saw you also have taken to Australian culture, pretty well, the mullets, the Australian beer, the football shorts. What do you make of how we live life here in Australia? Yeah, I think it's great. I've got a lot of very good friends that live here. And I don't know if I had the patience to grow a mullet, I think it would look good. Vick, this is a big question the launch off with. But how does it feel to be part

3:03of one of the biggest most successful YouTube channels in the world? I would say quite surreal. It's not something that any of us set off trying to do. We started making YouTube videos before you could even put adverts on the videos. Going from that to now having so much resource, a team of 40, 50 people helping us put together videos. It's something we never expected, but it allows us to do so many cool and exciting things and build this community. So yeah, no complaints. It's no complaints. I mean, it's kind of interesting because you're so famous, and the side men are so famous around the world with people who know your work really well. But you may not be as well known to people outside of that YouTube space. Do you feel like you've kind of cracked this code of being able to be mega famous while also being undercover at the same time? You know, I think you're right. We sometimes describe it as just a huge bubble. I do feel like there's a huge divide between kind of online culture and traditional entertainment culture

4:03and we sit somewhere in the middle. We have this audience of people that know us from our content over the years. And these people, they've watched hundreds and hundreds of hours of our content. So we feel like we know them on a personal level. It's almost different to any media that's existed before and until you've engaged in our content in these hundreds of hours, like a lot of our really awesome supportive fan base have, it's not quite the same relationship. But we don't mind that because everyone's so supportive and it's a fun core community. I mean, you said it's a big bubble. It's a massive bubble. It's incomprehensible. The sort of this bubble like I had a look and all of the subscribers across socials. It's like 140 million followers. Equivalent to being in the top 10 biggest countries in the world by population. Do those numbers mean anything to you anymore? Like is it so big that you just can't even comprehend it? I think you're right there. It is, yeah, you can't visualize what that actually is or how many people this really is because it is so spread out across the world.

5:05But you know, honestly, we could be a great country. If we could just get everyone together, if we could unite these 140 million people, what could we achieve? He's launching it here right now. Big star wants to launch his own country. That's a headline that'll grab a bit of attention. When you started, you were 14 years old. You were having a bit of fun in your bedroom creating these gaming videos. When did you realize, actually, I reckon I can make this hobby into a career. I would say it was very much blurred lines. The first few years of making YouTube videos while doing my studies at school, it was, I was making pocket money out of doing it. But it was this knowledge that, okay, when is this bubble going to burst? This bubble has to burst. How can I be paid for playing video games and recording it? It was something that no one else was doing, didn't make sense. So I think it took a long time for the confidence to come in to think, okay, one, this entire bubble itself is not going to burst and YouTube isn't just going to become this obsolete platform. And two, I had to pivot the content I was making.

6:07And I had to build confidence in doing that. It's a scary thing. Thinking, okay, I'm going to pivot my content. This could be the end. This could be my whole audience gone. Found people who supported me throughout that whole journey. And that gave me the confidence to then take a gap year, defer my university studies. I think I'm on my like 13th gap year now. Still, still seeing I want to go back to university. 13th gap year is goals for a lot of people I would imagine. I was going to ask actually, like have you thought much about what you would be doing if this YouTube stuff hadn't have taken off? Like where do you reckon you'd be? What kind of job do you think you'd have? So I've always loved science, especially kind of physics and the concept of space. And I think I would have studied that. But I think as we often know, you take a kind of high level degree in science and then often end up working so we're completely different. And almost the degree is just the proof that I can knuckle down and work hard for three, four years at university. So I think it's likely I would have ended up in some form of corporate job somewhere.

7:08Which is so interesting. Because people would be thinking, oh, you're super creative, you'd be in some creative space, but you're saying not really. No, no, definitely not. There's a lot of a science and maths to YouTube. And that's also why the Sidemen itself works because we're seven individual creators started our own careers very unique as people. And we all have our different strengths and weaknesses. And for me, on YouTube, we get all of the data instantly. Every minute we can see how many people are watching videos, which videos they're watching, which country they're from, what age they are, on average, when are people clicking off videos, which moments are making more people tune into the video, things like this. So there's actually a real kind of science and data analyst, a series of skills that you can use on YouTube. Well, let's try and give people a bit of a scale of some of these videos that you work on. Like if we take the one that you did with Mr. Beast, the collab that you did that's had like 40 million views or something, how much work and effort goes

8:09into that. What kind of a team is behind something like that? And if you don't mind me asking, how much does something like that cost? Okay, so yeah, that was an interesting time. We had our Sidemen charity football match. Mr. Beast had come over to play in that match. And we thought this is a missed opportunity. We don't collaborate with him. At the time, our videos were a fairly low budget. Sometimes videos would almost have no cost. We would go out holding our own cameras, film ourselves doing things and post it as a video. But we thought, okay, this is Mr. Beast. He's got some pretty mega sets and videos. We've got to build something cool. You've got to step it up, yeah. So we hired a warehouse for two weeks. We hired set designers to come in and build almost Takeshi's castle themed challenges, which is a game show we grew up loving. The cost of that was around half a million dollars just for one YouTube video, which is- Half a million, would that be easy? Would that be US dollars or Australian dollars? It would be US dollars.

9:10That's why. For one YouTube video. And that was hard for us to get our heads around. Especially, you know, you think someone would build a set like that for a game show. They're shooting a whole season off. But we were saying, build it one day, film it for eight hours, and it's gone the next day, which is different to what we usually do. But it worked. I mean, it sounds like a lot of fun, a lot of the time. You're getting to do some really cool things, meet some amazing people, and entertain such a massive audience. I also imagine it can be really hard and grueling, especially probably early on in your career. And there would be people listening now thinking, oh, how much work is it creating content or chucking videos up on YouTube from your bedroom? Can you explain, Vic, like how much time were you spending in those early days creating content for your channel? You know, at my peak of creating content, I had three different channels. I was uploading five or six new videos every single day, and my 16 hour day

10:10would entirely consist of making content. I would wake up, have a quick breakfast, sit down at my desk, I would make a video, I would record it, I would edit it, I would upload it to my channel. And the moment that was done, I would start working on the next one. I'd send out some messages to some friends, say, hey, do you want to record this video with me? And when I felt like I was tired, I would stop going to bed, wake up the next day, and need the exact same thing. Now, the interesting point you made, as you said, what was that struggle like, or the grind, so to speak? I didn't feel it at all, because to me, it was so exciting and novel, so it never really felt so much like work in the early days. And it was actually, as the audience built and built and built, that's when it started to feel more like work, because you're thinking, okay, there's this audience of thousands of people, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people who are now expecting this content, and I have to live up to their expectations. So that's when things started to change, but the upside of doing something like that

11:12is that the bigger our audience became, the more resource we had to create better videos. Have there been moments where you really have felt the full weight of it and thought, ah, this is not working, or I'm not doing a good job? Yeah, there's been numerous of these throughout my career, and sometimes you work really hard on something, you think it's gonna be received amazingly, and there's just, you know, there's just none of that, and it really makes you sit down and question, and you have to, you have to double down and think, no, okay, I'm gonna keep going. You have to, you have to shoot and miss to eventually land on something really good, but again, it's been a long career in doing this, and we've developed a thick skin and close friendships that allow us to push through those moments. I mean, you said, Vic, before when you were younger, and you were creating 14 hours a day, seven days a week, while you were in that, you weren't even really noticing just how taxing it might have been on you. When you look back now, what kind of impact was it having on your health? Was there a big consequence to all of that work

12:15in terms of your social life and your physical health? Yeah, looking back, it was a little bit crazy. I wouldn't recommend doing what we did. I think during the winter in the UK, there were entire weeks where I wouldn't see the sun coming up, because I was on a different time zone, just constantly chasing that wheelhouse of content. A lot of elements of health that I was neglecting, I had a bad dire, I wasn't getting outside, I wasn't getting enough exercise. I grew up in a time definitely where health wasn't and diet wasn't really talked about. It was kind of, you know, eat your greens, get you five a day, yeah, you're good, kind of thing. And now we know so much more about health and wellness and fitness and what you shouldn't shouldn't be doing. As I started to slow down, I looked around and realized, okay, what is my life if I'm not making videos? Was there ever a time where you thought, am I addicted to this star for all this time online and is it unhealthy? I would say it wasn't even a thought, it was an understanding. It was a real hang on a second.

13:16I'm spending too much of my time doing this. I need to focus on friends, family, creating things for myself outside of this work. But I think the more I go through life, I realize that actually to enter the kind of top of any space, it almost does require a degree of obsessiveness. And that will only come from a true passion for something. So I don't kind of regret any of those moments, but yeah, six or seven years into it, there was this realization that, okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna burn out so much if I don't now find things outside of this space to balance with it. Vic, I don't know if you're aware of this, but recently Australia introduced this social media ban for anyone under the age of 16. And YouTube was included in that ban. And now we've got other countries around the world, including I think England looking to copy that ban. What do you make of this? This idea of banning young people from social media? It's an interesting one. I definitely see both sides of the coin.

14:16And if this rule was passed many years ago, I wouldn't have a career. So I definitely can't say I support it. I started age 14, YouTube videos, social media. And I think it can be a great, great tool for people to learn, network, create. So for that reason, I think a ban is unfortunate, but also I see the flip side algorithmic content, the short form content that's five seconds, everything has to be so attention span grabbing, so engaging, hyper interactive. I don't love that. I don't think that's great for anyone. I don't think that's great for me. And especially people who are younger, who are kind of forming their opinions of the world, and algorithm deciding what they see rather than their own interests. I don't love it if I'm being honest. I see both sides of the coin really. Do you think reflecting on your own experience and talking about feeling addicted to social media early on and when you were a creator,

15:17that the harm that may be inflicted upon young people or some of the issues that young people might be having when engaging with social media, that creators have a responsibility to recognize that and to do something about it. Yeah, no, I fully agree that part of the responsibility does fall on creators to be mindful of what they're putting out, the messages that are sending out with this content. But also at the same time, I think it is super challenging because audiences really used to go and seek out the content they wanted to find and then align with a creator that's creating that where it's now the entire scene has shifted to whereby this mysterious algorithm decides what people shouldn't shouldn't see and a lot of creators are purely just chasing that because they have to. They're changing the content they're creating because they have to chase what's relevant in the algorithm, what the algorithm is suggesting and feeding two people. And it creates this, like you say, this hyper-addictive cycle. The algorithm knows what people want.

16:18It provides more of what people want. Creators have to create more of that and everything becomes hyper-optimized and maybe slightly less human. And we try and get away with that with our YouTube content. We try and keep making long YouTube videos, one hour, one and a half hours, real experiences, putting that across rather than this hyper-entertainment-driven, short-form content. You opened up about your battle with Crohn's disease, which is an autoimmune condition that actually a few YouTubers have revealed they have, Mr. Beast being one of them. Yes. Can you explain what it is and how you got it if you know? Yeah, well, it's frustrating for one thing. I'll tell you that much. It's an autoimmune condition that a lot of people just seem to develop and they're researching it. They're trying to work out why it happens. There's no fantastic answers yet. There are partial solutions, but no cure as of this moment.

17:20An illness where your immune cells don't recognize some cells within your gut lining. So your immune system attacks your gut and it can cause discomfort, pain issues. I do have some medication that kind of helps with the condition, but it is, and this is what a lot of people with it will say. It's a struggle because it's an invisible illness, so to speak, you can't visibly see when someone is suffering with this illness. They'll just be more tired, more ill in and out of hospital. And it's a challenge because somebody might walk up to you and say, what's wrong with you today? You're so energetic. You're not giving good vibes and it's like, I don't know how to explain to you. I'm just not feeling great. I mean, did you feel a bit of a responsibility to speak up because you have this platform, this big following, and like you said, a lot of people maybe don't like to reveal this kind of stuff about themselves, was that weighing on you a bit? I really should get out there and talk to people about it. Yeah, definitely just because there were moments myself where I felt like I'm the only one with this problem

18:22and kind of, I wish there was, you know, other people who I could relate to and feel less kind of alone in this. So yeah, that was a big part of it. Yeah, and just kind of spreading awareness of invisible illnesses, people with the illness, they can doubt themselves. I can think, wow, is this just me on my own making a big deal of this thing? Or am I actually really ill? You know, I've just run down my body. It's, you know, it's my own fault. Sometimes it's not your own fault. I want to get onto your music stuff now because that's why one of the reasons you're in Australia and you're doing a few shows, how are you finding the DJing? Like you talked about getting into that and being a little bit of an escape in a way, a new challenge, something else that you were discovering. Are you loving this music career? Absolutely loving it. Yeah, complete imposter syndrome thinking, what on earth am I doing? This is not what I ever set out to do, but that's the fun of it. It's the unknown. It's being out of my comfort zone, out of my depth, but also learning to grow in that space and also just sharing music that I genuinely love

19:22and have been enjoying for 10 years. I never expected myself to be able to share that with an audience. I was always in the audience myself. What does it feel like playing something like tomorrow, Lann? Like you've got so many people watching your stuff all the time, but to look out and see them, how does that feel? Completely unique and special. I think, yeah, we can sit there on a Sidemen video and say, oh, this one only got 4 million views. That's, you know, we should be shooting higher than that. But then you play a DJ set to 3, 400 people in a room and they're real people and you see them enjoying and reacting to the music that's being played and you're part of this experience with them. And it's so special, yeah, words can't properly describe it. Where can people catch you here? Have you got a few more shows here in Australia? Yeah, I'm playing at Eclipse in Brisbane on Friday night and then I'm playing at the iconic Ivy on Saturday in Sydney, which is a venue I've been to many times in my past. And again, if you told me back then, oh, you're going to play a DJ set there one day

20:23I would have said, oh, that's a funny joke. Okay, let's move on. Yeah, it feels like you got kind of a nice relationship with Australia and I wonder whether has that come from you building up a big fan base in Australia when it's night time in the UK, it's daytime over here and you're interacting with a lot of those people? Yeah, I think there's a few elements. I think one is the fact that our YouTube content is so globally consumed and the UK and Australia, I feel like there's always been a bit of a brotherhood going on there. And then the other part of the coin is that some of my best friends in the world live here and some other very prominent YouTube creators here, Locklin and Laserbeam have been long-term friends of mine for about a decade in this YouTube journey and any opportunity I have to come and visit. It's a long time to get here, but if I can get here, I have a great time. No, we love to hear it. I isn't an annoying trip though. So you need to spend a bit of time here when you get here. What do you reckon is the future of YouTube, Vic? Like do you think that there are opportunities

21:24for creators, young creators to make the career that you've made in this day and age, to start off from nothing and build a platform that is just massive? So my honest take is that it's now more difficult than ever. I think it would be astronomically difficult to start a YouTube career now. I think if I were to do it myself, I would fail time and time again. However, there is always a niche, there is always a way to really blow up and there's more eyes watching YouTube than ever before. I think the challenges that the production level that's expected now is so much higher than it was when we started. But I think the space itself, there are so many more jobs within the space now that didn't exist a long time ago where people can get involved, they can get experience, they can try new things. And the way I always advise people if they are looking to enter the space is focus purely on the skills that you can learn and the fun and the friends that you can make along the way as cliche does that is.

22:25And just finally, I mean, do you see a life for yourself outside of this space where you are Dr. Professor, Lord, Vickstar, you are a scientist, mathematician? Can you see that is like an happen one day? No, this world is familiar and it will continue to be that way. I can't see myself disappearing off the grid and retraining into some other profession. Massive exclusive for me if you just announce your immediate retirement from social media right now on this random Australian interview. So good to catch up with you. Thanks for making time for us, Vickstar. Appreciate you joining us on Hack. No worries, thanks for having me. What a superstar, literally. More followers than you can ever imagine and an absolute delight. Vick on just a couple of hours' sleep was so generous with his time and you know, happy to answer all our questions. If you do want more details on his performances here in Australia, his gigs, head to his socials,

23:27that's all there. And if you like these long chats, please subscribe to this podcast. Catch us on socials slightly smaller following than the side men. I've got to say that. Triple J hack on Instagram and TikTok. That is all for now. I'll catch you next time.