Two weeks before I wrote this, Wiz Khalifa published a new documentary, Still Rolling Papers (11 years after his debut album, Rolling Papers).
A quick look: Will Smith has close to 10 million subscribers, so does Ye. Ellen DeGeneres has 38 million. Kim Jong-Kook’s Gym Jong-Kook channel has close to 3 million subs. Gary Vaynerchuk has close to 4 million.
Wiz Khalifa has a whopping 26 million subscribers, with his new documentary debuting to 1.5 million people so far. It’s been a long time since I listened to a Wiz song, or watched his DayToday videos. But Wiz and his team are incredibly consistent, and they ship. To YouTube’s credit, they show Wiz’s work to enough people to make it worth his time and investment.
It’s worth noting at this point that Wiz does not rely on YouTube to monetize directly, and he works with other channels and media; he uses YouTube as one of many platforms to promote his businesses. This documentary promotes his album and career as a recording artist. Amongst other businesses (I’m sure), he’s got his own gin and cannabis brand, and he leads his record label Taylor Gang.
I appreciated that this dropped at YouTube, which was at the platform that Wiz bet heavily on in his early days, setting up his own version of what Dan Runcie calls the OutKast Edge (Tyler and A$AP on Tumblr are similar). I am also surprised it wasn’t at Netflix or another distributor. Here’s one of his first videos at YouTube that I could find, him introducing himself and his new song to the world. (Check out Gary Vaynerchuk’s and Seth Godin’s early work too.)
It’s something I’d been thinking about lately. I want to start speaking, so I should be spending more time practicing speaking and showing people who can hire me to speak. I’d been fixated on finding the right opportunity, uncertain how to make it happen, but my slow hunch is I start practicing and publishing it at YouTube and sharing it with my own friends and audiences. Things will move forward from there.
On a side note, eight years ago my friends and I shot and released our first Prologue video at YouTube, which got featured at Hypebeast (shouts to Hypetrak). We shipped, made videos with Ty Dolla $ign (signed to Taylor Gang), Post Malone, and A$AP Ferg, and then we stopped. We all had other things going on, and nobody to drive this one.
(But it’s never too late to start again.)