Todd Rosenberg
- Brandon Rogers is a YouTube star with 4.5 million subscribers who was nominated for a Streamy Award for Comedy on Tuesday, but his road to success has not been easy.
- Rogers toiled on YouTube in relative obscurity for years before going viral on the now-defunct video service Vine.
- Rogers' career has included many twists that are emblematic of the changes (and struggles) of digital
media , including having a show on a subscription service that shut down, dealing with having his videos demonetized on YouTube, and getting one of the first premium Facebook Watch shows. - Rogers gave Business Insider a behind-the-scenes look at his rise, from making depressing videos for a personal injury law firm to the time Facebook told him to tone down the blood and feces on his show.
It was 2 a.m. by the time Brandon Rogers had packed up everything he could fit in his car, ready to run away from his hometown of Livermore, California - a small, sleepy city on the outskirts of the San Francisco Bay Area - and to Los Angeles.
It was his "rock bottom point," Rogers told Business Insider. He was in his mid-20s and had been making YouTube videos for about seven years, with only a few thousand subscribers and nothing tangible to show for it. He had watched his other actor friends make their way through college and graduate.
"I was scared," he said. "I was going to be left in this town without my friends because they all got their s--- together and got out."
Little did Rogers know the YouTube channel that seemed so futile then would - a few years later, and a decade after he started it in 2006 - begin to blow up, eventually reaching its current height of over 4.5 million subscribers. That subscriber count puts Rogers in the upper echelon of YouTube creators, and he was nominated for a Streamy Award on Tuesday in the Comedy category.
But it hasn't been a straight path. In many ways, his long strive for stardom is representative of the numerous fits and starts the fledgling web video medium, and its top platforms, have experienced over the past decade. Rogers, right alongside Facebook, Google, Twitter, and a few other titans, has been trying to figure out what native web video content is, what fans want, and what business model makes sense.
On his way to the top, Rogers experienced every twist of the changing ecosystem, from going viral on video-sharing network Vine (RIP), to landing a show on Fullscreen's now-defunct subscription service, to creating one of the first shows on Facebook's Watch platform.
"It really does feel like I'm on the cusp of history," Rogers said. "I'm not making it, but I'm a part of it."
Indeed, Rogers' comedy feels like it could only exist in the Wild West of the internet. It is frenetic, bawdy, offensive, and utterly unhinged - in a way that millions have found hilarious. He has developed a roster of dozens of surreal characters who interact with each other, often at a dizzying pace.
His characters include an ornery grandpa who refuses to provide candy, a mom who always seems to be on the verge of a highly caffeinated breakdown, a blind German fashion designer, and a strict hall monitor.
If you aren't familiar, here is a video that mashes up a lot of his characters:
But while Rogers said he's always enjoyed playing various characters, he didn't develop his signature style until he took a depressing job at a law firm - following that late-night move to LA - and found his cameraman and collaborator Gabriel Gonzalez.
In tracing Rogers' story, you can see what a strange ride the digital media business has been for creators over the last few years, and how little Hollywood (and even tech giants like Facebook and Google) understand about this new world of internet entertainment.
Developing his style while making brutal videos for a law firm
The first job Rogers found in LA was making videos for a personal injury law firm. Rogers would go into the house of the plaintiff of the suit, the injured person, and do a documentary on a "day in their life" with their new, horrible circumstances.
"It's so sad, you'd cut to their confessionals, 'What do you miss most about your previous relationship with your wife,' and they would start crying," he said. "Almost all the videos won the cases. It was a dark job. I had to take someone who was f----- up and make them look even more f----- up [to] pull the heartstrings of a jury."
Rogers did the job for three years with Gonzalez, who was the cameraman. Gonzalez was brilliant behind the camera and would get beautiful shots for these videos, Rogers said. And the idea started brewing in Rogers' head that these "day in the life" videos were compelling and could travel beyond the courtroom context.
"Let's make a funny version of these," Rogers proposed to Gonzalez one day.
Rogers had been making every type of YouTube video imaginable for nearly a decade, but these "day in the life" videos of wacky characters were the ones that caught on.
But there was a big problem.
Rogers' videos didn't go viral when he uploaded them to his YouTube page. They actually started to get picked up when someone Rogers didn't know uploaded 6-second clips of them to the video-snippet-sharing platform Vine. (After buying Vine in 2012, Twitter shut it down in 2016.)
The first clip that blew up on Vine was a clip of Rogers playing his grandpa character at a supermarket.
"They didn't think I was an actor," Rogers said of the people watching the clip on Vine. And worse, he wasn't credited. Then another clip, and another, began to circulate on Vine. He wasn't credited in any of them.
"No one knew it was the same person," Rogers said, because he looked so different dressed as each character. He said he even started seeing quotes from the clips on tee shirts in restaurants and felt "maddeningly" like Bruce Wayne or Clark Kent.
"No one knew it was me," he said. It was agony.