j aubrey has found success on YouTube diving deep into the lore behind popular and controversial public figures. We had a chance to sit down with j aubrey to talk about how he went from Lego animations to YouTube commentary, his approach to narrative structure and content creation and why consistency is key for new creators.
j aubrey
Subscribers: 1.23 M
Uploads: 85
Video views: 169,483,662
Content type: Commentary
User created: Feb 11th, 2018
Before j aubrey
“I’ve always wanted to entertain people,” j aubrey tells us at the beginning of our interview. “I started my first channel when I was 13 making Lego stop motion animation videos.”
Before starting the j aubrey YouTube channel we know today, j aubrey was writing and producing stop motion shorts on AubreyStudios82. Friends would help with script writing and voice acting, but j aubrey took on the laborious animation process. “I would, you know, just take a bunch of pictures of Legos,” j aubrey recalls. “It was very time-consuming.”
j aubrey didn’t expect much from this Lego-based storytelling endeavor, but one video struck a chord with viewers, raking in around 400,000 views seemingly out of nowhere. j aubrey says this had a big impact on how he viewed YouTube: “That really motivated me to keep going and let me see that this was actually somewhat of a viable thing if I really put enough time and resources into it.”
Too many Legos
All of through middle and high school, j aubrey kept making stop-motion animations, but when high school ended, j aubrey faced an issue. “I wanted to keep making content,” he recalls. “I didn’t really think that I could continue animating in a dorm setting because I had a big animation table set up with, like, lamps and all this stuff.” The amount of gear and space required to continue his stop-motion work just wasn’t practical for dorm life. It was time for j aubrey to pivot.
At the time, j aubrey was binging content from YouTubers like I Hate Everything, Colossal is Crazy and The Right Opinion. (Spoiler: j aubrey and The Right Opinion have gone onto become friends, with TRO offering j aubrey advice and encouragement along the way.)
“I really enjoyed what they were doing,” j aubrey says, looking back. “And so I thought that maybe I could try doing that because all I needed was a mic and a computer — I didn’t need the buckets of Legos that I’d been using in the past.”
A successful pivot
There was one hiccup in j aubrey’s pivot to commentary. After uploading his first two commentary videos to his existing animation channel, he discovered that most of his viewers just weren’t that into it. “They didn’t perform very well because I realized that’s not what people had subscribed for.”
Rather than try to drag his existing 120K animation fans into the commentary scene, j aubrey started a new channel. “It was kind of nerve-wracking: the idea of starting fresh again,” j aubrey admits, “but my friend, The Right Opinion, convinced me to just go ahead and start clean and see what could come of that and just start posting over there.”
That turned out to be great advice. As of this writing, the j aubrey YouTube channel has amassed 1.23 million subscribers since it began in 2018.
j aubrey talks commentary
The j aubrey YouTube channel started out with 13-1400 cross-over animation fans, giving it a slight boost early on. j aubrey began posting around two videos per month, garnering a couple of thousand views each. Channel growth was slow, but j aubrey enjoyed the process.
“I was teaching myself how to write a different kind of script, and I was teaching myself how to edit in a way that I had never done before … I really enjoyed the learning aspect of it and also just researching the people that I was talking about and giving my opinion on them,” j aubrey reflects. “I just found it very rewarding because it was something that I had never done before.“
Gaining traction
“Everything kind of changed that November [2018] when I made a video on this TikTok predator.” The j aubrey channel had been enjoying slow but steady growth since launch, but then one video — a comprehensive timeline of TheBudday’s allegations and controversies — skyrocketed to 4 million views in just a couple of weeks. With this surge in views, j aubrey’s subscriber count also quadrupled from around 20K subs to around 80K.
“I just remember being, like, so blown away,” j aubrey recalls, “just like, every time I would refresh, it just kept going up.” j aubrey says this is the moment that convinced him YouTube was worth his full attention. Until then, j aubrey had been editing for The Right Opinion and doing other odd jobs. After this first viral hit, j aubrey decided to put all of his time and effort into his own content.
YouTube as a career
While j aubrey is technically still in college —”I have two classes I need to finish before I can graduate,” he admits — he still considers YouTube to be his full-time gig. That hasn’t always been the case. “The first [animation] channel was definitely more of a hobby and more of a passion project … this channel started off as a passion project [but] it definitely turned into something where I view it way more as a job.”
j aubrey says it can be hard to find the balance between viewing YouTube as a career and still finding joy and passion in the work. “It is for sure a job,” he tells us, “and that can come with like stresses as any job would, but at the end of the day, I mean, this is what I enjoy doing more than anything else. And I have no idea what I would be doing if I weren’t doing this.”
How j aubrey attracts viewers
When asked how he makes sure the videos he makes will bring in the views, j aubrey offers simple advice: “It boils down to what do people want to see?” j aubrey explains that the easiest place to start is with yourself — think about what interests you and what’s missing from your YouTube homepage. “That’s kind of why I started making commentary videos,” j aubrey reflects. “I wanted to see people talk about these creators that we’re not being covered.”
To get new video ideas, j aubrey makes sure to keep up with the latest news from creators both on YouTube and elsewhere online. “I’m constantly looking at what’s going on, like, in the YouTube space … who [is] involved in controversy.”
Unlike many commentary creators, though, j aubrey doesn’t try to chase the trend right away. Instead, he waits until the dust settles. His goal — and what has become his niche — is to tell the whole story. “I’ll try to put together, like, as comprehensive a video as possible going over the controversy that person just experienced a few months ago,” j aubrey says.
Because j aubrey waits until his subject has left the cultural hot seat before telling their story, he is able to structure his videos into compelling narrative arcs. For j aubrey, this process is essential.
“I focus a lot on like the structure of a video. That’s probably the other most important thing beyond the topic itself,” j aubrey tells us. “I try to structure it in a way that, even if it’s someone that maybe my audience has never heard of, they would be interested in learning their story.”
Thumbnails are key
Another factor is attracting viewers is, of course, the video thumbnail. “Thumbnails are the most important thing,” j aubrey reminds us. “Like, I really put a lot of attention into like crafting a thumbnail.” While he has passed off some of the editing work, j aubrey still makes all of his thumbnails.
“I try to make like something that looks kind of uncanny — something that’s gonna catch their eye,” he says, referencing the creepy smiles he imposes on his subjects’ faces in each thumbnail. “You want to choose a very expressive face when you’re making a thumbnail,” he advises. “What I discovered is … some of the people that I covered didn’t always have the most expressive faces. And so I just started just adding smiles.”
Along with the exaggerated smile, j aubrey also adds bright pops of color to his thumbnails to make them stand out amidst all the other videos on YouTube. “You have to package the video in a way that makes people want to click on it,” he says bluntly. “Sometimes that means kind of dipping into clickbait, which I think is fine as long as the video is worth that person’s click.”
We love a good deep dive
j aubrey suspects that having a typical video runtime of 60-90 minutes also plays a role in his success. “I love to watch like a good deep dive on something that I know nothing about,” he says, “And so that’s what I like to make, and I feel like that’s what people respond to really well … if it’s a long … they can just, like, put on in the background while they do something else.” He notes this format seems to work well for a lot of creators right now: “That just seems to be what’s popular at the moment.”
He also points out that longer videos can give viewers a reason to return to your channel, potentially increasing overall views: “Like, they’ll maybe watch half of it in one sitting and then maybe like a few days later, they’ll come back and finish it.” That is, if the video is worth watching. ”You want there to be substance so that people feel compelled to watch the entire thing,” he reminds us.
Adding capacity
For a long time, j aubrey researched, wrote, recorded and edited all of his videos himself. While not as time-consuming as stop animation, it was still a long process to tackle on his own. However, j aubrey recently found a solution: “Recently, this past summer — really starting in May — I’ve been outsourcing my editing a lot more frequently just to speed up the process … for the longest time, it was just me doing everything. And that’s why I was able to only get like one video out per month.”
Working with outside editors doesn’t only free up time for deeper research and script writing. This collaboration also opens up new creative possibilities: “Now that I’ve worked with some of these editors on a few videos, I kind of know what their strengths are, and so I will play to that as I’m writing the script … it’s like a different challenge.”
Advice for new creators
Throughout the interview, j aubrey emphasized the importance of consistency. “Consistency is absolutely key,” he insists when reflecting on the advice he would give to new creators. “At the beginning,” he says, “just talk about whatever you want to talk about … make the videos that you want to watch yourself, and make sure to stay consistent with it.”
He goes on to point out that each new video is another chance to improve: “You want to be enhancing your skills enhancing the quality of each video … don’t worry if the quality is like not that great at the beginning because you can always refine that as you go along.”
Even for j aubrey, staying consistent can be a challenge: “It’s like, you can have a video that you work on for a month, and you do, it does really well, and that’s very rewarding and very gratifying. And then it’s like, okay, well, now I have to do that again … That’s why you have to really enjoy it.”
He reminds us that success on YouTube is never guaranteed. “Nobody should really go into YouTube for the money,” he says. “It should be the content that you want to focus on because if you make good enough content that people want to watch, then I think the money will follow.”
He goes on to say that consistent breaks are just as important as consistent production: “I can see why people do get burnt out and struggle with motivation. And I think that can be a very challenging aspect if you do not take consistent enough breaks.” In other words, creators need to remember to go outside sometimes.
In the end, though, j aubrey is encouraging to those entering the YouTube scene: “I feel like it can just be very daunting, thinking about building a channel from the ground up. But my best advice would just be to do it … because you don’t really know what to expect until you’re actually in it.”
What’s next for j aubrey
“I’d like to continue doing the kind of videos that I’ve been doing for basically as long as I can, j aubrey assures us toward the end of our conversation. “Especially now that I’ve been outsourcing … I feel a lot more motivation to continue on with what I’ve been doing because I am looking forward to posting a lot more frequently.”
The j aubrey YouTube channel has found good success in his hour-plus deep dives, but with more help and resources, he also hopes to add some new formats into his content rotation. “I am trying to get into shorts and I’m posting on TikTok,” he tells us. “I’m just cutting my videos that I make down into more easy-to-consume 60-second shorts.”
Most exciting, j aubrey has plans to expand his production to include in-person interviews and investigations. “It would be really nice to kind of do what I’ve seen other YouTubers do, which is make a blend of documentary footage that you yourself film and then like the B-roll that I’ve been doing.” He references iDubbbz as an example: “He goes out and will spend time with a person and will film them and … tell their story through you know, their own testimony.”
We can’t wait to see how these more involved documentary projects turn out. If you’re curious too, you can keep up with all of this upcoming content on the j aubrey YouTube channel.