Daedoseogwan’s The God of YouTube — Building a Channel before There Was a Playbook

“One-person media” once sounded like an awkward phrase. YouTube’s growth in South Korea made the idea familiar: an individual could put out a programme regularly and build an audience for it.

The business around those individuals grew too. Creators began signing with companies known as multi-channel networks, or MCNs, which work with online talent.

When Independent Creators Became Part of the Industry

A popular YouTube creator can draw an audience comparable to a television celebrity’s. Some use that audience as a route into broadcasting.

The traffic goes both ways. Entertainers and professional gamers also turn to YouTube to make programmes of their own, sometimes earning more than they did through established outlets.

Successful channels can become businesses with their own staff. You don’t need to start with millions of subscribers to see why the possibility attracts people.

Daedoseogwan and the First Generation of Online Broadcasters

Na Dong-hyun, known online as Daedoseogwan, was part of the first generation to make independent broadcasting and streaming familiar to Korean audiences.

His importance lies partly in how he put live streaming and YouTube together. A broadcast could have a second life in an edited form, with a different audience and another way to earn income.

Live platforms such as AfreecaTV and edited video on YouTube once seemed like separate kinds of work. When Daedoseogwan began drawing attention to his YouTube earnings in 2013, more streamers saw a reason to edit their live broadcasts for the other platform.

The God of YouTube

Na published a book about that experience in 2018. Its title translates as The God of YouTube.

He starts with what it was like to broadcast alone and traces how the channel found an audience. He also addresses a question readers are likely to bring to the book: income. The figure he discusses for his channel at the time was about ₩40 million a month.

What It Was Like to Run the Channel

The story begins when Na leaves a large company to try broadcasting on his own. He writes plainly about the isolation of those early sessions and uses incidents from the broadcasts to show how he learned to keep going and build a following.

He spends some time on planning a programme and running a channel. Much of the book, though, is the story of the person making the videos and dealing with what happened next.

Where the Money Came From

Anyone thinking seriously about making videos is likely to wonder how the bills get paid. The book gives a concrete account of where revenue came from for one established creator.

It describes three main sources:

1. Audience contributions
2. Advertising through Google AdSense
3. Direct deals with advertisers, including production fees

For Na, advertising and direct deals made up much of the total. The book puts the combined figure at around ₩40 million a month at the time it describes.

Making Something You Can Keep Making

The book also offers some practical ideas about making and scheduling videos.

Na’s advice is to keep the channel within one broad subject and make work on something you genuinely enjoy. Interest gives you a reason to keep filming after the excitement of starting a channel fades.

He suggests putting out one or two videos a week and trying it for a year or two. The point of that time is to get a feel for the work and learn whether you want to stay with it.

For someone who has heard about the money and is thinking about doing YouTube full-time, the quieter parts of the book may be the most telling. They show what it meant to make a living as an independent broadcaster before there was an obvious way to do it.

Book Information

The God of YouTube (Korean title, translated)

Author

Na Dong-hyun (Daedoseogwan)

Publication date

10 May 2018

Daedoseogwan’s YouTube channel

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSHVH_AWVUc-C8-D8mh8W6A

View the book on YES24

We may earn a commission on purchases made through the affiliate link in this article.