Creator Spotlight 👾 ExcelHD: “Creating in a group is amazing!”

Hello! Tell us a little bit about yourself. Who you are, what you do for a living.

I’m ExcelHD, 24 years old. I look about 18 because I can’t grow any facial hair at all (laughs). And I’m currently a retail assistant, but I’m looking into getting into QA testing for gaming, where I’d be playing games to test them and search for bugs. It’s something I really aspire to get into because I’m a game design graduate.

I also make videos on the side: I’m super into video editing. I’ve been doing it for way over 8 years now! And it’s finally starting to pay off. I’ve got 20k followers on YouTube, and almost a quarter of a million on TikTok. So I’m doing super well at the minute I think! I’ve got an awesome group of friends that I play and record with, who do content creation as well.

Wow, so editing is really your big passion.

Absolutely. There’s so much freedom. I can easily spend 48 hours editing one video and I’ll have fun doing it the entire time. It’s just something I’ve always been super passionate about. And I feel it’s also opened up a lot of doors: I’ve had a lot of editing offers recently as well from big creators, one of which had 3M subscribers. I’ve probably been an idiot not accepting it (laughs). But it’s fine, I know there will be more offers in the future.

How did you learn?

I did it the way everyone else should: just download a software and mess around with it for hours, test yourself out more and more with each video, and eventually, it will end up being really good. I just started from absolutely nothing, no tutorial event. I wanted to test myself and see how much I could do. You can tell by the first couple of videos on my old channel I wasn’t very good (laughs). That’s all fine tho, I had fun doing it, so it doesn’t matter. Originally it was the almighty Windows Movie Maker I relied on, which is a fantastic software. One of the best on the market. I use Sony VEGAS 14 now. It’s quite outdated, but I’m quite stubborn and I don’t want to upgrade.

ExcelHD’s alter ego (right)

I know that for a lot of creators it can be difficult to start since the software is quite complicated, so it can be a big barrier to entry.

I’m quite controversial with this. If you’re not willing to put the time in, then you don’t deserve to be a creator. I don’t want to call anyone out, but I know this one creator with almost 100k followers who wants to double down his videos, because he can’t be bothered doing subtitles, and the views are going down because of that. You really need to put in a lot of time.

The editing part is really key for me. I don’t really care about views or anything like that. I know it sounds cliche, a lot of creators say that. But I truly have fun with it: my mates and I go online, we have a laugh, play a bit of CoD Warzone, Battlefield, whatever. I have no schedule, I will upload every week, every month. It doesn’t matter. As long as the videos are good quality and it gets out to people. It doesn’t matter to me. The views could go down. I could care less to be honest.

Has it been problematic to combine that level of commitment to content creation with your job?

I recently asked my boss if I could have reduced hours, precisely to have more time to make content. Surprisingly enough, and I never thought I’d be saying this, but content creation has really become a part of my everyday routine now. I receive money from it now, which is insane. So mixed with a part-time job as well, which is fantastic for me.

Like I said, I do this as a hobby. But if I ever had the chance to turn it into a full-time occupation, I’d do it in a heartbeat.

I’d love to go to work tomorrow and just slap my resignation notice on the table in front of my manager (laughs). I would kill to make content all the time, but it’s not a priority.

I understand that your main thing is content creation, what about streaming?

I’m very new to streaming, actually. I don’t use Twitch, because there’s just a lot of bad vibes around the platform. They’re in the media too much, with bad publicity.

It seems very sensitive. People get banned all the time, just out of nowhere, for no real reason apparently. I see so many creators nowadays lose everything because Twitch doesn’t like them. So I prefer to stream on YouTube. Plus, that’s where my audience is anyway!

In that sense, I made the mistake of — I wouldn’t say blowing up — but gaining followers before streaming. So I started streaming with like 40–50 viewers, which was terrifying, as opposed to starting with zero (laughs). So it was a little bit scary but cool in the end.

You’re the first creator we interview for the series that streams on YouTube, is that becoming more and more popular now?

It’s becoming big, yeah. They’ve recently taken on a bunch of creators such as TimTheTatman. He’s now streaming on YouTube Gaming because they pay him, as opposed to Twitch. And I believe lots more creators will follow. It will be huge.

So YouTube has alternative revenue streams for creators?

It’s the same sort of setup really. Except that on Twitch, you’ve got the subscribe feature where you can subscribe to the channel for a month. On YouTube, you don’t have that. Rather, it’s built on donations. I’ve got quite a generous community, they give me way too much money, I don’t understand why (laughs). But generally, there are a lot fewer donations on YouTube, feels like they will add more in the future. What they do have is this thing called “members”. It’s similar to the subscribe option, but different in that creators have to offer things in exchange. I offer my community a private Discord server, where they can gain access to early uploads. It’s a lot more in-depth. Whereas with Twitch, you just subscribe, get a couple of emotes and a ‘sub only’ mode in the chat. On YouTube, on the other hand, you have to genuinely offer them a service when they become a member, which is fair.

Do you earn money through any other platforms?

There are multiple sources. TikTok is one, they have a creators’ fund. I’m also fortunate enough to be on their marketplace as well, which has stupidly high requirements. I don’t know how I’ve got it. That allows companies to offer me sponsored videos and stuff. In addition to donations and memberships, there are also YouTube ad revenues, which are quite big. And obviously occasional corporate sponsors.

Tell me more about the group of friends you create with, did you guys meet online? How does this co-creation arrangement work?

So we met at this random YouTube forum called YouTube Talk, back in the days. There weren’t a lot of ways to meet creators. We didn’t have TikTok when I started making videos, so the only real option was YouTube Talk, which is a website where you will post forums explaining about your channel, what you’re after, what the requirements are to collaborate with you and you can meet a lot of other creators through that. That’s how I met my current group, the previous one as well. It’s a super good website, but it’s very outdated nowadays.

So the people I play with are: MxZ, Bloo, Wadism, Mr Bio, Benje.

From left to right: MxZ, ExcelHD, Wadism

People say that we are very relatable: real British, with that British sense of humor, we laugh together all the time like good friends. It’s super natural for us, whereas certain people will force out content, just to get the video to 10 minutes. And you can tell.

A lot of solo creators would kill for a group like ours, where you truly vibe with people. Another amazing thing about the guys is that we don’t have to make content all the time. When we just want to chill, we go and play for fun off-camera. For us, it’s not all about content creation — it’s about being friends.

Are there ever creative disagreements? Do the egos get in the way?

There’s probably been a few arguments, but never an ego barrier, at all. Sometimes, I hate to say that, but the smaller guys can get a bit frustrated when their videos don’t do well. There have been multiple instances where we’ve uploaded the same clip and they’ve got fewer views by a landslide than me or Isaac (aka MxZ). And there have been a couple of disagreements in terms of what games we play and the moderation on Discord. It can be hard work, but I believe now we’re that close with all across the UK — we’ve met up twice now — we’re amazing friends. No matter what disagreement we have we always come round and sort it out together, have a proper chat. I think that’s how we’ve gone along for so long and got so far with it.

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