Creator Spotlight 👾 MxZ: “Having fun while making content is way more important than curating it for others.”

Let’s start with a quick intro!

My name is Isaac, also known as MxZ on YouTube. I’m 20 years old (soon 21!) and I make gaming content. I have a part time job, and I’m in my third year of university, studying film. I post on YouTube, also TikTok and Powder. That’s for gaming clips. I also have a second channel on YouTube for Lego building, called “Lego Therapy”.

It all started with YouTube when I was 12, which was not the most glamorous time (laughs). It involved using a really old camcorder and filming my TV screen. If I played with friends, I would get them on Skype on my phone, balance it on the top of the camera, so that that picked up the audio. It’s gotten better over time of course. Today, I spend about 30-40 hours a week on average making clips.

Creating content itself is about 60% of the work — there’s a lot more that happens around it.

Do you steam as well?

With my friend group we fell in love with streaming a little bit lately. None of us really did it before. But all found out how much we love the interaction that comes with streaming. My passion will still always mainly be videos.

Do you steam on YouTube or Twitch?

I’ve never really felt like Twitch is a platform that suits me. YouTube’s always been my home. And I’ve kind of got an audience and a viewership there. And I’d feel wrong pulling them over to another platform. I really like YouTube, I like everything that the company does. The streams are really clean and they get saved straight onto my channel, so I can have all my content in one place.

MxZ’s YouTube channel.

I see you have over 50k followers on YouTube, it’s pretty impressive. How did you grow your community? Did the numbers spike at some point or was it more of a steady curve?

A big spike is something that I’ve never really achieved. It’s always been a very steady grind. I think I had a little bit of a boost during lockdown last year, with everyone at home just watching content. So, it’s been 5 years of slow and steady growth.

But I actually like that. I think you get more of a community and people grow a bit of a stronger bond to you than if they just find one trending video and go, “Oh, this looks cool”.

If I’m picking subscribers up slowly, it means I’m building the community off of my content, not just one trend. I feel like the quicker you blow up, the harder you fall off.

Whereas if you just slowly build the bricks up, then you’ve got a strong foundation.

Since you only recently got into streaming, how did you manage before to bond with the community? Must be more tricky without live interactions.

Throughout my time on YouTube, I made a point of replying to every single comment, without fail. Discord has been an amazing thing for the community, too. Being a part of a creators’ group means that our different communities come together. Of course, streaming is great thanks to live interactions. With comments you can back and forth a little but answering more than once can be tricky. Whereas with streaming, you can have an actual chat. Last thing, I recently started with “YouTube Members” — it’s a really great way of getting the strongest community. One of the perks I give back is movie nights, where we watch movies and talk with my followers.

Having spoken about your creators’ group — the Winkies — with Excel HD in the past, I’d love to hear your opinion about it too. Do you feel like without the group, your path as a creator would have been very different?

I was the latest to join — only a year ago, by the way. The group kind of saved me because my previous group — they weren’t YouTubers, but friends from RL — they fell out of love with gaming. And there was a period where I was really struggling to make content without having anyone to bounce off of. Being part of a good group pushes and motivates you to do a lot. My editing was half of what it is now — I’ve spent a lot of time improving my editing to get closer to their level. Without them it just would not be the same. They all deserve massive success and that is way more than I do, because they’re all just incredible people and all their content is amazing.

The Winkies group of creators that MxZ is part of.

Since you have a somewhat similar style with other group members, how do you manage to get inspired by others without basically starting to copy each other?

It often happens that there’s a highlight from our gaming session that everybody has recorded, like a really funny moment. We don’t necessarily race to get it edited first, but there is definitely a little bit of a need to get that one out quickly. To be honest, it doesn’t necessarily make any conflicts.

I really enjoy seeing how people can use the same footage completely differently, how creative everyone is in their own unique ways.

It inspires me, I can learn from others, which helps me make future content better.

MxZ with ExcelHD.

Is there a gap between the kind of content you wish you created and what is “popular” these days?

Somewhat, yeah. There’s some clips of mine I genuinely love that I know will not perform incredibly well on socials. But I personally love how it’s edited and had fun with it. For example, this Fallout video we did before Christmas (below). It’s hilarious, but it doesn’t get to the 10 min mark, which is like a “law” of YouTube — and didn’t do that well with viewers.

There was a time during lockdown that GTA was doing super well for me — every video would get crazy view. Had I just carried on with GTA content, it might have skyrocketed. But me and my friends stopped enjoying GTA so we switched games. For me, that’s what content creation is about. Five years down the line, when I go back and look at those clips. I won’t be thinking “That’s the clip that didn’t do well”, but rather “Oh, that was a funny moment that I had with my friends”.

Having fun making clips is way more important than curating content for others.

It must still be challenging to stay true to yourself creatively in an environment where there is so much content online?

I actually think authenticity and creative content is kind of on the rise again. There’s been a shift, from everyone just acting like a “sellout” for a few years. Maybe not everyone, but there was definitely this big clickbait thing going on, with lots of YouTube videos that no one enjoyed making, but that did well for the algorithm.

People realize now that the lifespan of this ‘trendy’ content is incredibly short. The audience will leave as soon as the trend passes. So, its better to to actually do what you enjoy, and if it works out — great! People will love you for what you love. That is the dream scenario, isn’t it?

And do you feel like shorter form content is generally received better? We hear a lot of talk about shorter attention spans, with platforms like TikTok really leveraging that.

TikTok is a fast food chain, while YouTube is like a five star fancy restaurant.

Fast food is good every so often but the best experience is still on YouTube. I think YouTube’s always gonna reign supreme for the length of your content.

On YouTube, I have 50K subscribers on TikTok — 400k followers.

I see the YouTube subscribers being worth so much more. If I got 1M views on TikTok, I’d be like, “Oh, cool”. But if I got the same number of views on YouTube, I would be losing my shit.

TikTok is easier, but not many people go on the following page — 99% of content consumed is from the “for you” page. So even though people follow you, they’re not necessarily going to see your other content. Whatever you make will also disappear in like two days, it won’t be prioritized by the algorithm anymore. On YouTube, people subscribe to the content they will see on their homepage, maybe even getting notifications — and the content is there five years later for people to watch.

In a nutshell, TikTok is a promotion feed for me as the creator, while YouTube’s where I put my main content. I can spam three clips per day on TikTok, and every time it’s gonna get a different audience — which is a potential audience for the YouTube channel.

Where do you see it all going in the future for you?

At a certain point, I would want to sort of switch directions from gaming content creation or add a little bit extra. I study film at uni, so that’s a long term project. The dream scenario I’ve always imagined is: I create content on YouTube, build an audience and maybe do that as a job. I’d love to go into script writing, and then maybe push out film to that audience. I love coming up with stories and directing films, which is why I enjoy editing YouTube videos — I get to decide where the plot goes and how it plays out. That’s where the elements kind of crossover between today’s content and the future. I guess I’d love to be able to do both, in a sense.

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To follow MxZ on YouTube, go here!

To learn more about Powder, visit our website.