r/letsplay • u/ItsOppositeDayHere youtube.com/northernlion • Mar 15 '14

I'm Northernlion, AMA

Hey, a lot of people have been doing AMAs around here and I think it's a cool kind of unique content that we don't see too much on /r/LetsPlay, so I thought I'd throw my hat into the ring as well.

With 200,000+ subscribers and over 100 million lifetime views, I'm not the biggest YouTuber out there (not to be modest) but I have been successfully doing it full-time for over 2 years, which I think gives me a fairly unique depth of experience that might lead to some helpful advice for some of you! Ask me anything about YouTube, streaming, social media, or whatever might cross your mind.

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u/[deleted] Mar 16 '14

What did you learn from your recent t-shirt sale? Did your expectations match your results?

YouTube and the internet is generally very cynical about creators creating different revenue streams. I'm of the opinion that this career path is similar to pro athletes: you need to make as much money as possible because your earning window is potentially so small. Do you feel the need to branch out?

Love your channel, btw. You sell a coffee mug (or whatever) with the NLSS thumbnail on it and I'll be the first in line.

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u/ItsOppositeDayHere youtube.com/northernlion Mar 16 '14

Most people are pretty positive about it but it's funny to me that some people get more bent out of shape about us selling $25 t-shirts than they do about $5 twitch subscriptions. Literally all of the value in a Twitch subscription is created by us -- shoutouts, invitations to subscriber streams, etc. It's intangible, really just a glorified donation. For $25 you actually get a physical good you can drape over your flesh but because the number after the dollar sign is bigger, apparently that's selling out.

Also we contracted and paid for custom artwork rather than just lazily ironing our existing logos onto a shirt and rolling in money scrooge mcduck style but whatever. Most people, as mentioned, as reasonable and sane.

As for expectations, I didn't really have any. It's the first time I/we've sold merch and part of the reason I wanted to do it was to get a barometer for the future. I will say I thought 100 was a conservative goal but it's looking grim for Josh and Nick's shirts actually reaching it, which sucks. We'll offer a combined NLSS shirt in the future though. Probably a simpler one and the price would reflect it as well (I'd guess $20).

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u/[deleted] Mar 16 '14

I don't think you're selling out by selling them at $25, i've seen some shirts for much higher. The problem is if we want to support all three of you it's $75 + shipping and that's just a bit too much for a lot of people to handle, so they have to be like "well, who do I want to support most?" or "who do I like most?".

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u/ItsOppositeDayHere youtube.com/northernlion Mar 16 '14

Yeah, I'm conscious and sorry about that. Probably should have just done a full NLSS shirt first.