Inside the Multi-Million Dollar Sidemen Empire: Secrets Revealed I Vikkstar DSH #500

When we started, this is back in 2010.

No one else was doing it.

We were the first people to do it.

If you walked around holding a phone or a camera talking into it, people would think you were not okay in their head.

They would think you were unwell and you had that complete embarrassment of everyone around you.

Because we started them, because it was a weird thing to do, because it took a lot of confidence and a lot of getting outside your comfort zone to do then.

That's why we were lucky in the right place at the right time to start building this career.

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It helps a lot with the algorithm.

It helps us get bigger and better guests and it helps us grow the team.

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And here's the episode.

All right, guys, this first podcast in the US.

We got Vixar here all the way from the UK.

Thanks for coming on, man.

Hey, thanks for having me.

It's good to be out here.

Yeah, dude.

You're out in Vegas a good amount, though.

Yeah, seemingly more and more.

Look, the clubs here, the nightlife, it's just, you can't beat it.

You can't beat it.

Your DJ career's taking off.

Yeah.

Yeah, slowly but surely.

Yeah, definitely.

It started as a bit of kind of a fun side quest and now it's becoming a whole lot more than that.

That's like the main thing, right?

Yeah, I'm grateful for it and having a lot of fun, a lot of new challenges.

I love it.

So it's great.

You just dropped a video five days ago, a new music video.

Yes, yes, I did.

Filmed back in the UK for trying a little bit of a different style.

I think that's the fun part of music for me is I can come in and try lots of different stuff.

And I don't really have a music identity yet, but I have my own audience from everything else I've done.

So I'm having a lot of fun kind of experimenting different sounds and seeing what people like and where I'm going to end up

spending a lot of my time in the music.

Wow.

Have you always been big in music?

Like, have you always made songs?

So I grew up playing music.

I grew up playing the drums, the piano, and the violin.

And

when I got into YouTube, I kind of left all of that behind.

Then during my whole YouTube career, I discovered a love for EDM.

I went to Miami Ultra Music Festival with Spin and Records back in, I think it was 2014, 2015.

They asked me just to film my experience and meet some of their producers and DJs.

I had so much fun at that festival.

It was like, wow, this is a big deal.

And really fell in love with the music.

And then for about a decade, I was just a fan of EDM music, going to all the festivals, meeting a lot of the talented people behind it.

And it was, I would say, a year and a half ago,

a good friend of mine, Alan Walker, he really pushed me and said, you should do this.

You have an audience.

You love the music.

Just get involved, learn to DJ, learn to start making music.

And I started that for fun, but now it's seeming like it could be a whole, whole nother profession I take on at this point.

No, it makes sense for you because I noticed on your socials, you love to travel too.

Yeah, that's 100%.

I think the two most exciting parts about DJing.

One is being able to connect with an audience in the real world.

We have these huge audiences of people that watch us online, but it's very difficult to do anything for that audience if you don't have a medium to perform.

I can take hundreds of selfies, signatures, but you can't really scale that beyond a few hundred people.

And it takes a whole day to meet a few hundred people.

Whereas now I can play a show for a few thousand people, put on an experience, they come and see something that I'm doing.

They listen to the music that I like and it's a new challenge in that sense.

So, that's one side of it.

And of course, as you said, the other side of the coin is it's a fantastic way to travel, meet new people, experience new places.

Yeah.

So, I'm, yeah, I'm loving it right now.

I love it, dude.

Yeah, I saw your Instagram.

You've been all over it.

You saw the Northern Lights recently.

This is also true.

Yeah, third time lucky.

Um, I've been to, actually, fourth time, I've been in the Arctic Circle.

I've been to Iceland twice, the fleeting trips completely clouded over.

Had been to Finland once before into Lapland, which is way up in the Arctic Circle didn't manage to see it but then fourth time round got to see it and I think it made it that much that bit much that bit more special yeah just seeing it when you've been chasing it for so long that's crazy so you went there three times expecting to see it and you didn't yeah yeah I was probably pretty unlucky they were short short filming trips yeah but when I saw it it was spectacular you ever seen it no I thought it happened every day is it like something you got a time yeah it all depends on the kind of the sun the solar rays that are coming off, um, the solar flare, sorry, that are coming off the sun.

Got it.

They fluctuate in strength, and then it has to be a clear day.

If it's cloudy, obviously you're not going to see it.

Wow.

So, yeah, we got the perfect combination while I was out there.

That's on my bucklist.

That's a life goal for sure.

100%.

Yeah, it's something special.

So, if you didn't live in the UK, where would you pick and why?

Ooh, that's a really good question.

Because, yeah, the more and more I've been traveling around, I've been trying to find a place.

I'm like, where,

where

is a place I could see myself living?

Yeah.

And it's really difficult.

I think the UK is the only downside I would say is the weather.

It rains a lot, right?

Yeah, yeah.

And being out in Vegas,

it's such a nice, nice way to be walk out, sunshine all day.

Outside the UK, that's tough.

I think maybe Canada.

Okay.

I do really enjoy, yeah, Canada.

To be honest, the East and the West Coast.

I've got some friends that live on the East Coast and some of the kind of wildlife and the lakes up in that part of the world are just stunning so that's a rare answer it's cold there man

it's cold during the winter but during the summer it's so nice actually yeah yeah i know it's really nice yeah i haven't been there so i can't speak on experience but yeah i know um not the us though you wouldn't pick the us no i don't think so i think the us is i i like to come and visit get involved in the craziness and i like to get out and go somewhere else so fair maybe canada's you know a lot of people say especially east coast of canada feels like that middle ground between the uk and the us I feel like they've taken a lot of our culture over.

They've got a bit of French culture as well.

It's a nice mix up.

I enjoy that.

Got it.

I haven't been in the UK.

Is LA similar to London, Utah?

That's a tough question.

I would say no.

I think LA and London are very, very different.

Okay.

I feel like when I go to LA, I see it as very kind of show-biz, entertainment-oriented.

Whereas I think London, it has

a lot of kind of arts and formative stuff.

But I would say more so it's the kind of financial world that you see it as

and I think it is also much more diverse in terms of a place I feel like there's a lot more variety of things you can do people you can meet in London than you can in LA from my experience anyway got it that makes sense yeah UK I feel like they're big on social media right compared to other European countries

I'm not sure that I would say the UK is any bigger actually.

I'd say all of Europe's pretty big into social media.

One thing I find interesting is how different places use different social media yeah for example like snapchat is huge over here in a lot of european countries it's huge but in the uk it's just not really not as big it's instagram feels like to be the platform that people use more so i take kind of different regions use social media very differently yeah snapchat's huge here people are making up killing out here this is true yeah i need to launch my backup but you're on another level man you're on netflix

yeah you just dropped a documentary there right yes yeah that was uh really, really exciting.

We started that project ourselves as our own funded documentary.

We thought that we've got tens of thousands of hours of content uploaded to YouTube.

There's a real story here of how we all started in our bedrooms balancing YouTube life with our studying or work that we were doing.

And to take that from that point to now, where we have hundreds of employees, side businesses, a real content production team, I think being able to tell some of that story was really exciting.

And

yeah, when Netflix asked to pick it up in the UK, that was a real kind of wow moment because we went from filming ourselves with little phones and cameras to putting together our own production that Netflix, one of you know the biggest streaming platform in the world, wanted to pick up.

That was something we didn't expect to happen.

But yeah, it was fantastic for us.

And I think it was also a great way to really explain to people outside of our audience what we do, how it works, works, and why people follow it.

I think sometimes we sit there ourselves and look at the viewership numbers on our videos, tens of millions, hundreds of millions, and it's hard to even comprehend or understand why people watch the content in the way they do.

But I think the documentary helped give it a wider

understanding, especially friends and family who don't have time to sit and watch an hour long Sidemen Sunday.

They could watch an hour and a half of the documentary and understand

what it is, what it is all about.

And also, I think it was quite nice for us to be able to show off the behind the scenes and all of the people and the effort that goes into our content.

Because I think there is this common misconception that, oh, you can get tens of millions of views on YouTube if you pick up a camera and do some stupid stuff and put it down.

So it was nice to be able to kind of strip it back and say, these are all the people behind the scenes.

This is all the planning we have to do.

These are the locations we have to hire.

These are the things that can go wrong in videos.

These are the moving parts.

This is how we argue between ourselves and make decisions right so it was yeah it was a great um great experience and nice to explore a different format that's cool yeah there's a lot that goes on to each video probably 40 hours right at least yeah

yeah definitely yeah um some videos yeah we'll be away for three days filming so like 70 72 hours we'll be away filming to make one video piece.

So yeah, we've had to build out a big editing team and they get footage dumped on them sometimes three or four days before it comes out.

So

a lot of editors we've had join the team.

They quickly tell us, we can't deal with this.

We're not used to working in this environment.

If they've come from elsewhere in film and editing to receive, you know, yeah, 20, 30 hours of footage, different angles and say, okay, this needs to be put together into a watchable video with music.

editing, effects,

grading within three or four days.

It's quite the ordeal.

And yeah, fortunately, the team we have now, they're super reliable.

They get the job done.

And that's a huge part of how we're able to do what we do and react to things

faster than other media companies can and potting productions on a bigger scale, shorter notice.

And I think that's why the new media is replacing the old media.

We've dabbled in working with kind of TV production companies.

and they can't even get their head around how quickly we decide ideas, we put them into production, we film them, edit them and put them out.

Sometimes it is a matter of days and then these videos are getting up to 10 million views, which is more than some entire TV shows get.

For sure.

And we're doing that with a small team and kind of deciding it ourselves.

So absolutely.

It's a fun new challenge.

Yeah, that is very interesting.

Yeah, because typical TV production probably spends months.

on their editing and you guys are doing it in three days.

Yeah, and even more so, ideation and getting things signed off.

We have to, because of the nature of it, we do something different every week.

We have to very quickly decide and if something goes wrong We yeah a member of our group needs to change a date We lose a venue or a studio or something goes wrong We sometimes yeah have a matter of days to turn around a video

On the sidemen channel since we started sideman Sundays I think it was probably

it might even be five and a half years ago.

We haven't missed a weekend upload Wow since then and that's with all seven of us trying to align our calendars to get together film get it edited Yeah, that's released.

That's impressive, man.

Yeah.

Seven people.

So walk me through the creation process.

Let's say there's a video idea.

Is it like a group vote on if you're going to pursue that idea?

How does it work?

So we effectively have a huge document of video ideas,

hundreds and hundreds of video ideas that we've submitted.

We've had creative people submit that we've all rated the kind of how we how good we think the video is.

So then that gives them all a score out of 70.

Each of us rates them out of 10.

So then we have a list of video ideas we can look at and say, okay, these are the top 50 video ideas that we all agree are good ideas.

Then we'll go through and we'll pick maybe one or two or three of them in a meeting with all seven of us there.

And we'll sit and discuss and we'll work out the logistics of it.

Is this a good idea on the surface?

How do we take the title and thumbnail of the video, which people want to watch, and turn it into an entertaining piece of content?

What spins can we add in to make it exciting?

We decide that between all of us.

We then find a date we can film it in.

We plug it into our calendar with all of us, which is an absolute meta calendar, you wouldn't believe.

Once we've done that, the video gets handed to one of the seven of us and we effectively become the exec producer of that video.

So it's our responsibility to make sure that the venue is booked, any extras that need to be in the video is booked, flights are booked,

activities.

So it alternates, like just between the seven of you?

Yeah, we effectively work on a rotation to try and create accountability and equalness and fairness.

We make every decision equally.

We share every bit of revenue and profit and company ownership equally.

Wow.

And we try to ensure that the workload is shared evenly.

So we have this rotor effectively that rolls around and people jump in.

They'll say, I, you know, this was my video idea.

I want to be in charge of putting it together.

Someone might say, actually, you know, you have the right contacts to put this video together.

And then we work with a wider team of about 10 people who help put all the moving pieces into place.

Then we turn up on the day, we film the video, and that person is then responsible for going through their edits for the video and giving feedback, notes, helping the editing team improve it, get it finished.

polished package, review the thumbnail, title.

A lot of the time we do this together.

Wow.

Then the video goes out and then we do it all over again.

Dude, I'm so impressed because you guys were all friends before you started this, right?

Actually, no, there were three,

there were two pairs of friends.

So

four of the guys went to two separate schools together and grew up together.

We all started our YouTube channels and we just started making videos together and we were just having a lot of fun.

It wasn't really important.

the sizes of our channels,

what was going on.

We actually started playing GTA 5 together and

our fans really enjoyed the idea of all of us together and the kind of the way the entertainment came across.

And they almost created us into our own brand

and they kind of started aligning around us and said, oh, I love it when the side men play GTA together.

And that's effectively how the group started.

It was

fans just enjoyed seeing us together.

So we continued to do stuff together.

We took our logo, we printed it on a t-shirt and took it to an event and sold a thousand t-shirts.

And then all of a sudden, we're like, hang on a second.

Our friendship group and creating content together is actually now a profitable business

as well as just we enjoy spending time together.

So from that point onwards, it was, okay, how can we make better videos together?

A few of us moved into a house together and things grew and grew and grew.

Then we built a team around us.

And it's just been a consistent process of how can we try something new?

How can we shake it up?

How can we make things better?

And we've built this amazing audience along the way.

I love it.

Now you're selling out soccer arenas.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We've, yeah, our last charity football match, uh, we sold

63,500 tickets.

That's insane.

So, yeah.

What's the price on each?

Um, I think they were

around

eight pounds a ticket.

And through the event, we raised, I think, £2.7 million for the charities we've supported.

That's almost £3 million.

Yeah, yeah.

And

that was really fun and exciting.

And again, like I said, coming back to the DJing thing, the charity football matches for us are fantastic because we can put on something for tens of thousands of fans to come along, have an experience, create big moments with creators people would never see, expect to see together.

You've got Mr.

Beast, you've got Speed, you've got KSI, you've got all of us running around on the same pitch.

I think that's really fun and exciting.

And to be able to do that and also raise money for great causes, I think it's

such a huge win for everyone involved.

Which player surprised you with their skill?

That's a good question.

Who was surprised?

Who surprised us?

That is a really good question.

I can't even.

Like, was someone good that you were like, wow, I did not expect that.

You know what?

In one of our charity matches, FaZe Adapt.

played adapt yeah and he was on our team and he had he played in defense and he was getting stuck into challenges had really really good stamina and fitness.

So actually, yeah, I'd say he jumped out at me as someone that you wouldn't expect.

Yeah, he doesn't look that athletic.

Yeah, and I don't believe he really played that much football or soccer.

So yeah, he showed up and he did well.

That makes sense.

I saw you score, right?

You scored a couple times.

Yeah, yeah, twice, actually, which is kind of absurd given that I'm the one of the seven in the group that grew up not playing football, not supporting a football team.

I was the kid at school in football.

I would be picked last because I have no coordination whatsoever.

And in all of our football videos we filmed over the years, I am the laughing stock of the group, which is fine.

That's my take is, hey, look, it's fine for people to, you know, if you're doing something badly and it's funny, it's fine for people to laugh.

It's entertainment.

Don't take yourself so seriously.

And that made me into the underdog in those videos.

So when I did something great in a football video, a crossbar challenge, I'd hit the crossbar penalty challenge, I'd score a penalty.

It was this, wow, big entertaining reaction.

I would be like, oh my goodness, I can't can't believe that happened.

So then when the charity football matches came about, that was kind of the precedent was, wouldn't it be ridiculous if Vic scored?

And in both games that I scored, I had absolutely no business scoring.

I'm not nearly as skilled as any of the other players.

But I think it was just one of those right place at the right time.

It was the moment was right.

Yeah, you popped off.

All the comments were freaking out.

I saw that.

Definitely.

So were you like the nerdier kid in school growing up?

I would say so.

Yeah,

I was the

kid who sat at home in front of his computer talking to a microphone playing video games.

That was weird.

I would be in school and people would say,

That's so weird.

Why do you talk to yourself on a microphone at home and film yourself playing games?

It wasn't the same way it is now, where everyone understands social media, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube.

You want to be a, I think a vlogger is, or a YouTuber, or a content creator is the most popular job young people want to do nowadays.

But when we started, this is back in 2010, no one else was doing it.

We were the first people to do it.

I remember when we started vlogging ourselves, if you walked around holding a phone or a camera talking into it, people would think you were not okay in the head.

They would think you were unwell.

And you had that complete embarrassment of everyone around you thinking, what is wrong with this person?

Why are they talking into their phone?

Whereas now it's completely flipped.

But I think that because we started them, because it was a weird thing to do, because it took a lot of confidence and a lot of getting outside your comfort zone to do then,

that's why we were lucky in the right place at the right time to start building this career over a decade ago that now people who are just starting, it's impossible for them to have that head start.

It's impossible for them to be in a space that's as unsaturated as it was when we started.

When we started uploading YouTube videos, you couldn't monetize them.

We were just getting views because we thought it was cool to get views and learn the skills of commentating and editing and filming.

And I think that really helped us develop through our careers because we were doing it as an experience to learn and a challenge rather than as a job.

And then fortunately for all of us, monetization came in and then we could sit back and say, hang on a second, we've been able to succeed in this as a hobby.

Now we have the financial incentive.

We can leave studying.

and put our all into it.

And I think that's, that came at the perfect time for all of us.

Yeah, you spent years without making a dime, right?

100%.

Yeah.

You stuck through it.

I remember feeling a lot of shame even for playing video games growing up from my parents.

Oh, I used to get in a lot of trouble.

I was, yeah, I was, uh, I was told unless I got perfect grades at school, I was not allowed to play video games.

Yeah.

Um, and it was, yeah, I'm super grateful for the fact that I did play video games.

And I think even in video games, I learned a lot of skills.

And I've been able to apply those to my life and my career since.

I love that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You were good at COD and Minecraft and stuff, right?

100%.

Yeah.

I mean, I played the game so much and i always love a new learning curve and a challenge i like to try and get very good at things then i get bored and move on to something else that's the way i like to do things i feel like yeah a learning curve is very rewarding yeah and at the first it's terrifying because you feel so out of your depth then when you start picking it up you it gives you i feel like a good sense of purpose and yeah chasing that is always good there's a lot you can learn from video games did you play rune scape growing up yeah that was my game economy i learned simple economy trading.

Watch out for people who are going to scam you and do you over.

I think, yeah, there were a lot of lessons.

Yeah, RuneScape was the one.

Dude, that was the OG.

Yeah.

What are you playing these days?

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Pretty much the only video game I play at the moment is Dota 2.

Okay.

And I don't record it.

I don't stream it.

I just sit and I play that game.

And I love it.

It's so complex.

You always can get better at the game.

I think I'm nearly like in the top few percent of players in the world.

Wow.

Just from sitting and grinding.

Why don't you stream that?

You get too pissed or something?

I feel like I also, for me, it's often been a game that I kind of escape to.

And like when I just want to kind of disconnect from everything, I just get locked into the game.

I think another part of it is a lot of people just want to watch the best players in the world play it.

And I'm still nowhere near that level.

So it's, I feel like it's MOBAs tend to people really care about the best of the best of the best.

Got it.

Not so much the entertainment side of it.

So yeah, for me, I just kind of enjoy the challenge of it.

And I just enjoy it being kind of a detachment of everything else I'm doing.

That makes sense.

That game's similar to League of Legends, right?

Yeah, yeah, definitely.

Did you ever play that?

A tiny amount, but all of my friends growing up played Dota.

So that was just the MOBA that I got into.

So you don't play Call of Duty anymore?

No, no, I haven't touched it in years, which is crazy.

I would say during lockdown, it was pretty much all I did.

I was streaming probably 12, 13 hours a day on average, playing in all of the tournaments.

It was a fantastic time.

I really enjoyed it.

But I think once we got out of lockdown, I was much more excited to kind of

see the world and try other things.

And also, I feel like

that game didn't innovate enough and it became quite stagnant in a sense of the best people became so unbelievably good that I couldn't keep up without continuing to play for 10, 12 hours a day.

And it just got to a point where that wasn't what I was interested in anymore.

So I kind of left that world behind.

And it's weird.

I spent 10 years making...

multiple gaming videos every single day.

So to now not be making any gaming videos at all on my own is weird.

But I think I reached reached a point in my career where I said, I'm not going to force myself to pretend to enjoy games, to really try and, you know,

put on this side of myself that I'm not.

I want to only play and stream and record games if I'm really enjoying them now.

That's kind of the merits of my career being as long as it has.

I've, you know, earned the right to be able to do that.

And I feel like it's more genuine to my audience rather than me jumping on pretending to be in love with the game that I'm playing.

I feel like more and more nowadays people see through that kind of behavior.

Yeah, being genuine is huge these days.

You have a ton of Minecraft videos I saw on your channel.

Yeah, yeah, thousands of Minecraft videos.

That's crazy.

Yeah.

Is there really that much to do in that game?

I've never played it, but it looks simple.

100%.

It was the perfect open world engine.

We made all of our own games within the game.

We launched our own servers where our fans could join and play alongside us.

And yeah,

it was absurd.

I remember, yeah, I was posting three Minecraft videos every single day.

At one point in time, every single one would get 200 to 400,000 views.

And it was just a case of YouTube was so under saturated in gaming.

The more videos I posted, the more views I could get.

And it got to a point where I would record a half an hour Minecraft video.

I would maybe edit two minutes out of it myself, hit render, set it to upload.

As soon as that was done, I'd start recording the next one.

And it was this low effort, easy

game to play and record and create content on.

And the audience loved it at the time.

So, yeah, you were growing fast because of those, right?

Yeah, yeah, definitely.

And we created our own little group

who are friends who I'm still friends with to this day from all over the world.

And we used to get on and play that game together.

So, yeah.

So, you met people that you met online, you met them in real life?

Yeah, I was with a group of some of my best friends called the PAC.

So, that is a guy called Lachlan, a guy called Preston.

I'm sure you know Preston,

Bayesian Canadian, Jerome ASF, and Mr.

Woofless.

And yeah, we were from Canada, America,

Jersey, Texas, Australia, London.

And we all came together and we would make, yeah, make 10, 15, 20 videos together a week.

And people couldn't get enough of them.

That's awesome.

Yeah, we all got millions and millions of views in that time.

And we stopped making those videos together, but we're still really, really close friends.

We all travel to visit each other all over the world.

And that's something really special that I got from that period of content creation.

That's That's cool.

And yeah.

My parents never let me meet my online friends, you know?

Oh, I remember the early days.

The first gaming event I went to was called Eurogamer in 2011.

And one of my friends,

Calux, who I had never met at that point, he used to upload some of my clips to his community Call of Duty channel to help me get subscribers.

I remember he had to talk to my mum on a Skype call and get my mums,

explain to my mum that they weren't strangers who were going to kidnap me.

I was just going to meet them at a gaming event and we're going to play games together.

I love it.

Shout out to moms being protective, man.

Yeah, 100%.

You saw their drop in a Minecraft movie?

I did, yeah.

You're going to watch it?

I'll definitely watch it.

Yeah.

Jack Black's in it, I think.

Yeah, and he's been playing the game to actually get involved with the community.

And I like that as well because Hollywood actors are involved with the game.

They've got to understand the game.

And seeing him taking the effort to do that,

that's really important.

And I think it's going to be good.

If KSI offered you a million dollars dollars to box XQC, would you do it?

No, no, I've said this many a time.

Influencer boxing is all the rage, but there's no amount of money you could pay me to let someone else hit me in the face.

I just, it's not, it's not for me.

I also, I very rarely have disagreements with other people.

And I just don't think I could walk into the ring with someone else.

And to be a good boxer, you have to want to hurt the person you're boxing.

It's so true.

And I think a lot of influencers in influencer boxing struggle to separate those two parts of it.

There's the entertainment side of it.

But when push comes to shove, you're either a fighter or a not.

And I'm 100% not.

So massive kudos to everyone that does do it.

I feel that.

But I prefer to put myself out of my depth in other scenarios where I can't get hurt.

Yeah.

So I can't in any way.

I'm not sure you talk actually now that you've said this.

No, it really doesn't come naturally to me.

I tend to try and get on with most people.

Who do you got winning the Jake Paul Tyson fight?

You know what?

I think Jake Paul does win again.

I just think the age differential there is is so huge that that does sit in Jake Paul's favor.

And Jake Paul is, I think he's talented.

I think he's done really, really well.

He commits himself to his training and his camps.

He's put on great fights before.

So I think he wins that again.

But

isn't that the joy of the boxing?

Who knows who will win?

But yeah, if I had to choose, I'd choose Jake Paul.

Absolutely.

Any artist you want to make a song with

oh artist i'd like to make a song with that's a very good question there are there are so many um artists that i love and enjoy i'd rather name a handful um some of you know i've been able to work with some of my favorite artists in the electronic music scene people like afro jack alan walker steve aoki

um

I would say any of those guys, I've already made a record with Alan Walker, which was a crazy experience.

My first single.

Yeah.

I learned so

my first single, which

has had, I think, like 60 million streams now, which is

mind-blowing.

And that was really a massive springboard.

So I'd love to continue to work with, I think, some of those guys.

I think, yeah, Steve Aoki or Afro Jack would be great to work with because they've been so helpful, effectively mentoring me in entering this new and scary world of the music industry.

So yeah, it would be fantastic to do something with those guys at some point.

Who's considered the goats of the EDM space?

I don't listen to any EDM there are I there are so many goats of the EDM scene I couldn't I don't even know okay marshmallow right yeah marshmallow skrillx alesso zed martin garricks the list is endless there's so many talented people in the space all with their own different sounds and i enjoy so many of the different djs and what they do okay um yeah i love going to festivals and different stages and different kinds of music And to be able to, yeah, start working on it myself is really fun.

I didn't realize how big it still was because when I was in high school, it was huge, but I feel like it kind of took a dip and I didn't realize it came back.

Yeah, I would say from the way I look at it, what is EDM music diversifies, diversified massively.

So back in 2014, 15, 16, a lot of people talk about that as the golden era of EDM.

Big, melodic, euphoric music, Swedish house, mafia, that kind of stuff was massive.

And I think now there's a lot of different niches where people want stuff that's, you know, know, more like much harder.

There's a huge bass house, fans now, techno, drum and bass, everything, progressive house, it's all kind of separating out to a degree.

But for me, I love that original and in a lot of ways, outdated sound.

But the nice part for me is I've got my own audience of people who really support everything I do.

And I'm so lucky that that means I can actually do something very different to other people in terms of the music I'm producing.

And I can take it back.

And, you know, if you watch my DJ sets on YouTube, I'm playing a lot of stuff from five, six years ago that a lot of other DJs, if they played that, people would say, oh, you're so out of date.

You're supposed to be the cutting edge.

But then a lot of people saying, oh, this takes me back to, you know, 2015, 2016, when I used to love this kind of music.

I wish people would play this kind of stuff more.

So yeah, that's a lot of the kind of music I'm trying to make and play in my sets is that big old school, melodic, euphoric EDM that maybe isn't seen as cool nowadays.

But I've done so much in my career, I don't care about being cool.

I want to make stuff I love and put it out and find people that resonate with that.

And I think that's a really important part of content creation is to try not to chase what's trending too much, to try and forge your own path because you can get lost and you're competing with so many other people trying to chase the cutting edge.

It's challenging to do, but if you can find something that's unique and something that you love, then you're doing it for you and you'll find other people that love it for that same reason.

That's bars because there's so many people that chase and just put on a show and they're not that person.

A hundred people.

You can see through it these days.

Yeah.

And you'll burn out so fast pretending to be someone or do something that you're not.

And I think, yeah, it's so hyper-competitive now that a lot of people do want to just chase what's popular, chase what everyone else is doing.

But doing that and standing out is a thousand times more of a challenge.

For sure.

Dude, so many people copy your Sidemen videos.

It's crazy.

Yeah, definitely and i i think that's fine you know it's inspiration and a lot of people do put their own unique twists and i think that's one thing that we've always we've always taken inspiration from elsewhere for example some of our most successful videos we did a cheap versus expensive holiday that now has over 110 million views on youtube which is a two-hour video i don't think there's any other two-hour video over a hundred million views And what that originally was, was a BuzzFeed concept.

It was, we saw they were doing the cheap versus expensive, you know, $1 versus $1,000 steak.

And we looked at that and we said, okay, people really enjoy this content.

It's getting millions of views, but there's no personality involved in it.

People don't really know who the presenter is.

They're here for the concept of that.

So we said, okay, how can we take this and throw in our personalities and

really build it into a bigger piece of content?

So that was it.

We said, okay.

Three of us go on a, you know, a $200 holiday to Europe.

Three of us go on a $20,000 holiday to Europe.

And it's been one of our most successful series because it creates this dynamic,

this contrasting dynamic between both experiences.

It shows what you can, you know, all the fun you can have on a small budget, all the fun you can have on a big budget.

Right.

And also, it's the jeopardy.

It's the fact that we're all friends and we don't know what we're in for.

And we all have to make the most of it.

Some people have a breakdown.

It's real emotions.

We spin the wheel for real.

No one knows whether they're going to have a lavish experience or

a budget one.

And

yeah, it's stuff like that that really,

you know, it's something that already existed, but we gave it our own spin and now it's been hyper successful.

So other people take it and put their own spins on that format.

And a lot of people have.

We have no problem with that.

I think it's, you know, great for the scene.

Yeah.

What's the most you've spent on a video?

Oh, we filmed a YouTube video with Mr.

Beast

about

a year and a half ago our previous charity.

It was about actually probably two years ago when he came over for our charity match before last.

And we effectively built our own version of Takeshi's Castle

in a studio.

And all of the set builds and lighting and camera crew and everything, it took two weeks to build all the sets.

We were taking a leaf from his book there.

We said, okay, if he's coming to England,

we can't film one of our mukbang videos where we sit in a restaurant and eat for an hour.

I mean, to be fair, maybe we should do that sometime with him because it'd be a completely different side of him.

That would be a good video.

But we, yeah, spent, I think it was around $500,000

on that one video.

One video.

And that was, yeah, two weeks of people building all the sets.

You can see it on YouTube.

It was this big, big production.

That's nice.

And actually, the video came out not really feeling like us.

Funnily enough, it was more of this spectacle of, okay, these big sets that we're playing these games on.

But it was super successful.

It's had tens of millions of views.

So it was a good investment.

Okay.

Oh, so you made it back?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, wow.

so one video can really make that much i didn't know that yeah yeah the biggest videos on youtube can make yeah seven figures now when you damn and it the the perk for us is we make really long videos that get a lot of our videos have a 30 minute average view duration and the average on youtube is probably about seven eight minutes so we're getting four to five times more viewer retention right than other channels which means their advertising rates are higher and it means we can really fund big production Do you do the language thing Mr.

Beast does, where you're in like a bunch of different countries?

So, actually, we tried translating our videos to different languages.

We made a Spanish channel, Sidemen en Espanol,

and it was a massive disaster and a failed project.

Oh, wow.

We quickly realized that a lot of our humor is very, um, very language-based.

It's English slang,

English humor, and memes, and it just didn't translate well across to other languages.

Effectively, you'd have to have seven voice actors in other languages that could create the same conversational chemistry that we've created from knowing each other for 14, 15 years.

It's kind of impossible to do.

A very objective video that's, we are going to do this.

Look at this.

I told people to do this.

A Mr.

Beast video translates so fantastically to other

languages.

We found that our content did not translate well.

We had a lot of fans saying, I speak Spanish and English.

The Spanish just isn't it, guys.

Like, we would rather watch you in our non-native language because it's just not, it's not translating well.

That's fine.

And we would have to spend absurd amounts of money to get it translated well.

And also, our content is so long.

If you're getting an hour-long, hour-and-a-half video translated with seven different voices, you're looking at so much money to do that for something that just doesn't convert well enough.

So absolutely.

It's probably a way to do it.

We never really got into finding the the way to do it.

So yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

I didn't even factor that in, but yeah, because Mr.

Beast offers that to other clients and stuff.

But for you guys, it's way different.

100%.

What do you think of the recent FaZe stuff?

There were some big layoffs like a few days ago.

Yeah, FaZe has been a roller coaster to watch.

I almost joined at one point actually during lockdown when I was

doing big numbers on Call of Duty and streaming content.

They tried to recruit me.

Ended up, it would have been a conflict of interest between Sidemen and FaZe.

It wasn't going to work out.

And shortly thereafter, they had the whole public listing fiasco that evidently did not go well.

And yeah, they're trying a trying a whole new rebrand now, which I think is good.

I think it's good for them to take power back within themselves.

I think they outsourced a lot of their management.

And that turned out to be a disaster.

And that's a key difference between Sidemen and FaZe.

Sidemen has always been the same seven members with equal voting decisions.

We effectively sit as a board and everyone else within the company works underneath us.

We make all of the final decisions.

I believe with FaZe, it ended up investment.

Oh, what was that voice crazy?

With FaZe, investment came in.

And to get that investment, you have to relinquish power.

And if you relinquish power to the wrong people or people who don't understand your business, things can turn sour very quickly.

And that's what we saw.

And that's something that we've always had to work to avoid with Sidemen.

So So we've had huge investment offers.

We've had companies come in and say, we'll take over the operation.

We'll run it for you.

And I'm, you know, now looking at what's happened with FaZe, we're very glad to have turned down every one of those offers and said, no,

you know, you work on our terms.

Otherwise, we won't work with you.

And seeing them effectively take steps to bring that power dynamic back, hopefully it works out.

And I think they're on the right path.

But again, you can have fantastic ideas.

It's all about execution.

So

Time will tell how they execute this new phase, this new era, this new phase of face.

There you go.

Wow, there we go.

Yeah, I love that.

Cause, yeah, you probably got crazy offers.

Same with Mr.

Beast.

He's probably been offered crazy money, but then you give up that creative freedom.

So it's like a catch-22, right?

A hundred percent.

Yeah, it's very difficult to bring people into our businesses because they change so fast.

The understanding you can pick up from publishing for your own audience for a decade, it will take other people years to even get close to understanding that audience in the same way that you do.

So, yeah, if you're relinquishing power and decision-making and even creative decisions to people in this space, things can go wrong very quickly.

And it happens to a lot of creators where they burn out and they say, I don't want to make the creative decisions, the logistical decisions myself.

I'm going to outsource this to this team of people.

But very quickly, things can go very wrong.

And you see YouTube channels go from these huge, huge powerhouses to irrelevancy in a few years.

And it's always a scary, scary thought.

For sure.

There's not many still around from your time.

You're like one of the few left.

We've seen the rise and fall of so many channels, but every time we see that, it allows us to learn a little more and avoid those pitfalls because there's a hundred different ways you can kill a YouTube channel

every month.

Absolutely.

Vic, it's been fun.

Anything you want to promote or close off with?

No, I mean, the Sidemen channel, if you guys watching are curious about what we do, yeah, the Sidemen channel, the documentaries, my own music is a work in progress.

But if people are into EDM,

hit it up on Spotify, SoundCloud, all that good stuff.

But no, it's been a pleasure being here and

a fun, different way to chat because, yeah, a different perspective on the world.

Things are different over here, and we're all about it.

Yeah, thanks for coming on, man.

That was fun.

And like everything below.

Yeah, thanks for watching, guys.

As always, see you tomorrow.