Dr Bar­ney Pacheco

When Paula Drakes cre­at­ed a YouTube chan­nel three years ago and start­ed post­ing videos about how to cro­chet ba­by hats and socks, she nev­er imag­ined that this would one day evolve in­to a vi­able busi­ness.

Drakes had in­her­it­ed her love of cro­chet­ing from her grand­moth­er who was renowned for the qual­i­ty of her hand­made prod­ucts and unique de­signs. She start­ed post­ing videos on YouTube as a way to share this dy­ing craft with a wider au­di­ence in the hopes that oth­ers might be at­tract­ed to a hob­by that she was pas­sion­ate about.

The fact that she was now get­ting paid to post videos about some­thing she loved do­ing was just ic­ing on the cake as far as she was con­cerned. Achiev­ing a per­son­al mile­stone of at­tract­ing 1,000,000 view­ers to her videos had plant­ed the idea that she could turn her hob­by in­to a ca­reer.

An ar­ti­cle she had read about oth­er en­tre­pre­neurs who earned mil­lions of dol­lars an­nu­al­ly from their YouTube chan­nels in­spired her to se­ri­ous­ly con­sid­er quit­ting her job and fo­cus­ing on mak­ing home videos.

The main ques­tion in her mind, how­ev­er, was: did she have what it takes to be­come a YouTube star?

En­tre­pre­neur pro­file and back­ground

Drakes grew up nev­er know­ing her fa­ther since her par­ents di­vorced when she was two years old and he mi­grat­ed to Cana­da. Most of her child­hood was spent liv­ing at her grand­moth­er's house while her moth­er worked to sup­port her and her three sib­lings. This is where she had de­vel­oped her life­long in­ter­est in cro­chet.

Af­ter grad­u­at­ing with an un­der­grad­u­ate de­gree in man­age­ment, she got a job as a sales agent at a large fur­ni­ture re­tail­er and al­so start­ed a small busi­ness sell­ing scent­ed can­dles. She had start­ed this busi­ness as a way to sup­ple­ment her in­come and en­joyed mod­est sales over the first year of op­er­a­tions. She re­cent­ly de­cid­ed, how­ev­er, to close this busi­ness af­ter she re­alised that the in­come she was earn­ing did not com­pen­sate her ad­e­quate­ly for the ef­fort she was putting in­to get­ting the busi­ness off the ground.

She had nev­er aban­doned her love of cro­chet­ing and, while brows­ing through YouTube videos for ideas on some new tech­niques she want­ed to try for a ba­by hat she was work­ing on, she re­alised that the videos cur­rent­ly avail­able were rel­a­tive­ly poor in qual­i­ty and pro­vid­ed lim­it­ed in­for­ma­tion. This in­spired her to pro­duce her own in­struc­tion­al videos.

What made Drakes' videos stand out was the high qual­i­ty of the cam­era work and the de­tailed in­struc­tions that she pro­vid­ed for every step of the process. She al­so starred in each video and tried to por­tray a fun en­joy­able ex­pe­ri­ence while work­ing on each project.

She post­ed her first video to YouTube in May 2012 and ini­tial­ly up­loaded at least three videos a month last­ing be­tween three to four min­utes each.

As she be­came more skilled at videog­ra­phy she start­ed post­ing a new video every week. She pro­mot­ed the video by pro­vid­ing a link on blog sites where she con­tributed com­ments and shar­ing it on craft Web sites that she vis­it­ed. She al­so asked her friends and rel­a­tives to watch her video and share it with their friends on oth­er so­cial me­dia sites such as Face­book.

The videos al­so fea­tured promi­nent­ly on Drakes' per­son­al Face­book page.

Busi­ness op­por­tu­ni­ty

The re­sponse to the videos was very en­thu­si­as­tic and she quick­ly be­gan at­tract­ing a loy­al fol­low­ing with many vis­i­tors com­ment­ing on the video qual­i­ty.

While she had orig­i­nal­ly start­ed post­ing videos with the in­ten­tion of help­ing peo­ple in­ter­est­ed in cro­chet­ing, she quick­ly re­alised that there was an op­por­tu­ni­ty to earn mon­ey from the au­di­ence she was at­tract­ing. This led her to join YouTube's Part­ner pro­gramme which al­lowed YouTube to em­bed ads in her video and com­pen­sate her each time some­one sub­scribed to her chan­nel or viewed one of her videos.

She earned rough­ly 45 per cent of the rev­enue gen­er­at­ed by ads em­bed­ded in a video, which on av­er­age meant about $5 per 1000 views.

Be­com­ing a YouTube Part­ner not on­ly al­lowed Drakes to gen­er­ate in­come from her videos but she al­so gained ac­cess to a set of tools that pro­vid­ed her with the abil­i­ty to track her au­di­ence and man­age the per­for­mance of her videos.

One of the hall­marks of her chan­nel was the close in­ter­ac­tion she had with her au­di­ence. She re­spond­ed to many of the com­ments post­ed about her videos and oc­ca­sion­al­ly de­vel­oped and post­ed videos re­lat­ed to view­er com­ments and ques­tions.

She al­so made it easy for vis­i­tors to find her videos by us­ing de­scrip­tive names and tag­ging her videos with pop­u­lar key­words.

Fu­ture plans

Drakes was ex­cit­ed by the op­por­tu­ni­ty to con­vert her YouTube chan­nel in­to a full-time ca­reer op­por­tu­ni­ty but recog­nised that to do so she would have to at­tract a wider au­di­ence. She was al­so un­sure about how many con­sumers would be will­ing to pay for the con­tent she pro­vid­ed giv­en the abun­dance of free videos, al­beit of low­er qual­i­ty, avail­able on the Web. She had iden­ti­fied three op­por­tu­ni­ties for fu­ture growth.

1. Start pro­duc­ing videos about oth­er arts and crafts and up­load those on her ex­ist­ing chan­nel. She es­ti­mat­ed that at least 30 per cent of her cur­rent au­di­ence would be in­ter­est­ed in videos show­ing how to cre­ate tie-dye jer­seys and jew­el­ry at home. The chal­lenge with this ap­proach was there were many chan­nels al­ready de­vot­ed to these types of crafts and she wor­ried that not enough view­ers would be will­ing to switch to her chan­nel to make it prof­itable.

2. Open a phys­i­cal re­tail store where view­ers of her videos could pur­chase prod­ucts that she demon­strat­ed mak­ing. This would fur­ther es­tab­lish her brand cred­i­bil­i­ty which she had es­tab­lished on­line and sup­ple­ment her in­come. She knew, how­ev­er, that in or­der to cater to her world­wide au­di­ence she would have to fa­cil­i­tate on­line sales and she was un­cer­tain whether she would have the time need­ed to man­age the store and con­tin­ue cre­at­ing the vol­ume of videos that were need­ed to main­tain her YouTube view­er­ship.

3. Pro­vide work­shops and in­di­vid­ual train­ing to view­ers who saw her video but want­ed a more hands-on ex­pe­ri­ence in cro­chet­ing. Sev­er­al view­ers had, in fact, con­tact­ed her re­quest­ing such train­ing but she had de­clined since she felt that the vol­ume of clients in the lo­cal mar­ket was too low to jus­ti­fy such a ven­ture. She was al­so con­cerned about vis­it­ing peo­ple in their homes giv­en the cur­rent crime sit­u­a­tion in the coun­try.

While Drakes was pleased about the large num­ber of in­di­vid­u­als who had viewed her videos and sub­scribed to her chan­nel (she cur­rent­ly had 5,000 sub­scribers) she was un­clear about how best to mon­e­tise her on­line pres­ence.

She was con­fi­dent, how­ev­er, that with the right strat­e­gy, the videos she cre­at­ed could pro­vide a fi­nan­cial­ly re­ward­ing busi­ness op­por­tu­ni­ty.

Dis­cus­sion ques­tions

1. What fac­tors have con­tributed to Paula Drakes' suc­cess?

2. What strat­e­gy should she pur­sue in or­der to grow the busi­ness?

Dr Bar­ney Pacheco is a lec­tur­er in the De­part­ment of Man­age­ment Stud­ies at The Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies, St Au­gus­tine.