Anthony Padilla
For some people, the world of social media appears to be a new phenomenon. What’s often forgotten though, is that Youtube has been around for nearly 20 years. Youtube was officially founded on Valentine’s day, 14th of February, 2005. Long before the terms "creator" or "Passion economy".
The first ever Youtube video is called Me At The Zoo, uploaded by Youtube co-founder Jawed Karim, 25 years old at the time. As one of the first Youtube creators ever, Anthony Padilla started making comedy sketches with his friend about this time.
Anthony was raised in a family where his mother was struggling with agoraphobia, which he has said affected him in many ways. They also had financial difficulties, but one day he received a computer from his father. A day he calls "opened up a new world for him". "I built a website called Smosh.com, where me and my friends would post comedy videos that we had shot the same day", Padilla recalls.
The group called "Smosh" started selling merchandise t-shirts to finance the server for the website, and they soon found that uploading to Youtube’s server would be a cheaper option than running the site themselves. From using video editing skills Anthony learned at his community college, Smosh would continue to grow, rapidly.
Agoraphobia is a phobia of being in situations where you feel anxious or helpless. Padilla’s mother’s condition made her rarely leave the house, which made Anthony to grow up with a fear of getting the phobia himself, and being trapped in the house. The computer brought by his father made Anthony interested in programming. He realized that, if he could learn to code, he could make almost anything. After developing Smosh.com, with the goal of being able to talk to friends after school, their comedy videos started gaining traffic. So much so they had trouble paying for the bandwidth. “The problem with video is that the files become relatively big, and every time somebody watched we had to pay a couple of cents”.
One month the bill was extraordinarily high, indicating they had received a lot of traffic. Padilla googled the videos’ titles and discovered that one version had been posted on a site called "YouTube" that had received a lot of views. The group started posting there, after realizing it was less expensive than managing the servers themselves. After this, the video reached a million views in a month (which at the time, was huge) and broke the record for most watched video ever. Padilla’s entire life changed at that moment, it took the attention away from his fears and funneled all of his attention to the excitement of endless opportunities he could create using the internet and YouTube.
Ian Hecox (L) and Anthony Padilla of Smosh speak onstage at VH1's 5th Annual Streamy Awards at the ... [+]
After a few years, by 2011, the group started to release behind-the-scenes films and bloopers exclusively on Smosh.com, attracting many viewers from YouTube to their website. The garnered attention and website traffic made other media companies in the industry take notice. One of them approached Smoth with a purchase offer. They proposed taking over the administrative tasks and provide the group with resources to focus on the creative side of production. Excited by the new opportunities, the group agreed to sell Smosh. "However, I felt they started to put an increasing amount of pressure on us as a group, wanting us to create more content in a machine-like way", Padilla remembers. He thought it became too draining and ended up leaving in 2017.
"I felt lost. I had been part of Smash for many year and now had to find a new way forward." Anthony started a new YouTube channel, which at first did not go as well as he had hoped for. "I felt a lot of pressure having to live up to the glory of Smosh, that I had been part of creating." "A large part of my self-worth felt connected to the view count. There were times when I was like, am I nothing without Smosh?”, Padilla remembers thinking.
Today, Padilla sees the failures and experiments as learnings. He is now doing a series on YouTube with millions of monthly viewers each month, with the aim to help him and the audience understand people who may be different from them. “No matter how strange someone may seem, there is still this deeper humanity that you can find with anyone regardless of how much you disagree with them.”
The conversation has been edited for clarity.
