Rowan Jacobson

YouTube had only just begun, so it was in its infancy.

And I would have been 16 or just about 16 when I made my first video.

So that would have been in 2006.

I think it was actually, I know the date, January 27th, 2006.

There you go.

I was a really quiet kid.

I didn't have a lot of friends in school, but deep down I wanted to do some form of...

creative work i wanted to be an actor or a host or a presenter or something like that and youtube for me was a community that i found online that felt private i was also a queer kid who didn't really know it yet so within that too it was a way for me to meet people that i wasn't meeting in my everyday life and what kind of videos were you making i used to do vlogs which would be kind of heightened character vlogs and then in between have little sketches um so it was very much comedy and very much character based um and very much of the time i can tell you

We can't wait until he strikes.

We have to leave this galaxy.

You don't mean, yes.

Enter Slipstream.

Yeah, so just before I turned 18, they started offering these contracts.

So it's actually the first time any social media website had started paying its creators.

back in 2008, which was a huge deal and it almost felt like a validation for me because, you know, my mum hates me saying it, but she was like, what are you doing?

This is weird.

And all my friends in school as well said the same thing.

A lot of people were quite nasty about it and they didn't understand it.

Almost all of them made fun of me for it.

So, yeah, it quickly became very big.