Crypto, Gaming, and the YouTube algorithm with Jake Browatzke

foreign [Music] welcome to Super entrepreneurs podcast today we have with us Jake bro what bro Watsky yeah yeah bro Watsky yeah perfect awesome man but it says Jake on um on chain gaming correct yes yes yeah so on-chain gaming is the YouTube channel uh that I'm running right now uh with uh I have two of my brothers working for me one as an agent and one as a video editor and then uh we have another guy working for uh anchain yammy as a video editor as well so it's a small team of of four and yeah we're talking about the future of of like web3 gaming um crypto gaming blockchain gaming stuff like that I've seen the growth is incredible yeah yeah the the channel really really uh started picking up a lot of people were searching for crypto gaming especially in the crypto bear market like towards I don't know the second half of of 2021 when like people were just really really hyped on on the crypto space and uh axi infinity started getting a lot of popularity so like one of our videos on on axi and just like how the game worked has like 700 000 views so literally like hundreds of thousands of people started like seeing the content and wanting to learn about it so it was yeah a lot of growth I think we had a hundred thousand uh subscribers for like 130 000 now um in about 12 months of making content which is really really fast growth on YouTube especially offer a brand new channel um because this is not the first channel that that I've started on YouTube uh but this is definitely the fastest uh one as far as like initially just taking off now we're more into a bear market so if you look at like Google trends for crypto gaming or web3 gaming uh the search volume is down quite a bit but what's interesting is in spite of the like search Interest being down which it kind of makes sense this is like stuff like this is simple is cyclical especially like crypto there seems to be like uh like big inflows of Interest everyone gets really hyped and then the public conscience kind of moves on to something else and starts thinking about something else and then people who are really into it though they keep building during these uh these times of low interest and then it allows the next bull market to be much bigger than the last one ever was because now there's so much more progress so much real value in the space that's been created so even though search volume has been down it's been really interesting there's been like a ton of like funding rounds closed um there's like so many developers that are coming from like the traditional gaming space into web3 gaming and I just think that that will go through the spare Market who knows how long it's going to be but there will be another bull market at the end of this like that there's going to be another period where it's not all pessimism about inflation and like so much like I feel like fear in in the market people are going to start getting excited about the potential that exists and when that moment happens again the space is going to be so much more mature next time around um and there's gonna have been like there's a lot of lessons that have been learned um from some of the failures of um or not even failures sometimes just like never having done this before it's like you just you just run into these unknown unknowns that now you can plan for and it's going to make the space a lot more resilient I think um and long-term sustainable for the future so I'm just really excited about being in this space I I think yeah that was that's a long answer for you there no no no it's good like I love this excitement I love the enthusiasm the passion behind it but honestly speaking I am not that Versed and I would love to learn more now for sure yeah totally it's true right so I understand so web3 gaming crypto gaming is basically a a programmed game that has crypto built into it like nfts am I right so far yeah yeah so I guess just to keep to like catch your whole audience up if you don't know anything about like crypto or the blockchain or anything like that like pretty much um you can you can think about it like all of a sudden instead of there having to be a central um Authority that is kind of controlling ownership ownership becomes a decentralized ledger where like essentially a community together decides um this is who owns this and in order for the ownership to change yeah so gaming pretty much just then integrates the blockchain so that you can give real ownership instead of like having the blockchain uh validate the ownership of Bitcoin the blockchain can literally validate the ownership of every single thing inside a video game so that you can have like if you imagine World of Warcraft it's like a massive multiplayer online game that has a pretty like reasonable functioning balanced economy inside this game well you can literally turn everything inside the economy of World of Warcraft into a non-fungible can on the blockchain that is provably owned and then all of a sudden you transform this virtual economy into an economy that has real economic value and all of a sudden there are a lot of opportunities opened up now it's not new for like people to try to make money on World of Warcraft like there's been um Farms or company set up even though it's against terms of service to like try to create like earn this currency inside of World of Warcraft and then sell it to players who just want to like buy the currency and it's kind of like a black market for for that kind of thing but all of a sudden it's it's no longer Black Market just like everything that you have inside of of the virtual world you really own and it's limited and has real utility in in these games so for players who are excited about like spending time in this world like you can look at a game like a League of Legends they make billions of dollars selling virtual skins that players don't even really own um and it's against terms of service to sell those skins it's against terms of service to sell the account so essentially if you put some money in it's just gone it's gone forever you can you're never you should never expect to get anything back out it's like you're setting it on fire but if for example buying a skin in League of Legends was on the blockchain and you had the ability to resell it sure every single skin you're not going to be able to sell for the same price that you bought it for um but if there's like some limited skins that there's like only a certain number of and the game gets a lot more popular going forward or like I don't know there's there's some people that really like that champion and and you have one of like a very limited number some of the stuff you're going to be able to flip for more so there's there's at least at the very least going to be the opportunity of you can yard sale your your gaming experiences after you're done with them and you can at least get some of the money back out and it's just a lot better for for players to have real ownership and I think that it adds a new level level of realism and is kind of one of the first steps of of building a metaverse kind of like ready player one uh shows it to us where in Earnest cleanse the radio player one future that he he wrote In the book the metaverse currency like the Oasis currency is one of the most stable currencies in the entire world even compared to uh government currencies sponsored by by different governments because it's just decentralized the it's very stable there's like a very there's a set amount of inflation and it's just like it's something you can actually trust because no one can control it and change the livers so it makes sense that a virtual currency would have a lot of of like long-term stability going forward I mean when it's not so speculative like it is now when it's kind of um more accepted into into common Society but I think that a lot of a lot of these uh currencies are going to have a surprising amount of value stored in them um a decade from now or or maybe even less when some of these games start coming out so this this uh last bull market was maybe like a lot of hype but not that many games actually built on the same quality of traditional gaming like there's no reason for crypto games not to be the same quality of fun um as as traditional gaming Market especially when we have a lot of the developers from traditional gaming coming in so in this last bull market though that was not the case like crypto games currently um they're a lot lower quality there's a lot of kind of not it's just because the space is so new so like this this is like the the design of it right like everything is the same you're just adding a token you're adding yeah a code like why why would the quality it's because all of the first movers in this space are from the crypto space so they don't have experience in game development so yeah it's like a lot of people from crypto that are like oh wow we can we can release a coin that's like used in this game and like all these people have these ideas but they've never built video games before so I think the next time around we now have a lot of people from gaming realizing the potential here and who who have actually made a lot of of the video games that we love from our past that are now moving into this space and saying oh wow we see the opportunity here now so in the next bull market there's gonna be a real game so it's going to be a lot more exciting wow so this uh how about fortnite do you think fortnite will uh you know include or they have done it already like nfts within it in that world you know like into a metaverse if any anyone does it would be someone like epic games who has fortnite um because they've actually been making some well so I don't I can't speak to the short term whether or not they're gonna turn like fortnite yeah yeah yeah epic games has been a lot more Forward Thinking than a lot of other traditional uh game companies as far as web3 goes uh for example like on the other end of the spectrum I think from epic you have steam that literally banned their games from awarding players with cryptocurrency or nfts so steam is literally saying we don't want to deal with the potential regulations that the scrutiny that might like come on us if we start awarding players in crypto all of a sudden like uh companies like steam that have a big established business model they don't want to all of a sudden get hit for like some kind of gambling law that they didn't know they were following falling under or something like that so so a lot a lot of these Legacy companies are going to wait for kind of the first movers to get the regulatory scrutiny and for for the rules to be established before I even think they they'll think about moving into the space but epic games unlike Stadium actually has been making some proactive Partnerships with some of the big web 3 gaming companies uh like Gala games uh for example uh who is founded by the CEO and the co-founder of Myspace he uh started Myspace sold that company then he uh started zanga and uh zanga had like uh Farmville um and I think zenga's worth it's a publicly traded company worth billions of dollars now so now he has started Gala games which is a web 3 gaming company and he's brought in a lot of big traditional uh developers who have made like really successful games in the past and they are like bringing in a ton of sponsorships and one of the Partnerships that they recently announced is with epic games they're going to be launching uh one of their new web 3 Battle Royale games called grit on the epic games store so it's going to be I believe the first like nft blockchain game on the epic game store and it's kind of showing that epic is open to this idea and the CEO of Epic actually has said said um not not that long ago that he is like very interested in making sure that epic has a presence in the metaverse and like doesn't let uh like uh Zuckerberg Facebook just like you know take take the whole space or something like that so um you you're a gamer yourself yeah yeah I actually I play a lot of how many years I played games since since I was like I don't know 11 or 12 so I guess it's been 16 years something like that how did you get into this like how did you um start talking about it or getting knowledgeable about it probably not I mean like when you started this channel a lot of people for example podcast is start podcasts to learn more right so yeah totally was it some yeah was it something that you started the channel to to learn more or is this something that you already knew you had the knowledge you wanted to share with the world what was the decision behind uh starting this show yeah so I have a lot more experience like as a YouTuber than I do as a crypto gaming YouTuber so I actually started my first YouTube channel uh when I was 14 and it was like a Call of Duty channel so I would do commentary over over Call of Duty gameplay videos and that was kind of just like getting my foot um kind of in the pool as far as YouTube goes and learning how like the YouTube algorithm works and like how to get videos promoted on YouTube and make videos that people enjoy and and YouTube is a big steep learning curve in and of itself so like probably from 14 to 17 I did not make any money on YouTube and it was all just a learning experience like making hundreds of videos with absolutely no reward except for like seeing some positive comments and a lot of work and a lot of just learning how do I make my videos not suck so that that was my first channel so then I started uh Jake's top 10 uh which was really just focused on like trying to get a lot of views on YouTube and like figure out like how do you actually hack this viral algorithm thing to get some videos to really take off so that channel has close to a million subscribers but I was feeling like I don't know a little bit of lack of fulfillment on that channel because it was more focused on making videos that I thought were going to get a lot of views not making videos about topics I am actually interested in so it really got me searching like okay sure I can make I can make money making these videos for Jake's top 10 but what's something that I'm actually passionate about or excited about and one of the things that I started uh really getting into was was investing partly because I was like well what do I do with this ad Revenue I I want to invest it I don't want to just spend it so I really started getting into like stock market investing and I started like researching I was like I need to actually understand what this crypto is and as soon as I like really started um digging into this the the implications for how it could impact gaming it like hit me almost instantly I was like because I played a lot of massive multiplayer games with like real economies and I always thought it would be so cool if these economies were interchangeable with the real world economy and that like if I could get my character really rich in this game like maybe I could pay my rent in real life with that and that concept was always really cool but I always thought like I don't know how we could actually do this um and when I started learning about crypto I was like oh my gosh this is game changing so I started like looking on YouTube I was like is anyone talking about this and I was like looking for articles and I just there was like a lack of of information like no one was talking about it and I was like wait this is something yeah I was like this is a brand new space I think has so much potential and no one is making content about it and I was like well yeah exactly I have my expertise on on YouTubes so I'm gonna start this channel on on crypto gaming and yeah that's that's kind of how it how it went amazing so you um continuously invest in Bitcoin um yeah I own a little bit of Bitcoin but to be completely honest I own a lot more ethereum uh than Bitcoin um so if you think about like Bitcoin is kind of like a slow um more maybe like stable store of value type uh currency where it's like people are going to put their money here and then they're just not going to touch it and it's kind of like a gold substitute where there's not going to be that much inflation you can you you know exactly what the max supply of this is and you can just kind of like no like okay this this is not going to get inflated a lot this is potentially going to store some value ethereum on the other hand you can actually do a lot of cool stuff with and ethereum is kind of what enables crypto gaming because it is more than just a store of value it's like a computer for um for programming ownership into so it does have some problems with scalability and cost per transaction but it kind of is the the origination of this idea of wait we can program anything to exist on this blockchain and ethereum can can literally like it can compute Randomness it can like have like voting and decentralized like organization set up in it so ethereum is almost like the next generation of the internet in my mind and the fact that you can own the Internet it's like or that you can own ethereum it's almost like you can own the internet like the next generation of the internet you can have a piece of ownership in and um yeah I just think I think ethereum has even more potential than Bitcoin I think a Bitcoin uh definitely has a good amount of upside ahead but ethereum is something that as a as someone who's in web the web through gaming space and buys a lot of these uh gaming nfts and stuff like that like I'm spending ethereum and dealing with ethereum all the time so it's like it's something that I feel like has a lot more real world uh value and utility to it to my everyday life um and I think that there's just more and more developers that are building on ethereum um and more and more cool stuff that's getting built that is going to have more and more like real users and those real users coming into the space and actually using ethereum is what's going to cause more people to store their their wealth in ethereum and it's going to cause the market cap to go up long term whereas Bitcoin I'm not sure what the real driver of adoption is going to be for Bitcoin like I I think it's like it is definitely on an adoption curve and like its market cap is going to keep going up I think in these future Cycles I do think it is like a better substitute to Gold than gold um because um it's decentralized and like you're not gonna start asteroid mining or like finding these new gold reserves or like new Bitcoin reserves or Bitcoin on these asteroids right so I think it's even going to have less future inflation than something like gold uh will so I think a lot of people are going to like the idea of storing their their value there but I think ethereum is just going to have so many users so much quicker because of things like like gaming so personally I've been yeah I've been buying more and the thin Bitcoin but I mean nobody knows what what any any short-term price movement is going to be so yeah that's that's just my my personal yeah an nft like for example um you know they can attach it to anything right so it's it's that's where the nft is based on ethereum not Bitcoin right yeah yeah exactly so yeah and what do you think what do you think the future will be like like now that governments are talking about like you know for example fed coin uh they're a regulated coin when these countries bring out these regularly regulated coins what do you think is going to happen with ethereum Bitcoin and all these other tokens fine like there'll always be a market countries like China have like tried have like tried to ban Bitcoin mining and like Bitcoin selling and I think that a country like China I mean they they try to control a lot more of what the people can do I don't think a lot of Western countries are really going to even attempt that like China even bans a lot of the outside internet from existing in their country and I feel like Banning Bitcoin or ethereum is a lot like trying to ban the Internet it's a very difficult thing for a government to actually do especially when you have things like starlink popping up where like people can literally get internet from space from anywhere yeah it's like how is the government going to stop that from happening so I think it's it's actually going to be really really difficult to actually like in reality ban something like Bitcoin or ethereum now if there are government-sponsored alternatives that will mean that some people might just never have the incentive to like try to use something like Bitcoin or ethereum if it's just like really easy to use a government sponsored one but I think that ethereum and Bitcoin are always going to have their place um as like the first existence of this new type of currency um like a bitcoin's always gonna have the street cred of being like the first one and I think a lot of people are going to want to use it because of that and also because of that it has the longest track record of security so as long as that continues It's like because bitcoin's been around the longest it has the longest track record of bit of of storing money securely so people appreciate that as well um and then also for ethereum just so much is built on ethereum that you can't take that away from ethereum um and the more that gets constructed using that cryptocurrency it's like the more that it's like just in use by people every single day and even though yes Alternatives will exist and you're gonna have like China's sponsored currency and I think there's going to be some regulations about like stable coins in the U.S uh like US dollar coin and stuff like that but I think that's mostly good for people because it's going to be at least the regulations coming from the West yeah they're going to be like there to protect consumers the point is going to be like um ensuring that like if I own usdc like the company actually has all of that money really there and this coin is actually backed one for one with the US dollar and it's not going to go to zero at some point and that sort of Regulation I think is going to open up the market to more people because when something is like FDI insured and you know that you're not going to have like what's been happening with Celsius or um some of these other crypto exchanges where they've had liquidity problems when there's more Regulators in there and there's insurance yeah so as as more regulation and uh security is put in place more people are just going to feel comfortable being in in the crypto space and like holding cryptocurrency and like in the stock market if something happens to the exchange that you're using like a lot of these have insurance that you're insured up to a million dollars or something like that so if like the exchange that you're using goes out of business you're not going to lose your money for that but in crypto right now that's not the case like most of the stuff is not insured and that causes a lot of people and not regulated well and that causes a lot of people to say you know I'm just gonna not do anything here like I don't want to get scammed I don't lose my money and that makes sense like there's a lot of scammers in crypto and it does really suck and like my friend just texted me today like another person pretending to be me on Instagram to try and scam people and like that sucks so I understand why a lot of people just are like I'm not gonna do anything in this space yet so I think that for the most part governments moving into this space is going to be good for the space it's going to mean less scam and it's going to be more people are comfortable doing stuff in it um yes we always like to ask our guests what their inner superpower is that got them to this point um well I don't know if I have any inner superpowers I do think that I am very curious and I love maintaining curiosity and maintaining the desire to learn I do think that's super super powerful because like we don't live very long on this Earth and there's like no way that you're gonna know even most of the stuff you're not by the time uh but no there's like so much to learn and I think the moment where you're like okay I I know what's up first of all you start you're you're too cocky for your own good at that point already but at the point where you stop learning it's like you stop growing and I I think yeah so just being going to learn and experiment I think is important I think having a bias towards action and not and not letting the potential risk of failure stop you from trying stuff um is really important but it's definitely not a superpower it's something that you have to like win scores you have to like you have to try and cherish or like help grow things that you want to be more true about yourself like a lot of this stuff doesn't just happen instantly it's like you have to work toward it mm-hmm that was wonderful Jake thank you so much for sharing that and everything else that you shared you know in the audience um Jake is available all his information will be available in the show notes get in touch with them check out his YouTube channel he's growing oh one more thing sorry Jake can you give us one tip on growing a YouTube channel yeah a powerful one so the algorithm really cares about click-through rate like if I show someone this thumbnail and this title are they going to click it or not because if someone's not going to click it then the algorithm is going to stop showing it so getting someone to click your video is like the first barrier before then you have to get them to keep watching so it's like making entertaining video is important but I think there's a lot of people that have really great content but they just don't have like provocative enough like titles and like quality enough thumbnails that make people say what I want to know what's happening there like oh I want to know what the the answer is so it getting like triggering people's emotions in some way can oftentimes be a great a way to like get someone to click a video um but honestly like look at what people are searching too like look what people are searching Google Google Trends is a very powerful tool and then make content about what people are actually searching for and I think Google uh Google analytics for your YouTube channel uh recently added a section you can literally see what your own subscribers are searching for so that is like really powerful to making content that the viewers want to see as well um but yeah I I think uh watch a lot of like Mr Beast podcasts like watch them talk about you the YouTube algorithm and like how to make videos that people want to watch um and then just being consistent and doing it for a long time is important for growing it's like a Snowball Effect and at first it like seems it seems small but as it starts to come compounding and the snowball gets bigger um I think people can be surprised what the payoff can be eventually just for consistently making content and slowly growing an audience over time great great Jake thank you so much for taking the time to come on our show uh we're grateful and um hopefully we can you know provide value in your world and the audience of course this is all for you guys you know so if this is bringing value to you make sure you comment on the video make sure you connect with the thumbs up the thumbs up is great the algorithm loves that because it tells the algorithm like this person liked it and that means that someone else who maybe watched a different video that this person also liked the algorithm is going to say hey look this person like this video and that video so maybe this person will also like this video so it's just like when you leave a thumbs up it's great because it causes the algorithm to to recommend it to more people and exposes the video to a new audience perfect so yeah amazing definitely ask for those thumbs UPS on these yeah yeah that's good good thumbs up yeah so I'm sure we give a thumbs up and uh thank you again Jake for coming on the show and the audience thank you all yeah my pleasure thanks for having me thanks for inviting me no no problem and just any time um you want to get in touch with me you know where my Instagram is official durrani uh send me a comment send me a a message DM whatever it is love to hear from you and Jake again thank you so much for your time stay in touch yeah will do have a good one you too [Music]