"My own thing" and other such people
Here's a filthy secret: when I started out one of my main goals was to get to the point I could collaborate with Big Successful YouTubers. Well, let's be more honest about my humble aspirations here - Relatively Large YouTubers Who Seem Like They'd Be Fun To Do Stuff With. I bring this up because while this isn't on everyone's list I have seen enough evidence to suggest it's not an entirely uncommon sentiment, even among people who don't take the plunge and record about 100 hours of themselves mumbling into a microphone over an increasingly broken game of OpenTTD like they've never heard the phrase, "completely orthogonal to your intended direction of travel".
It is no longer one of my goals. Like, I wouldn't say no if I was asked, but also I'd be just as happy if the request was, "do you want to drive us about and make the tea?" Possibly more so, because then I wouldn't have to worry about ruining someone else's video by stumbling about like the Hunchback of Notre Dame and muttering while continually looking somewhere 30cm to the left of the camera.
Also while it's not exactly that goal you can indeed find my calming tones across a variety of videos which aren't mine, from augmenting lists of useful tech tools to masquerading as a game reviewer. You will note these are not huge channels with enormous reach; they're people in the same sort of place as me, doing this as a hobby but still doing their best to make enjoyable and well-produced videos.
(Alright, so both of those examples have about 50% more subscribers than me. Bastards.)
Back-patting
The reason this happens is because when you're small, you don't have a list of people you can call on when you need "an authoritative BBC voice" or "a South London gangster" or even "somebody who'll most likely turn out a half-decent talking head segment". You have to ask whoever's about and see what they come up with. Which will usually be another channel about the same size. With those of us below 10k having largely disjoint audiences, there's a practical benefit to helping out in this way. Not all of Rose Tinted Spectrum's audience will like what I do and not all of my audience will like what Rose Tinted Spectrum does, but there's enough crossover that we both gain a few viewers every time that "thanks to @TimberwolfK for his sultry advertising voice" goes in the description. Some of them might even not be bots!
Well, if I remember to retweet and share. Otherwise the gain is all mine, like a particularly cack prisoner's dilemma. One in which I probably don't get asked to do things again.
Maybe over time some of us smaller channels will get big. And if/when/if we do so, we'll have our little red book of "great fun on a live stream", "just the person for an in-depth technical explanation", "happy to eat unreasonably large quantities of lime jelly on camera", and so on just like the current pro channels. I'm sure if that happens, we'll also inspire other people who don't yet have a channel to go, "I'd love to appear on one of those live streams", or perhaps more likely, "wouldn't it be brilliant for me to be in one of those Timberwolf videos where he drinks an entire bottle of Frosty Jack's in an alleyway and shouts obscenities at a fence because hey, it's all gone wrong for him."
Nerves
Here's the thing. I recently put out my first, "so er, does anyone want to help me put together a video" call to some of the people I've met through retro gaming, and let me tell you it is nerve-wracking.
When you do that for the first time, you genuinely don't know who will say yes (if anyone will say yes), who will run hopelessly over or under your intended time slot, who will have obvious and unrecoverable video problems (usually this is me), who will be too big a character, who will fade into the background, and who you'll need to keep prodding until it feels uncomfortably like you're Making People Do Work.
In reality, it's all gone well. I've not got exactly what I expected, but then I'm not sure exactly what I did expect. What I have is lovely things I can use and react to, and also an idea of what each of those people brings to A Timberwolf Production™ when I ask for help.
The thing driving that nervousness is this: I've reached a point where Timberwolf has its own identity. It's not me doing Let's Plays until I get invited on something better, it's not me investigating controversial game mechanics in real time, and it's not me throwing random things at the wall until I figure something out that works and then decide I don't like things working because it clutters up the comments page something rotten. There is a recognisable thing which is a Timberwolf video, and while I'm constantly looking for things to improve it or make it more fun I no longer want to throw the basic principles away.
I finally have my own thing. When I invite people into that thing, I have to hope that on some level they get it, that they understand it's not just droning on endlessly about technical details and while the skits are about 50% terrible dad jokes there are certain parameters to the humour, it's never sweary, "yuk yuk look at me I'm hilarious", or unnecessarily mean. Except to people who write tedious nit-picking comments, and frankly they deserve it.
Which brings me back to that opening point. I no longer look at a collaboration on A Big Channel and think, "oh I could do that, I could play that part". It's a sanguine, "this person already has someone to play that part. Someone where they know what they bring, they can count on them to turn up on time and be reliable, and they have to waste precisely zero time on sorting out the working relationship." It's what I already knew: you, J Random Wants-To-Be-On-A-Channel-50-Times-Bigger-Than-You, are just some weird Let's Player who can't be trusted not to stand in the wrong place, mess up all the banter, mug at the camera and go, "ooh, if you like this you'll love my video where I connect Flundinghattan to Pludville Ridge by bus!"
That sounds cynical, but it's because I have a naturally cynical style of self-reflection and I get through life more easily when I'm brutally honest with myself. You will not believe the number of times I use the word "bellend" when assessing my own actions. Well. If you've spent any significant amount of time with me you might.
Despite this, being in the fortunate place to be able to crowdfund things I spent some time on the set of a Big Medium-Sized YouTube Channel With Many Collaborators recently and this, if anything, helped me finally make my peace with the idea. Seeing it all in action you start to see how the moving parts of the machine fit together, how each person knows how to bounce off the other and even the sound and lighting engineers know exactly what's going to go on and how to get the best out of it.
Also, I finally learnt how to wire myself for sound. Like that there Cliff Richard.
Magnitude
If anything, seeing people with a large(ish) audience work together solidified that there's a bunch of channels I should collaborate with, and that's those around the same order of magnitude to me and with the same kind of outlook. See, those bigger and successfuller channels have a template, one they've figured out over all those years getting biggerer and successfullerer. But then look at my channel. There's no template yet for, "someone contributes a section to a Timberwolf video". There's no template yet for, "someone turns up and chats retro games with Timberwolf". (There's not even a plan for it yet!) There's no template yet for, "Timberwolf turns up on a charity livestream", although that is in the process of getting rectified as I write.
More importantly, if I work with other people of about the same size and experience we're not going to all immediately piss each other off with differing expectations of production standards. In the 500-5,000 region, while we all have different things we're good or bad at, most of us have a baseline knowledge of how to record usable video and sound, be vaguely entertaining on camera, and what does and doesn't work for a YouTube audience. It's hard to get beyond 500 without that, and believe me I talk from experience there.
But also, we all make mistakes - cameras out of focus or accidentally set to 720p, audio with too much echo or clothing rustle, austere titles, all those little rough edges which make things look more like one of the wonkier episodes of Crown Court than a professional modern TV production. So it's not like I'm going to do something in my typically amateur style and have it immediately thrown back with a, "what maniac colour-graded this?" Even those of us who do know how to do it can remember a time when we didn't.
Although I might get some helpful advice on how Resolve's colour page works as a result.
Illuminatus
Which is the tedious reality of collaboration between YouTubers. 90% of it is going, "oh yeah, this drove me mad with Resolve, you need to put it in Frame mode and then press the arrow here to track it" or explaining your EQ settings. Seriously, if you got enough of the people you watch together in a room it wouldn't be an awesome collab video of all your favourite YouTube channels, it'd be three hours of intensely technical graphic designer-y chat about thumbnail text legibility and trying to figure out why one person has a CPM £0.03 higher than another. (Usually across two videos which earnt £1.82 apiece).
Even of the appearances in other people's videos, almost all of that is, "I need a game review read out in a voice that isn't mine, anybody got a spare few minutes?"
When you see YouTube Person A's face in YouTube Person B's video, that's only the tiniest tip of an iceberg which is kept afloat by giving advice, offering encouragement on the bad days, reading a passage of text two dozen times until the local scooterhead stops revving their moped in the middle of it, writing detailed descriptions of what a camera or mic is like to work with, and somewhere in the region of 93,482.6 hours going, "if I'm seeing that in my feed, what's the question it raises that'll make me click on it?"
I know some people like to act shocked these sorts of relationships exist, but really there's no lid to lift here. It's not even like it didn't come with a living hinge and was lost years ago, it simply didn't exist in the first place. We exist in a lidless container. A bowl of YouTubers. A ramekin of retro gamers. Look, "people who make YouTube channels on a similar subject talk to each other" is no more sinister than the existence of a WhatsApp group of the people at your old workplace you used to go to the pub on Fridays with, which for the hard of thinking is 0 sinister. It's about as sinister as wearing a sock, or comparing ham.
The weird thing is, other than plucking up the courage to ask people to help me with a video, I didn't go seeking any of this out. It came to me. And it's not like I'm special, I think it would for anyone who works hard at their craft, does their best to improve, and comes across like a fairly reasonable and level-headed person. That's what I think some people miss about social dynamics, and I'm not just talking the top secret retro gaming ones. Even if it's just a weekly D&D session, you're still not going to bring someone into your world who feels like they're going to be constantly flying off the handle at perceived slights, trying to find things to be bitter about while contributing nothing, or is just looking for "juice".
Filth
So here's a different filthy secret: where I'm at now, one of my goals is to get to a point where I'm using my channel to collaborate with Other YouTubers Who Are In The Same Sort Of Place As Me, And It Doesn't Matter If They Have A Smaller Audience Because We Probably Have Comparable Production Standards. I love stating my top-secret goals, they're so succinct and concise.
This is the joy of building a channel. It's taken me a long time to be happy with it, but I now have my own thing. Something I can invite people to be a part of, with the small caveat that thanks to debilitating social anxiety this will probably happen no more than 3 times per year and at least 2 of those will require me to be quite staggeringly drunk at the time I make the request.
But still. It's there. And if anything, that would be my advice, to past me if no-one else: just start the damn channel and see where it takes you.