Smile, You're on Candid Camera

Would you believe me if I told you I didn't know who (or what) Mr. Beast was until June of 2025?

Apparently Mr. Beast is the most followed YouTuber, and despite that I'd never run across anything related to him (or his organization) until I discovered this video by Jaiden Animations:

This was when I first discovered Jaiden (after discovering Rebecca Parham's YouTube channel first) and a couple of her videos referenced how absolutely crazy some of Mr. Beast's followers were. However, even after watching Jaiden's video I didn't have any desire to go and hunt down Mr. Beast, so I tucked that little bit of knowledge away and just went on with life.

Then two things happened. First, Dan Olson dropped this video:

If you've got the time, it's worth a watch as Dan was most definitely NOT the sort of influencer that someone of Mr. Beast's ilk would typically be interacting with. I mean, Dan does long form video essays about deep topics --gaming related or not-- and is the polar opposite of Mr. Beast's stuff. 

After watching Dan's video, I still had no desire to go visit Mr. Beast's site on the internet. I mean, Dan had pretty much reinforced my opinion that Mr. Beast was NOT for me.

Finally, I opened up my email last morning to find this from (of all places) Lowe's Home Improvement:

This arrived in my INBOX on 5/18/2026.

You're kidding me, right? 

Lowes? The hardware company that partners with the NFL and sports figures like Messi?

No, I'm still not interested in seeing Mr. Beast's stuff, and after having watched Dan's video, I think that Beast Industries is throwing jello at a wall to see what sticks. After all, I'm about 45 years too old to be Beast Industries' target audience.

***

The presence of Monsieur Beast in my email provided me a necessary intro into something that I'd been thinking about after my attendance at the Dayton Hamvention: the prevalence of YouTubers and other influencers.

Outside of Salty Walt, I noted the presence of several other YouTubers at the Hamvention. One of the first people who came by our tables on Friday I recognized immediately.

"Hey, it's the CB guy!" I exclaimed.

"Yes it is," he replied with a slightly sheepish grin.

It was Erik of Farpoint Farms, whose YouTube channel focuses a lot on CB radio with a side helping of shortwave and scanner radios, solar power, and other items he uses at his farm in the mountains of North Carolina. He was a pretty genial guy, so he was exactly like he presented himself on his channel. That morning he was just rummaging around for anything interesting to purchase, not record for the channel.* Alas, one of our club members tried hard to sell him on items rather than let him look in peace, but at least Erik took it in stride.

However, as the Hamvention progressed, I noted other YouTubers around, some livestreaming with cameras and some without, but obviously all looking at things with an eye toward content. There was one moment where I was walking in one direction of the flea market, saw a well-known YouTuber with phone on a selfie stick, recording, and I spun around in the opposite direction and "noped" my way out of there. When I was looking at antennas with one of the indoor vendors --hey, I'm a ham, what do you expect?-- another guy appeared at my elbow and began talking to the vendor, explaining he was a YouTuber, and wanted to ask him some questions. After a quick side glance to make sure he wasn't recording at just that moment, I skipped out again.

I get it, people are creating content for a living. That's the name of the game. But holy cow did there seem to be so many of them around. And given that while the Dayton Hamvention has attendees worldwide, there are only ~730,000 hams in the US. (Yes, it's on the public record; as the link shows.) There were around 36,000 Hamvention attendees, and probably 25,000-30,000 of them were actual amateur license holders.** So the size of the potential audience in a YouTube channel isn't all that great to begin with, and it certainly seems that a lot of folks are fighting over that smallish slice of the pie. 

But you know, that's okay. I can just do my thing as long as they don't intrude on it, and I'll let them do their thing. 

***

I do realize that I'm griping a bit about this on a blog, which is the older form of social media. I have enough self awareness that I can acknowledge that, but there are two significant differences: scale and goals. as my other influencer post pointed out, I'm not even close to their league in terms of visibility. And for someone who prefers to keep himself largely out of the spotlight, that's perfectly fine with me. The second is that I'm not doing this to generate clicks and/or income. I'm doing it as an outlet for my urge to write. I don't have to worry about critiques, rejection letters (if I'd even merit one out of a slush pile), and god forbid any chaos that'd arise out of any potential professional publications. 

Isn't blogging a form of self-publishing?
From Imgflip.

The YouTubers do put themselves out there in a way I never do, and consequently open themselves up to criticism I don't receive. For that, I salute them, and yet I'm glad I am not them.

(Also, I have now developed what appears to be Con Crud, that low grade cold that afflicts people when they have been to a conference of any sort. I was just telling my wife this past evening that this was the first real "cold" that I've had since my health scare in 2021. Not sure what kind of record that breaks, but for me it feels like forever. And I simply hate hate HATE a sore throat.)

*That came later. Judging by the footage, I was not around the booth at the time; probably at a forum or something. Oh, and for the record, while I might disagree with some of Erik's stances on things, he is living proof that people can disagree without being disagreeable.

**For example, I only got my license in the Fall of 2025, and I'd attended around 5 times or so before this year.

How The Other Half Lives

I'm kind of grateful that my little corner of the internet isn't that popular. 

As I've said in the past, there's less than 100 people who regularly follow the channel (likely closer to 30 than 100), so I very rarely see much traffic beyond web crawlers out there. When you see traffic to the blog on blogger.com that says "5K" but when you go on Google Analytics and see "15", you know that you have a LOT of bot traffic.*

Truth, but I have it anyway. From StatsGlitch.

I realize I'm a bit of an outlier in that I'm perfectly happy not having much of an online presence. There's tons of people creating online content for various reasons, and here I am not really worried that I'm monetizing my blog that much.** 

Consequently, my normally shy self is served by not being recognizable out in public. Ever since I grew a beard in college, I've been able to be anonymous out in public despite being a redhead; people who knew me in grade or high school have a hard time recognizing me now. It's not perfect, since some people do recognize me every couple of years in this metro area of ~2.3 million people, but I can live with that. If I ever became a published author, my nightmare would be that I'd have to go out on a book tour, so maybe it's for the best that I'm not that good enough of a writer to have to worry about that sort of thing. 

But sometimes I do wonder how I'd handle that "being recognized" scenario.

Luckily for me, some YouTubers who are far more well known than I'll ever be have had to deal with that, and they made posts about their adventures.

This first one, from Rebecca Parham, stumbled into my feed a couple of weeks ago. Until that moment, I was blissfully unaware of who she was. While I'm happy that she's doing well, I'm also perfectly aware she exists in a completely different orbit than I inhabit.

Because I watched a few of Rebecca's videos, the algorithm started suggesting to me JaidenAnimations' videos, and as a consequence this one appeared as it dropped Saturday afternoon. If Rebecca's in an entirely different orbit than me, Jaiden is in another solar system. 

I think that it's a good thing that both of them are in the sort of fandom where they don't have to deal with creepers all that much, but I'm also quite aware that their part of the internet only has occasional interactions with mine at best. There was a bit of culture shock involved when I said to myself "Just who are these people?" and went down the rabbit hole for a while, the same sort of culture shock when I noted that the mini-Reds were watching videos some somebody named Pewdiepie and I felt obligated to find out what that was all about.***

Yeah, I think I'm happy being in my own lane. I'm not sure how I'd handle it if the spotlight of fame were to shine on me, even within such a limited topic as MMO video games.

*There's also the fact that apparently a lot of traffic suddenly began flowing from Brazil of all places, and you know that it's a bot of some sort.

**Because I use an ad blocker on all of my browsers, I don't even know if my blog has any ads visible to people. Since I've not allowed custom ads on the site...

Here's the proof.

there ought to not be any ads. If there are any ads, however, I get so little "real" traffic that I'd never see a dime anyway.

***It was a short-lived interest, which was fine with me.