Felicia Day made YouTube work for her. The former co-star of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” created the web series The Guild based on her love of video games and it turned into a cottage industry, successful DVD releases, music videos and eventually the YouTube Channel Geek & Sundry, which caters to geeks of every class around, from board games to romance literature and beyond. Now Felicia Day is curating “Fan Friday” for YouTube’s Geek Week, currently in progress, and talking to CraveOnline about her plans for more geek-related YouTube content, how to become a successful vlogger yourself, and why generators of YouTube content focus too much on numbers, because what really matters is a passionate core fanbase.
We’d listen to her if we were you. If anyone can tell you how to make YouTube work for you, it’s Felicia Day.
CraveOnline: Did they run Geek Week by you? Or did they just say, “Hey, we’re doing Geek Week! Do this?”
Felicia Day: No, I knew several months ago that they were going to do these really cool events that pushed content and focused audiences on certain themes, and I was really excited about it. It’s a great way to use the platform to make audiences aware of things they might like that they might not know about. They proposed Geek Week and they came to us, as Geek & Sundry, obviously, we’d be a perfect fit for it, and they said, “We’d love you to curate a day.” I thought about all the things that our channel represents and I originally wanted to make sure that our day represented the grass roots type of geekdom, that’s personal, so we are hosting Fan Friday and I’m very excited about it.
Can you tell me a little bit more about Fan Friday? What’s everyone going to be able to expect from this?
Yeah, Fan Friday is the theme of our day, and we are curating a lot of videos that have to do with the fandom around geekdom, versus the celebrity around geekdom. As well, we’re having a whole slew of programming around the week: special episodes of our existing shows, as well as a special epic video that we’ll be releasing on Friday with our curated day.
You mentioned the disparity between geek fandom and geek celebrity. One of the things that fascinates me about internet fandom is that a fan with enough passion, and preferably with enough screen presence, can very quickly become a celebrity.
That’s what’s I think is amazing about the internet. That kind of spirit actually got me my career, where I am today. I was a huge fan of video games, I wanted to write something, and I saw the tools at my fingertips to upload a video to my audience, and that’s why I’m here today. I think that freedom and the lack of gatekeepers, combined with people’s passion, is what really the true spirit of internet geekdom is about. That’s what I hope Geek & Sundry embodies, because it’s my company that is sort of the umbrella for all the different shows that I make. Really it’s about the community meeting each other online and then maybe even meeting face-to-face at the huge Comic-Con event that we did this year.
When you started Geek & Sundry, did you have a specific philosophy? Is there a quote emblazoned on the wall to keep everyone focused?
We’ve done a lot of different quotes. We launched with “Eccentricity for Your Entertainment,” but we kind of changed it a little bit this year for thinking about never making a maintream show. Always about community, never mainstream, because we’re thinking about our fans. We’re not treating them as nameless or faceless. The people who watch our shows, we want them to be affected by it, whether it’s just making a video for their friends because it makes them look cooler or they really enjoy it, or it’s something that really allows someone to go and experiment with something in their real life that they want to see in a video. Like playing a tabletop game or playing retro games with their family, or vlogging about something that they really love. I wanted to make sure that everything we do is personal, and not anonymous. That’s what Geek & Sundry embodies to me.
I really admire that, because I feel like there’s a tendency once you turn your fandom, or even your creativity, into something as commercial as even a YouTube Channel, there’s a tendency to focus on how to keep going, how to keep marketing and reach the broadest audience possible. It seems to me like there’s a really good way to go in the opposite direction.
Yeah, I mean a lot of people do that large-scale. They want to scale larger and appeal to a larger and larger fanbase. But me, I’m looking to create something that doesn’t exist already, which is videos educating you, talking to you, representing something in a video that doesn’t exist already, and creating an opportunity for community around video in a person way versus an anonymous way. And that means our philosophy is doing less, better, so that we can really do everything 100% and make sure it’s a service to the audience instead of just checking a box.
