TheWillofDC Talks AdamThomasMoran and Rise of International YouTubers

YouTube’s Margaret Healy once called William Hyde, better known online as TheWillofDC, “the Oracle of YouTube” for his savant-like crunching of the mountains of stats and numbers within YouTube’s top subscribed channels. He’s arguably one of the foremost expert reporters on YouTube channels, so it’s no wonder we’ve had Will has a semi-regular contributor to Tubefilter.

Originally from the East Coast—and yes, once living in Washington DC—Will built up quite the following himself with his twice-weekly main shows, Winners & Losers and YouTube News, bringing his channel to a lofty 307,688 subscribers as of this writing.

We caught up with Will for a little one-on-one time on the Tubefilter interview couch at VidCon 2011 with Dana Ward, watch the full interview here:

And while we had him freshly back from a trip to a whirlwind trip through Europe that hit up Spain and Poland, he’s thinking internationally and we asked him for his thoughts on what’s ahead on YouTube.

Tubefilter: Are there any hot newcomers you’re noticing a big spike in this week?
TheWillofDC: adamthomasmoran, essentially the Russian raywilliamjohnson has really started skyrocketing after a year on YouTube. It almost make me wonder why every languge doesn’t have a =3 equivalent. The Spanish version, an actual subsidiary of =3 is doing fantastic and now this Russian independent content creator has struck gold. I am waiting eagerly for a Mandarin Chinese version of the popular =3 format.

Tubefilter: What trends should new and up-and-coming creators be aware of in terms of what’s working in online video?
TheWillofDC:

70% of YouTube’s total viewership is from outside north america. The past year we’ve seen a select few international YouTubers really take command and hold a sizable audience comparable to any north american YouTuber. I think right now people should focus on not limiting their audience to America only. If you speak a 2nd language you should be utilizing that in some way to make special videos or a channel dedicated entirely to utilizing that foreign language. Also I’m surprised at the lack of captions on videos. I think in the future the way everyone annotates now everyone will have their videos captioned.

Tubefilter: What’s next for you in the months to come?
TheWillofDC: I’m finally done with all my summer travels thankfully and can start putting content creation into overdrive. I have a gaming channel I want to start up again and my main channel has a brand new set that looks AWESOME and will really enhance the new look and feel for YouTube News and Winners and Losers while I’m always going to do news and statistics I have a desire to start doing more interviews and hosting gigs which is where my focus will be for the next year.