In October 2016, HopeScope became a YouTuber. Her second upload, a video about reviewing activewear, had unexpectedly shot up into the hundreds of thousands of views, and she saw the opportunity to build a channel off that trend. So, she spent the next four years reviewing yoga pants–and it killed her creatively.
But she still wanted to do YouTube. That left her with a dilemma: How do you transform your entire digital presence and 180 from creative exhaustion to a fulfilling career, where both you and viewers are excited to see what you’ll post next?
For her, the growth started with a conversation. She was chatting with Derral Eves, founder of creator bizdev convention VidSummit, when he tossed her a question that changed the way she thought about pretty much everything.
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“I was getting so much random advice from so many different directions, people telling me to keep going on what I was doing, or telling me to go into fitness content, and none of it really felt like what I wanted to do,” HopeScope (aka Hope Allen) tells Tubefilter. “Then I met Derral and he asked me, ‘Why do people watch your videos?'”
It took her a while to get to the answer he wanted. “I said, ‘Well, it’s because they want to know what leggings to buy.’ And he was like, ‘No, Hope. Why do they watch your videos?’ And I said, ‘I guess it’s because they trust my opinion.’ And he was like, ‘There you go,'” she laughs. “He was like, ‘So what other topics do you want to talk about that you think they might like your opinion on?'”
That set the wheels turning.
Allen didn’t want to make the jump too quickly. She believed Eves when he said her (then) audience of 400,000 subscribers was watching her stuff for her, not just because they were rabid Lululemon fangirls, but she still didn’t want to risk her entire channel by pivoting suddenly into a new content direction. She and husband/creative partner Tyler decided to test viewer reception by mixing in the new stuff with the old. It was a crucial moment for both of them, as Allen had seen a downturn in channel traffic with COVID keeping everyone out of the gym and thus out of activewear; Tyler, meanwhile, had just been laid off. They decided together to commit to YouTube full-time for a year: both of them would give the channel their all for those 12 months, and see where they were at the end of 2021.
The first “new” video, where Allen bought the Kardashians’ used clothes, “didn’t do bad,” she says. “I posted it [in December 2020] and it didn’t do bad. It performed as usual, and obviously that was the best possible scenario.” (That video, btw, currently has more than 9.3 million views and is one of the top-viewed on her channel.)
By December 2021, Allen’s channel had a million subscribers and was bringing in over 25 million views a month. She’d moved away from her old content entirely, and capped off the change with a video where she got rid of the $100,000 legging collection she’d built up during the first four years of her channel. In this fresh era, she was sometimes gaining over 100,000 new subscribers a month with videos like I Bought FAMOUS MOVIE DRESSES, I Spent $2,000 on DIGITAL FASHION from the FUTURE, and I Bought LOST Cargo Packages for CHEAP, and she finally felt that creative oomph she’d been missing.
Now, four years later, Allen has 5 million subscribers, nets nearly 50 million views a month, and wants to help other creators who feel like she did back in 2020.
That’s why she’s the keynote speaker at VidSummit 2024, which will welcome 3,500 attendees to Dallas Sept. 3-5. Her half-hour talk will be about “how to get out of a rut if you feel like you’re ready to pivot, and understanding your audience,” Allen says. “I feel like that’s something I was able to figure out and do in a pretty effective way.”
And Allen’s not done evolving. She’s currently building out her audience with livestreaming, which she’s found offers an even deeper connection with her viewers.
“I started on a whim. I bought lost cargo, and the video was probably only 12 minutes long, but all the top comments on that video were, ‘We want to see everything you got!’ I was like, ‘Wait a second, that’s an interesting idea,'” Allen says. She ended up going live on TikTok and showing everything she bought. When she uploaded the VOD of that stream on YouTube, it got over a million views. “So I was like, ‘Okay, there’s something to this,'” Allen says.
She now does one stream a month on YouTube, and in the course of doing them is able to ask questions about what her audience wants to see, and gauge their interest in other topics she’s interested in exploring. Right now, she’s focused on content about experiences (like this video where she hunts down every Crocs ever made) and videos about traveling. She’s also bringing on a team to help expand her business–a move that includes getting an editor for the first time since she started YouTube.
“I was so afraid of losing touch with my community if I handed over the edit, because I felt like the editing was such a big part of the storytelling,” Allen says. “But I’ve actually found it to be the opposite. Now that I’ve handed off editing, I can actually spend more time on the creative and the story and just showing up as my best, most energetic, happiest self on camera.”
You can catch Allen onstage at VidSummit Sept. 4. We’ve previously covered what else you can expect from this year’s event, and next week, we’ll publish the official Tubefilter guide to the event, so stay tuned. For now, you can check out the full schedule here, and ticketing here.
VidSummit is a Tubefilter partner.
