Why Brandon B calls YouTube the "great equaliser"
Oct 15, 2025 [[read-time]] minute read
“I think YouTube is the most revolutionary thing to happen in media, arguably ever. For the first time in human history, access to global distribution is free to literally billions of people. This is the great equaliser of media,” creator Brandon Baum said in an interview ahead of this year’s Made On YouTube event, where we announced dozens of new tools and features to help creators streamline their production processes and bring new ideas to life.
Brandon—better known as YouTube Shorts creator Brandon B—would know the impact of YouTube better than most. After a stint working in TV production, his YouTube career started a few years ago during the COVID-19 pandemic, when he began making fun Shorts that relied on special effects at home in his bedroom: short scenes that used clever changes in perspective, subtle visual tricks, and quick edits for a unique style that was perfectly suited to YouTube Shorts.
“I said, ‘You know, what? Why don’t I create a new video every day, until the lockdown is done,’” he recalls. “What I thought was going to be a three-week lockdown turned into a three-month lockdown, but I carried on creating and by the end of the lockdown, I had an audience of over a million followers, so I thought, ‘Well, brilliant! Why don't I just carry on?’”
The huge audience that YouTube provided gave him a place to keep on building that audience, and in the four years since, that success has exploded into one of the most popular Shorts channels on YouTube, billions of views, and a production company, StudioB, that works with popular brands like Lego and Adidas on their own viral YouTube campaigns.
“I think YouTube is the most revolutionary thing to happen in media, arguably ever. For the first time in human history, access to global distribution is free to literally billions of people. This is the great equaliser of media.”
Brandon has gone from being the camera operator, director, writer, producer, and visual effects artist all on his own to running a team of 30 people. And his videos range from quick ideas shot in an afternoon to productions that cost upwards of £100,000 with massive simulations and huge effects that sometimes take months to render—all for 60 seconds of video.
“Some of our highest performing videos are the ones that we put very little budget into, very little time and resources… the idea just emotionally resonates with people so much that we didn't need to go crazy on it,” Brandon says. “It always brings us back to that idea that the story is everything, and everything else should be there as the supporting act to the story.”
Last month, Brandon joined the YouTube team on stage at Made On YouTube to help announce some of our latest creator tools, including Edit with AI, Transfer styles, and the ability to add objects right into your videos. And he’s excited for how these new YouTube tools can help level the playing field, lower the barrier to entry to create videos—even ones with complicated effects like Brandon’s—and open the door for a whole new generation of creators.
“When I decided I wanted to become a storyteller, I had to sit there for five years, learning really technical software, learning how I could use really technical cameras, just to start doing the thing that I wanted to do in the first place, which was tell stories,” Brandon says. “The world we live in now, anyone with a device and access to the internet has the ability to tell stories. We are opening up the playing field to billions of new storytellers. Meaning over the next decade, I think we're going to see some of the greatest storytellers pop up from all around the world.”
His advice to those creators?
“Upload a new video every day. Be obsessed with your data. Be obsessed with your analytics. Understand why things do, and don't work. Watch YouTube tutorials teaching you how to understand your analytics better. And then watch YouTube tutorials teaching you how to make better content,” he says. “It might take you five years until you see any return on the videos that you start creating. But as long as you've got that persistence to keep going and keep creating, you'll naturally learn everything that you need to know about creating the best content possible.”