Josh Pieters is a YouTuber, with over one million subscribers, turned filmmaker and co-founder of Goon Squad Productions.
Being a professional cricket player was what I wanted to do as a career. In my school holidays I would coach young kids and I once had an embarrassing poster which had my contact details for cricket coaching.
To pursue my professional dreams, I moved to England as an overseas club pro — I am 6ft 5in and was a left-arm opening bowler — for a club called Burslem in Stoke-on-Trent, who play in the North Staffordshire and South Cheshire Premier League.
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It was a far cry from beautiful Knysna in South Africa where I had grown up going wakeboarding at the weekend. That’s what I thought life was like as a naive teenager.
But I learned a lot of life skills at the club; from dealing with parents whose kids really didn’t want to be coached, to the motivated and passionate children. It was cool being able to try and mold them into good cricket players.
Going to live in Stoke-on-Trent and playing at facilities far different from the set up at Western Province was all a major new learning curve. I was quite soft as a teenager and was homesick at first. I had to grow up quickly as a 19-year-old and the people were incredible and salt of the earth.
The club paid for my return flights back home, my food and accommodation was covered while I earned around £150 per week for playing and coaching.
At the time one of my best friends from South Africa, Caspar Lee, was in the UK making videos. I spent a lot of time with YouTubers and started to make my own videos. By the time it came to return to South Africa, I had raised enough to rent my own apartment and 10 years later I have made a career out of it in the UK.
There is a social experiment meaning behind the videos I have created. When I started it was pretty silly stuff, the early days of YouTube when audiences would be happy sitting there watching young guys talk about their lives.
As I got older, that changed and I leaned into the content I was interested in, like Brass Eye and Sacha Baron Cohen. It led me into creating the prank video with Katie Hopkins where we flew her to Prague to collect the ‘Campaign to Unify the Nation Trophy’.
We also pulled a stunt on anti-vaxxer Piers Corbyn where we offered him £10,000 to stop talking about the AstraZeneca vaccine. Unfortunately for him it was monopoly money.
A few years ago we started our own production company which creates content for YouTube as well as adverts for corporate clients, and where the majority of our cash flow comes from.
Last year, I decided to move in a new direction. Aged 31, perhaps I had lost my appetite to be extremely naughty and setting people up and wanted to go into the world of documentary making.
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We got incredibly lucky with the first one we made. It centred on the story of Lily Phillips sleeping with 100 men in a single day. It performed extremely well.
It was such an insane story. We made contact with Lily two months before she pulled the stunt off and asked if we could be a fly on the wall and find the reasons for her doing it. We were never there to judge. It was more to dig into whether she had thought of the consequences of what she was doing.
The way the world is consuming media is changing so much, one where anyone can create content and put it on a platform to watch.
It is the reason why we are seeing the Phillips saga unfold — she is not breaking the law but where it doesn’t feel entirely right what she was doing.
She’s essentially pulling the stunt off in order to make herself more notable and to promote herself on OnlyFans.
With that creative freedom, we are seeing more extreme examples of what people are getting up to which is something interesting to keep our eyes on for the future.
It is sometimes a thankless journey being a content creator, sometimes your favourite videos don’t get watched and vice versa.
We are all content creators now and anyone can broadcast themselves to the world. Whatever you’re creating on YouTube, you have to make sure that is something you enjoy doing.
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