Just a year after Dan Bradley founded his YouTube channel FPL Mate – on which he posts content about fantasy football – he was making so much money through YouTube that he was able to quit his day job.
Dan, 32, was working as a graphic designer before he launched FPL Mate during the pandemic, when the lockdowns granted him more free time to spend on his passion for video creation. In the space of a year, his channel’s popularity had boomed so much he was able to hand in his notice and choose YouTube full time.
Dan credits his success in part to YouTube filling a gap left by traditional television to provide people with niche content on their hobbies and interests.
“YouTube, in general, is something I’ve been doing for a very long time, 17 years or something like that,” Dan, who is based in Bedfordshire, told PA Real Life.
“I’ve always been making videos since I was a teenager – as long as I can remember, really, I’ve had various YouTube channels of varying degrees of success.”
In 2020, during the Covid pandemic, “when a lot of people had more spare time than perhaps they previously did”, Dan said he decided to start afresh with a new YouTube channel that tapped into one of his personal interests – fantasy football.
The game sees people assemble an imaginary team consisting of real-life Premier League football players, and they score points based on the players’ statistical performance in the Premier League.
Dan landed on his idea after finding a gap in the market for well-produced fantasy football content, along with his desire for getting more into the nitty-gritty of the game he loved.
“I’m an avid fantasy football player anyway, I’ve been playing with my mates for years, since I was a teenager. So that’s probably 13 years playing at least casually,” he said.
“The year running up to me starting the YouTube channel, I tried to start playing a little bit more competitively and try and get into the real nerdy stuff that I was kind of blind to before. I started the YouTube channel, as well, as a bit of a learning process.
“If I’m putting effort into making videos and doing research, that’s going to improve me as a player, and anything I can learn from really being a (fantasy football) nerd I could then try and share with people who might happen across my channel.
“Hopefully that resonates with some people who are also trying to learn and improve at fantasy football as I was.”
“It only took a year between me opening up the channel and it becoming a full-time job,” he continued, adding that he quit his job in 2021 and was able to get on the property ladder with his YouTube earnings.
“It’s not really something I expected to happen. It was always intended as a hobby, side project, whatever, something I’ve always done anyway. But it got to a point where, I think because I had found that niche, the channel had grown to an extent where the earnings I was getting through YouTube eclipsed the earnings of my day job.
“At that point, it’s like, ‘OK, imagine what I could do if I put even more time into this, even more energy. If it wasn’t an evening thing any more, it wasn’t three videos a week, it was five or six videos a week. How could we scale this by dedicating more time to it?’
“As soon as it financially made sense to make that transition, it was (time to) hand in my notice. Let’s just go for this.”
Dan spends “probably 60 hours a week” on his YouTube channel, which has 224,000 subscribers, but it doesn’t all feel like work – at the same time, he’s improving at one of his favourite hobbies.
Of course, providing high-quality specialist content requires a lot of research.
“It’s a lot of scrolling through social media, actually, following all of the right accounts and having notifications set up for all the key Premier League clubs and the main news sources and stuff like that,” Dan explained.
“Also a lot of the the betting markets as well, what the odds are saying, and spending a lot of time using tools to look at all of the stats and try to understand how to interpret a lot of these underlying numbers: how many shots a player takes each game, some nerdy stats like expected goals, the positions of players and things like that, which you can all find on various different websites to go really in depth into these kind of things.
“There’s lots of resources out there, and it’s about compiling them all into something that’s useful and consumable and easy to understand.”
YouTube videos offer viewers something different to traditional television channels, Dan said, including the ability to find content that is specific to their interests and the fact that the site fosters communities for fans to engage in.
Ofcom recently revealed that YouTube has overtaken ITV as the second most-watched home service in the UK, with younger adults aged 16-34 driving the trend.
The BBC still holds the largest share of total viewing at 19%, but YouTube is close behind at 14%. ITV, Netflix and other broadcasters account for 12%, 8% and 7% respectively.
“It’s quite nice to be able to foster these communities, and chat with people on live streams in the video comments, and have some back and forth to discuss what everyone’s opinions are,” Dan said.
“There’s regular meet-ups now for fantasy football fans as well, which I regularly attend – it’s great to meet other like-minded people.”
To people interested in becoming a YouTube creator, Dan says: “I would definitely recommend that people just go for it and just try it.
“Like I said, I’ve been making videos for 17 years, or something like that. There’s a whole bunch of failures in there. And just being persistent, learning from those failures and continuing to grow, improve your skills and get better, is definitely something I want to put out there, because so many people are nervous to just try for fear of failing.
“It’s a time more than ever of opportunity for people. You don’t necessarily need to go to university to get a degree, or find those key connections necessarily, because you have that opportunity to just go out there and do it yourself, which I think is such a unique part of these times.”
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