Not many 24-year-olds can call their parents employees. But Adam Beales can. The YouTuber and TV presenter has found extraordinary fame in recent years for his larger-than-life antics on camera. With more than four million subscribers on his YouTube channel, Adam B, he has emerged as Derry’s most prominent player on the platform. You mightn’t have heard of him, but your kids probably have.
I’m meeting him at a hotel in Derry City overlooking the Peace Bridge. Born shortly after the Belfast Agreement was voted in, Beales is a child of peace, never encountering the sectarianism that dogged the city for too long – a privilege not lost on him.
His hair is freshly cut into a skin fade, his face is clean shaven and he puts on a warm smile as he stretches his hand to meet mine.
“I just love being able to produce things that people can react to,” he says, pouring some tea for himself. “For young people, I feel like [YouTube] is the new TV.”
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Beales’s audience is primarily Generation Alpha (born since 2010), ranging generally between the ages of five and 14. “Don’t get me wrong, you still have the mums, dads, grannies and grandads. But the majority tends to be younger.”
Beales taught himself videography on a rudimentary Nokia phone his parents gave him when he was six years old. “Oh the image quality on that thing was terrible – but I made it work and just loved it.” He has taken YouTube seriously since 2017, and along the way has involved his younger brother, parents and boyfriend. (Beales’s coming-out video has received 1.7 million views to date, and his boyfriend, Dom, features regularly in his content.)
His videos are not unlike Mr Beast’s, YouTube’s most watched content creator. Much like Mr Beast, Beales’s content is fast-paced and branded with emotive, highly saturated thumbnails. He knows how hard it is to retain interest on sites that cater to short attention spans. What follows is a loud, manic whirlwind of challenges, semi-scripted narratives and pranks.
I Survived Overnight in a Supermarket? Four-hundred thousand views. A Shark Attacked Me!, featuring a thumbnail of an injured Adam floundering in the sea, a prank video on his boyfriend? Half a million views. We found M3GAN’s in an Abandoned Mall ..., another horror-style prank video: 5.3 million views. Like any successful YouTuber, he chased that spike in eyeballs and made a series of related videos, racking up millions more.
While his videos aren’t scripted word for word, the “skeleton” of each one is planned with “checkpoints” they loosely aim for along the way.
Has he ever been compared to Mr Beast? (He laughs at the suggestion). “If I ever am, I’m flattered. To be honest, if anyone says that, I just think ‘Oh God, I’m Poundland Mr Beast’.”
Beales does, however, work with the same analytics guru used by Mr Beast. Paddy Galloway, a Co Carlow native who has made a name for himself as a YouTube strategist, told The Irish Times last year his hourly rate is typically more than $1,000 (€925).
“The biggest feedback indicator is views,” he says. “That’s the Holy Grail at the top and feeds into [everything else] ... If you’re in this game and you’re not optimising and strategising to get more exposure, then you’re not really working.”
“There’s a science to it,” says Beales. His father’s background is in data science. Now he works for Adam doing, among other things, data analysis.
“One minute [my parents] are data scientists, but then the next minute they’re a painter or a costume designer. They have a lot of different hats.”
He’ll work with his dad analysing where audiences are engaged, when they click off a video and how to focus on elements that perform well. “My YouTube growth is never linear. It’s always like that [makes a wave sign]. Even Mr Beast.”
“With anything, talent or personality is only gonna get you so far. I think that’s the 20 per cent, and the further 80 per cent is hard work, perseverance. Don’t get me wrong, over the years there’s been so many points where I just felt like, ‘This ain’t for me. [Let’s] throw in the towel.’ But you just have to stick with it.
“I feel like my core audience can change. As they grow older, they might grow out of the content; and if they were too young they might grow into it. So it’s almost like a wave ... There’s always been high periods and low periods [in views]. At the minute we’re in a lower period than we were in last year. Last year we had the highest growth on the channel ever ... The growth over time isn’t linear, but as long as you’re projecting the same on an incline projection, that’s good.”
His videos are monetised through adverts, but he also takes in revenue from brand partnerships, merchandise, events and children’s books – he’s authored two to date.
So how much does he make? “I probably wouldn’t prefer to talk about that just because it’s like wages and stuff. But all businesses make revenue. I mean, it’s public knowledge if you want to go on Company House and see how much the business has generated.”
OCG Productions Ltd employed an average of 10 employees last year and as of March 2023, it had £115,797 in net capital and reserves, a little less than the previous year. It doesn’t tell us his income from YouTube, but according to views4you.com, a website that calculates estimated earnings from the platform, Beales could be earning €35,000 per month. Not bad for a man pulling pranks on his little brother.
That leads us to a second passion of his: financial savviness. As his YouTube channel took off a few years back, people advised him to put his money into property. “At the time I was a very immature teenager,” he recalls. “But I’m glad I listened. Now I’m seeing the rewards of that.”
Beales bought his parents a house in 2020 and now has a portfolio that includes five residential properties that he rents to tenants. “I think property is just a very, very safe asset class ... We’re focusing on residential properties that are in a really bad state and investing in them and bringing them back to a high-end, modern standard and then renting them out,” he says.
Beales is also paying a year’s rent for a family to help them save up for a house deposit. In a video, he paid for actors to engage in ridiculous challenges such as bungie jumps and skydives against a competition winner in a bid for the house, before it was revealed she was the winner all along. “She took it in good spirit,” he says. “She’s a great sport.”
Beales has also delved into TV presenting, working on Blue Peter for two seasons and on CBBC show The Dog Ate My Homework. He has also starred in Bro’s in Control, a CBBC show with his younger brother, Callum, and fellow content creator Joe Tasker. “I like to compare it to Gogglebox meets YouTube meets TV” – and there’s a bit of Taskmaster thrown in for good measure. In Autumn he’ll have a show on RTÉ called What’s Next, which will investigate the future of tech, food, fashion and space waste. Beales rarely stops, by the sound of it.
He is a new breed of celebrity: born of the internet and chiefly for the internet. We’ve had folks of this calibre knock around Ireland for the last decade – gaming channels jacksepticeye, Call Me Kevin and Nogla, for example – but Adam B is among the latest to emerge.
I’m intrigued to see what he’ll do with his platform, and for how long he can ride those algorithmic waves. Property sounds like a safe bet in the meantime.
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