How one Aussie makes a living by posting baking videos on YouTube

The 35-year-old from Sydney says his YouTube career skyrocketed after he made a birthday cake for a kindergarten student and posted the result online.

At the time Choppa, a nickname that he has adopted for his YouTube identity, was a primary school teacher and volunteered to bake a cake shaped like a cow after one of his parents said she wanted a 3D version.

“My mum and I used to make cakes together because she couldn’t draw and so she used to take my drawings, cut the shape out, and ice them,” Choppa said.

He decided to take a crack at making the 3D cow cake and was proud of the result, so posted footage of it alongside some of the other videos he was uploading to YouTube, which he describes as the usual “inappropriate” content you would expect from a 30-year-old male.

“I put it up and I forgot about it because it wasn’t like my other videos,” he said.

But after three months he realised that the video of him making the cake, which had not even been edited, had earned 40,000 views. “In 2010, that was a lot of views,” he said.

It was one of his top five most popular videos and during a YouTube workshop he started thinking about the potential for this unusual content.

“At the workshop they asked us to self-assess our content and identify what had been popular. If something was getting a lot of views, they asked ‘can you finetune the content and deliver more of it’?”

Choppa said he had always loved the idea of creating YouTube videos as a job and started his channel CakesByChoppA in 2011. Success was almost instanteous and just one year later he quit his job as a teacher.

“I actually quit my job in 2012 with only 9000 subscribers because I was getting so many views,” he said.

A video of a Spider-Man cake he did three years ago has been viewed more than 27 million times. “I was making more money off cakes than from being a kindy teacher,” he said.

Choppa said he couldn’t see the sense in slaving away five days a week as a kindergarten teacher when he could make a living using his creativity and baking one cake a week for himself.

“As soon as I quit my job I went and visited friends and family around Australia for a year ... making cakes at their homes,” he said.

Nowadays he uploads new content three times a week and will be one of more than 40 celebrity YouTubers appearing at Game On, an interactive games and online video showcase being held as part of Vivid Sydney this weekend.

The event will give people the opportunity to try out new video games, attend concerts, movie screenings, workshops and meet and greets. Choppa will provide his insights into how to make money from YouTube, including how multichannel networks organise brand deals for rising starts.

For those who don’t understand how you can make a living from YouTube, Choppa says he is paid for advertisements that play at the beginning of videos, with the more views a video gets, the more money it earns.

The influence of YouTubers are now rivalling mainstream celebrities around the world, and Australian Troye Sivan was even named one of Time Magazine’s25 Most Influential Teens of 2014 alongside Lorde, Malala Yousafzai and Kylie and Kendall Jenner.

Choppa said he thought Australia was about four years behind America in seeing YouTubers cross over into mainstream media, where stars such as beauty blogger Bethany Mota had been filmed interviewing US President Barack Obama and appeared on television show Dancing with the Stars.

In the UK, another beauty blogger Zoella saw her debut novel outsell books by JK Rowling and Dan Brown.

But this is slowly changing with popular Australian identities like Chloe Morello and Lauren Curtis even turning up in a television ad for Colgate this year.

While Choppa says he sometimes feels like he has the “cruisiest job in the world”, at the same time, “it’s really full on”.

“You put up with a lot of criticism, if I do a character wrong (on one of his cakes) or the colours are slightly off, I’ll know about it quick smart,” he said.

Choppa’s bright colourful pop culture cake designs make his channel a natural successor to the cult recipe book, the Australia Women’s Weekly Children’s Birthday Cake Book and he still finds it amazing that there are hundreds of people, ranging from children, to mums and dads, who make his cakes and post the photos online.

“There is a core group and you get to know them, they are always emailing you with questions, and posting stuff on Twitter and Facebook, it’s something that still blows me away.”

Over the years he has refined his skills and mastered new techniques. An updated version of his Spiderman cake shows how far he has come. Nowadays it takes Choppa about 40 minutes to create a 3D cake, with the video usually taking about half an hour to edit. It’s uploading the content that takes the most time, a standard video takes about two hours to post in Australia, while in America it only takes about 10 minutes, he said.

He said one of the toughest parts of the job was coming up with ideas for new content, and forcing himself to produce cakes when he wasn’t feeling inspired often didn’t turn out well.

Despite his success, Choppa said he was still unsure why his videos had been so popular, except that he had always tried to make content that he would enjoy watching.

“That’s why it’s a bit chopped up, I speed things up, plus I have the world’s best critic - my mum, she’s never shy of telling me ‘that looks like crap’.”

Choppa also credits his mum with helping him to come up with the idea for cake templates, which means that people around the world can easily copy his designs.

“My mum lives on the opposite of the country and so we developed this template that you could print out and then make the cake by watching the video, so it’s all thanks to my mum, and my Auntie Bev who has supported and encouraged my creativity ever since I was a kid.”

Australian YouTubers with more than one million subscribers:

Beauty bloggers Chloe Morello and Lauren Curtis, motor enthusiast Might Car Mods, musicians Jayesslee and Troye Sivan, entertainers and pranksters, CommunityChannel, Max Moefoe, AdrianVanOyen, Janoskians, cooking channels MyCupcakeAddiction and HowToCookThat, interesting facts and tips channels DangerDolan, HowToBasic, Veritasium, dance tutorials MegaJam and gaming content CraftBattleDuty.