Meet the LEGO® pro: AustrianLEGOFan and his 500K YouTube Channel

12 de març 2019

Imagine that your job is to build LEGO® sets. Wouldn’t that be great? In the beautiful region of Carinthia in Austria a man has been able to fulfil this dream. Under the alias AustrianLEGOFan, as this LEGO® pro likes to stay anonymous, this man releases a new speed build LEGO® video each day on YouTube for his more than 500,000 subscribers. AustrianLEGOFan’s channel has in total more than 272 million views at the time of writing this article.

AustrianLEGOFan made time for an interview with ToyPro and we asked him about his life and his popular YouTube channel.

ToyPro: Could you tell our readers something about your background?

AustrianLEGOFan: I am 41 years old and was born in Germany, but I have been living for a decade in Austria. As for many LEGO® fans, it was part of my childhood. My passion for LEGO® however recovered in 2007 when I started collecting Technic sets.

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ToyPro: you started your LEGO® YouTube channel in 2012. Can you tell our readers about your channel? Are there specific themes that you build? Do you have a target audience within LEGO® fans?

AustrianLEGOFan: I was inspired by my wife’s brother who has his own YouTube channel, but back then I had no plans or goals. I just did it for fun. In 2014 I started with LEGO® speed build videos and also became a YouTube partner. In my speed build videos you can watch really quickly how to build a particular LEGO® set. I hoped that I could finance my LEGO® hobby with the YouTube channel. At that point I didn’t expect it to grow as big as it is today.

My plan was to create videos for every LEGO® fan, without any speech such I could make my videos as international as possible. I learned the speed building techniques from other YouTubers like Brick Builder, All New Bricks, and stop motion video creators like Artifex Creations, and MADABOUTLEGO®. Some of these were real small YouTube channels back then as well.

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At this time I owned around 200 LEGO® sets, mainly Technic and City sets. Therefore I had enough material to start with. A few years later, in 2015, I tried to get all new LEGO® sets to create speed build videos for these, but unfortunately this wasn’t financially feasible yet. In 2015 it was my dream to reach 10,000 subscribers. From this time my channel went rocket high and each year it grew faster. There was no particular video that went viral and I think that the consistent uploading of new videos made my channel grow.

ToyPro: do you have goals or plans for the future?

AustrianLEGOFan: it is my dream to reach 1 million subscribers and earn the Golden Play Button. My long term goal is to reach 1 billion views.

ToyPro: do you have tips for our readers who have a YouTube channel themselves or might want to start a YouTube channel?

AustrianLEGOFan: for everyone who wants to be successful on YouTube: it is a hard fulltime job. You have to permanently produce quality videos. You can’t upload just a few videos, do nothing for a while and expect it to be successful. That’s unfortunately just not possible. You have to choose a release rate which is feasible for you. For example, if you are able to produce 1 video per week, then you should set your goal to publish 1 video per week on YouTube.

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My release rate is a minimum of 1 video per day and that is sometimes really hard, because I have a regular job as well and have to go work every day. Some small YouTubers get lucky to have 1 viral video that pushes them to more visibility in YouTube, but most of the cases being successful is the result of hard work.

If you start a new YouTube channel you have to expect it to take years to reach a level where you earn more than pocket money. If you earn a nice amount you then must pay taxes. So it’s not easy to become a LEGO® YouTube pro and you have to have a long-term commitment.

YouTube itself has modified its terms and you must now reach 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time in 1 year in order to monetize videos. That’s a really high obstacle for a starting channel.

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ToyPro: which channels or LEGO® designers are you a fan of yourself?

AustrianLEGOFan: I am a huge fan of Jangbricks, especially of his City Layout and custom creations. For news, for example for new LEGO® sets, I sometimes watch Just2Good.

ToyPro: We want to thank you very much for your time and insights. We also want to wish you a lot of luck with your channel. Do you want to watch more of AustrianLEGOFan’s videos or do you want to subscribe on his channel? Visit his YouTube channel now.

Are you looking for LEGO® sets? ToyPro has a big collection of LEGO® sets. You can search by theme, find newly released LEGO® sets and view our LEGO® sets on sale.

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