Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Georgie Hasrouni. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Georgie, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Let’s jump back to the first dollar you earned as a creative? What can you share with us about how it happened?
The first time I started making money online was back in 2011. I was 14 years old, and I was making YouTube videos for fun on my channel: AnimationRewind. I would make parody animations, and one day I received an email from YouTube which invited me to join the YouTube Partner Program.
I created a Google Adsense account and started to earn money for the videos I made. At that time I would make around $3 per day as a middle schooler, which was a huge deal for me. I am very thankful to be given that opportunity, one that changed my whole life.
Overtime this grew into an online media company, in which I now run over 7 YouTube channels, 4 TikTok pages, and 3 Facebook Pages.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
To make a long story short: I am a YouTube Animator. I make cartoons and I post them to YouTube. This started as a hobby in middle school back in 2011. As a kid, I was very interested in animation and cartoons.
Growing up, I would enjoy drawing my own comics, sketches, and doodles, but I wanted to take that to the next level and give computer animation a try. On September 1st, 2011 I created the YouTube channel: AnimationRewind.
Middle school me had no idea this would one day become a channel that would receive over 400 million views. I was just a kid having fun posting parody animations.
In early 2015, at the age of 17, I started a series on my YouTube channel called: Cartoon Fight Club. Cartoon Fight Club is a fictional “versus” debate series that pits two different characters against each other and a winner is chosen based on which character is more powerful.
This series quickly became viral and turned my hobby into a business. Overtime this grew into a team effort. For example, I created another series called Cartoon Rap Attack, where I collaborate with my sister: Georgiana Hasrouni, better known by her stage name: Little G Fresh. Cartoon Rap Attack is a rap battle series between cartoon characters. Little G Fresh would produce the beats, and voice act the raps for each character. I would animate the battle. Our most popular rap battle: Sonic vs Sonic.EXE received over 8 million views.
Today I now run 7 YouTube channels. Four of them are Sports Related, 2 of them are spin-off channels of AnimationRewind, and one of course is AnimationRewind.
My sports channels include: Rebound Rewind (a NBA YouTube channel), Touchdown Rewind (a NFL YouTube channel), Home Run Rewind (a MLB YouTube channel), and Ringside Rewind (a boxing/MMA YouTube channel). These channels feature educational animations and commentary videos about the sport they represent. I started Rebound Rewind in 2019 and branched out to other sports in the later years.
I am very thankful to have such an opportunity making videos online. From sharing a series with my sister, to having such a supportive family and fanbase. My younger brother helps me with some of the Ringside Rewind videos and for a time he ran the Spinoff series: Cartoon Fight Night (Spinoff to Cartoon Fight Club) on the Cartoon Fight Night YouTube channel.
Without my family or fans, I would not be who I am today.
How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?
Being an online creator, if you don’t adapt to the overall market trends, you will lose your place in the content algorithm and this can have a devastating blow to your business. Even if you produce a good product, overtime people will get board of watching the same type of content over and over again, and my series was no exception.
Around 2019, it was clear that my main series Cartoon Fight Club was not as popular as it once was. Going viral on the internet is not easy; staying viral, one can argue, is even harder. To give a sports analogy, anyone can have one good game, few can have one good season, but very few can have multiple good seasons.
Speaking of sports, that is exactly what I pivoted into. I created a basketball themed YouTube channel in 2019 called: Rebound Rewind. the Rewind part of it is to pay homage to my original channel: AnimationRewind, and the Rebound part is to have an alliteration that sounds cool next to the word Rewind while also relating to basketball.
Much like cartoons, as a kid I was also very interested in NBA Basketball. I was a huge Cleveland sports fan, and Cleveland Cavaliers fan, this is where I drew my inspiration to make NBA YouTube content. Starting this channel from nothing and with a completely different audience demographic was a challenge at first. Most of my fans over on the AnimationRewind channel aren’t too interested in sports and the fanbase I grew on Rebound Rewind came from an entirely different demographic, so this was really like starting an entirely new business from scratch.
From time to time I do get comments on my sports channels from viewers saying they recognize my voice from my older channel, but as an online content creator this was a huge pivot from making video game themed parody animations to making animated sports analysis videos.
Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?
I started making videos in 2011, and it wasn’t until 2015 when my channel really went viral. The biggest difference was I went from making random parody videos to creating a series that had a consistent, easy to understand concept for each episode.
That series was Cartoon Fight Club. The concept was simple yet had an entertaining question: Who would win in a fight? Each episode would feature characters and matchups that people would regularly debate amongst friends in small talk, such as Super Mario vs Sonic, Batman vs Iron Man, etc.
My advice for creators who want to turn their hobby into a job is to pay attention to their CTR% (Click Through Rate percentage). This is basically the percentage of how many times your thumbnail is clicked on when it is shown to viewers. There are reports that state half of all YouTube videos on the platform have a CTR of 2-10%. This means the goal is to have a CTR above 10%.
Audience Retention is also important. To combat click bait, YouTube won’t just reward high CTR% videos, the video also needs a good Audience retention combined with a high CTR.
What is a good audience retention? It really depends on the length of the video. Any video under 8 minutes, I would say needs at least 50% retention. So an 8 minute video should have an average retention of 4 minutes watched per view. For longer videos, I would focus less on the retention percentage and more on the average watch time per view. Naturally 1 hour videos will have a low audience retention but still have over 15 minutes watched per viewer.
If you can consistently make videos that have a high CTR and high Audience Retention, you have a formula for a viral YouTube channel.
So the million dollar question is: HOW? How do you consistently make videos that have a high CTR and high Audience Retention?
There is no silver bullet answer that can quickly solve the puzzle. You need to find a niche that isn’t too saturated, and you need to create videos based on interesting topics within that niche. Your content also needs to be unique.
Take for example my NBA Channel; Rebound Rewind. If I didn’t animate my videos, the channel would be just another commentary sports channel. There are so many commentary sports channels, mine being animated makes it a very unique channel among the basketball niche.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.youtube.com/@ReboundRewind
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/animationrewind/?hl=en
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AnimationRewind
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/animationrewind
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@AnimationRewind
- Other: AnimationRewind TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@animationrewind?lang=en Rebound Rewind TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@reboundrewind?lang=en