We were finding a way to make it work as a living. Shukoff: Early on, I and one of other creative partners lived at the recording studio, which had no shower and no kitchen.
When were you able to work on ERB full-time, and how do you monetize your channel now? We could work on every part forever, so we try to paint ourselves into the corner with deadlines so we have a reason to stop. It takes anywhere from one month to six weeks of concentrating on the writing, doing the research and shooting and editing it. We used to do it from start to finish in two weeks, like we did for season two, but that was not healthy. So I'd say two to three months per video including the time the idea kind of gestates and sits around, but we're working on several at a time.Īhlquist: We've made 70 episodes, which sounds like a lot, but in the YouTube world, it isn't that many at all. For example, it takes a long time to become a real Dragon Ball Z fan. And we want to be authentic fans of the character before we start writing humor about it and making commentary on it. Now, a lot of times we go after characters we don't know that much about. We used to do characters we already knew enough about, so it was kind of in our bones to write jokes about them. How much time do you spend on each video? When it started to near 20 million views pretty soon after that, that was when we were shocked. We were aiming to get 1 million views with that video, and it went from zero to 1 million pretty quick. But the accidental result was that it became that much more popular. Our first battle didn't do that, but the second one did get to that front page, and then an interesting thing happened: It got blocked and banned in all the countries Hitler conquered, like Poland, Italy and Germany - they were understandably sensitive to the Hitler stuff. So even if you had 50,000 subscribers, if you made a video they loved and 10,000 "favorited" it, you could get to the front page of YouTube. You could make a video that connected with your audience in a certain way and get the top "favorited" spot on the front page. Shukoff: At that time, YouTube was a little more of a game you could play. In the span of about six months, I went from running a comedy theater to doing rap battles full-time.
Bill O'Reilly, and the second one was Darth Vader vs. I brought Pete to the show and he said, "Hey, man - I think we should do that rap battle thing and make a YouTube out of it and call it Epic Rap Battles of History." He'd been making YouTube videos for a while, but I hadn't done any before. We would take audience members' suggestions - for example, Shia LaBeouf and Charlie Sheen - and freestyle a rap battle onstage.Īt the same time, Pete was starting a YouTube channel at a place called The Station, which would later become Maker Studios and after that would become Disney Digital. We regularly did an improv comedy freestyle rap show, and in it was one segment called Celebrity Rap Battle. It was me and one of our now-writers, Zach Sherwin - he played ERB characters like Einstein and Stephen King. Later, when I moved to L.A., I started a comedy theater called Westside Comedy Theater. We had both moved there independently to study improv comedy, and we started touring and doing improv together across the country in a group called MISSION IMPROVable. We met freestyling on a porch one night in Chicago, a big improv comedy town. How did you come up with ERB and get your start on YouTube?Īhlquist: Pete and I have been friends for about 15 years now, so we were friends for quite some time before ERB.
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