I have a patient called David Brailsford.
He has given me expressed permission to be able to write this blog about him and his endeavours and he is actually quite famous.
For some of you reading this, in the first few lines you’ll think I’m talking about the David Brailsford involved with British cycling and team INEOS.
But it’s a different David Brailsford.
The David Brailsford I’m talking about is Professor David Brailsford from the University of Nottingham who is an Emeritus Professor of computer science.
Professor Brailsford was involved in computer science from some of the very earlier stages and even had a passing relationship with Steve Jobs who he would say hello to in his garden as he walked through Palo Alto in california in the early days of the silicon revolution.
I’ve looked after Professor Brailsford since the early 2000’s and it has been nothing but a pleasure to do so.
Recently though, I found out of another side to Professor Brailsford that I was unaware of and this is his celebrity YouTube presence.
David Brailsford founded Computerphile which is a YouTube channel based around computer science and specifically directed at computer science students.
I’m sure to you or I this doesn’t seem like much of a gig and certainly to our children, if you have children the same age as mine , not what it’s likely to catapult you to sidemen status.
In a recent conversation though about computerphile David explained to me that they’d just passed 2 million subscribers.
Yes, 2 million subscribers!
So, you could try to work out the income generation from this but I’m sure David hasn’t really done that.
He did not set out with his YouTube channel as an income stream, he set out to talk about something that he loves, something that he’s been amerced in for his whole career, that he has loved to teach and share and to share it on a wider platform.
First, try to be good, then try to be rich.
The trying to be good is much more likely to bring with it the rich.
In a world where everyone now has decided they want to be an internet celebrity, perhaps it’s best to understand that the most predictable course to internet celebrity is to not try to be a celebrity at all.
David Brailsford found a problem. He could see the pain of computer science students and how they wanted to share and he was able to produce something using the wonderful side of the internet in order to help.
Incidentally, it’s liable to generate a considerable amount of commercial success but in my mind he did this the right way round.
Even if you were never to make a penny from your YouTube channel yet you could see the difference that it was making and the lives it was influencing, surely that would be payment enough?
I think my sons videos of him playing on his own xbox and describing how he is ok but actually relatively mediocre at FIFA 2022 are unlikely to make him a millionaire.
Talking about something that he knows about and that he also loves is much more likely to do so.
Blog Post Number - 2897
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