Rob Moody: Why YouTube’s best cricket channel makes no money and has no future

Sports Content Strategy with MrRichardClarke: Exploring sports content, journalism, digital and social media

Rob Moody runs a YouTube channel with over 900,000 subscribers and holds an important influence over the agenda in his sport but he has never made a penny.

If you are a cricket fan with access to the internet, it is highly likely you have seen one of his videos. Robelinda2 is the ‘go to’ channel for the rare, unusual or controversial moments in the game. His archive has received over a billion views in its 10-year existence by curating niche cricketing content that is appetising to fans and acceptable to rights-holders.

His one-man mission has been so successful that, these days, major players and executives offer their support whenever he suffers a copyright strike.

Moody will say there is no strategy behind his channel, I disagree. His ideas are perfect for his niche, he looks at metrics and experiments constantly. One recent change saw a 10-year-old video move from 170 views to 80,000 in just 48 hours. However, the Australian expects his channel to be shut down soon.

This is an unusual digisport success story. Yet, there are many lessons to be learned.

TOPICS

His unhappiness at conventional cricket highlight edits

Curation – why produce a 32-minute video of all Glenn McGrath’s boundaries

The long list of requests and how he handles them

His stats since lockdown - 200k increase in subscribers, 249m views in 12 months

The Steve Waugh run-out video and how Shane Warne got involved

The value of heritage content and why it is not considered by many channels

Ignoring all good practice in YouTube channel-building - apart from the headlines

How changing the title of a 10-year video saw it go from 170 views to 80,000 in two days

“I have pushed the envelope and been as offensive as I can possibly be just to see what would happen”

Does the flak affect him?

Catering for older cricket fans

Why his channel is living on borrowed time

His process for dealing with takedown notices

Have the broadcasters tried to learn from Robelinda2? (The answer is only once and only briefly)

Pushing against the norms of YouTube