Shayne Topp, actor and member of viral YouTube channel Smosh, is hoping that “things go wrong” at the channel’s live event on Friday, but in a good way.
The veteran sketch comedy YouTube channel, which has been making content on the platform since 2005, is aware that it's living in a new era of YouTube, and that its audience has aged by almost 20 years.
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Smosh, which was created by YouTubers Anthony Padilla and Ian Hecox, has managed to grow its subscriber base to 26.6 million, with each video routinely garnering over 500,000 views. In Smosh’s earlier days, each of its videos would easily collect millions of views, and since its audience today still consists of a strong loyal fan base, its content still stays true to the nostalgic improv comedic undertone that made the channel successful.
It is no secret that YouTube’s algorithm has evolved over the decades. In the early 2000s, YouTube focused on recommending videos to users that attracted the most click/views. Today, the platform’s algorithm has grown to become more audience-driven by tailoring video recommendations to users based on what videos they like to watch, how long they watch them and what they typically like to skip over, forcing content creators to analyze their audience data closely.
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“Our algorithm doesn’t pay attention to videos; it pays attention to viewers,” states YouTube on its website.
YouTube has also altered and even doubled down on its community guidelines over the past few years, cracking down on content that it deems as “harmful” or inappropriate, leaving creators to tiptoe around verbalizing certain words in their videos that can threaten the existence of their content.
“The greatest challenge of YouTube is, you know, the algorithm, this God that we kind of have to deal with every day where it's like suddenly everything's different, and we have to adjust,” said Topp.
Topp claims that Smosh’s content has significantly evolved over the years, and has matured along with its audience.
“I think we're smarter now,” said Topp. “I think we're more grounded. But also the nature of the content, even in the numbers. I mean, when I joined Smosh, our videos were like five to 12 minutes long, every single one. Nowadays, you go to our channel, we're making hourlong videos where it's far more just dialogue and discussion based.”
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Many YouTube channels are trying to piece together the algorithm puzzle, and they are aware that getting to know their audience is one of the main keys to solving it as the platform’s algorithm is solely focused on viewers’ likes and habits. So Smosh and a slew of other YouTube channels have started experimenting with a unique way to connect with their audience; through interactive live events outside of YouTube that are controlled by the viewers themselves.
Veteran YouTube channel The Try Guys, for example, launched a live event on Aug. 10, 2023, called Romeo & Juliet, where the channel’s live rendition of the classic Shakespeare play was dictated by the audience. Throughout the play, viewers voted on what happened to the actors in each scene and how each scene played out.
Kiswe, the broadcasting company who partnered with The Try Guys on organizing the event, believes that giving viewers the ability to mold the direction of live shows satisfies a connection both the creator and fans long for.
“It's like when we go to see live events, you feel that proximity to your favorite artists or your favorite creator, you're there enjoying it with others,” said Kiswe Chief Product Officer Vadim Brenner. “So giving the fans those features, they're part of the experience. They feel like they have a contribution. They feel like they are getting closer to the creator and having a voice in what happens next. It's an engagement that both the fans like, and the creators.”
Smosh is soon set to follow in The Try Guys’ footsteps. In a live event on May 10 called “Smosh the Sitcom: LIVE,” which will also be in partnership with Kiswe, the channel’s cast (which has over 20 members) will be stepping into new territory in the only live event the channel has planned for this year.
The actors in the show will be performing their fan-favorite improvised Try Not to Laugh sketches, where each actor will play different characters, and if they break, they get replaced by another actor, creating a rotating cast throughout the whole show. To throw more chaos into the mix, what happens in each scene will be dictated by the audience, who will be watching the show live.
“This show is something we've never done before,” said Topp. “We've never performed a sitcom, we've never performed a script of this nature. We've never even done anything written like this.”
Topp, who is a writer and actor in the live event, says that Smosh did perform a sketch show back in 2016, but the concept for this show is brand-new and something he pitched a year ago that is “equal parts exciting and terrifying.”
“It was wild. It was scary because I've never written a sitcom before,” said Topp. “The nature of this, too, is that we're writing a sitcom that then needs to have a bunch of hidden elements and surprises that even I don't know about.”
Topp said that he instructed the other writers of the show, and the theatrical director, to add elements into the script that will catch him and the rest of Smosh’s cast by surprise on the day of the event.
“We have free reign to improvise on the night of and just break all the rules, go off the rails, which is really challenging when you're trying to write a script with the intention of it going wrong,” said Topp. “That's been the biggest challenge from the get go. So, we'll see. I hope things go wrong on May 10th.”
Topp is well-equipped for the challenge as he has been developing his craft in acting since he was 12 years-old. He later fell in love with comedy after his original plan of booking movie and TV roles in drama didn’t go as planned.
“I really wanted to do drama,” said Topp. “And, you know, that's kind of what you're told as a child actor, like ‘you're going to be in movies, you're going to be on Law and Order as a guest star,’ and (I) came out here and very quickly didn't book any dramatic roles and kept falling into comedy, and I kept falling more and more in love with it and realized I really enjoyed improv and just doing impressions and whatnot.”
Topp has acted in popular TV shows such as “iCarly,” “So, Random” and “The Goldbergs,” and later joined Smosh in 2015. His comedic style, he says, is heavily inspired by comedians Chris Farley and Phil Hartman. He claims that he and sketch comedy are “soulmates.”
“I've been able to do sketch comedy every week for 10 years now, nonstop, and I love it,” said Topp. “It's not something that I necessarily would say I sought out at the beginning, but we kind of found each other in a way. Me and sketch comedy are soulmates in that way, I guess.”
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