At the start of the year Comedy Central asked me to take charge of all the content on a new website they were planning. It sounded fun. But I figured that the internet was pretty oversubscribed with funny stuff so realised quick that I needed a content plan that stretched beyond the curation of funny cat GIFs.
The first thing I did was ask my 18-year-old nephew, Fred, to curate a list of all the funniest stuff him and his mates had shared online over the past six months. He sent me a ton of YouTube links to footage of drunk men falling through fences, skaters falling down steps, dogs getting stuck in tumble driers and Americans being knocked out in ugly road-rage incidents.
It seemed that young people didn’t find comedy funny any more: real-life fails were the thing. But you can’t commission fails. The best you can do is get people drunk, then stand back, switch on your camera and hope for the best.
I needed a strategy: something I could commission that might have a chance of cutting through all the comic appeal of real-life human indignity and deliver an audience that my Viacom bosses might be able to do something with.
So I called up a nice, clever man called Liam Chivers who, a few years back, quit his successful career in the tech industry to set himself up as a talent agent for popular YouTubers. One of his first signings was KSI, a YouTube video-gamer with somewhere in the region of 100,000 channel subscribers. KSI basically filmed himself playing Fifa on his Xbox, dishing out tips – wrapped in a thick layer of “bants” – to his audience.
Liam could see that KSI’s audience was growing and that games companies increasingly wanted to harness his influence over their target consumers. Since then, KSI’s audience has grown like wild fire: he now has close to 6 million subscribers and his videos have more than 700m views. He has endorsement deals coming out of his ears (he just went to the World Cup in Brazil as part of the Sun’s online team) and is making a ton out of YouTube ad revenue alone. I don’t know exactly how much but I do know that he was rich enough to buy the family home off his parents last year. They moved out.
It’s not just the size of KSI’s audience that makes him attractive to brands (and people like me). It’s their loyalty. Liam had a slew of stats and case studies to prove that KSI fans were more like acolytes: when he recommended stuff to them, they listened and acted on his advice. He turns down well over 80% of the commercial deals he is offered, thereby maintaining his credibility.
More than any of that, KSI is very funny – but maybe not in any way you’ve seen before. He specialises in outrageous sexual confessions and revels in creating massively awkward situations. In his legendary Q&A Sundays, where he invites fans to interrogate him and his relatives on Twitter, he famously asked his dad (a charming, middle-aged Nigerian gentleman) if he masturbated and his mother (also Nigerian, also charming, extremely long suffering) if she owned a dildo. It’s hardly the stuff of Chris Morris, admittedly, but it has a jaw-dropping appeal. This is all underpinned by an uncannily cocksure swagger: KSI is arrogant, obnoxious and ridiculous in a way that’s completely irresistible.
All of which made him the perfect subject for our first big Comedy Central commission, Demolished. Inspired by the infamous Comedy Central Roasts, our rendition of the format is rougher, tougher, even ruder and aimed at a younger, online audience.
Demolished sees KSI dragged from the comfort zone of his bedroom/studio and into our studios in Camden where a panel of merciless comedians verbally destroy him for the entertainment of an astonished live audience. It was made by Jay Pond Jones of Colour TV. He married a gift for TV entertainment with his former adman’s flair for creating a stir. We were both happy to receive an email recently from our head of compliance, describing Demolished as “the least compliant piece of content I have ever seen”. It’s lucky that the internet doesn’t really have to conform to all those rules.
As a bonus, I got to spend some time before and after filming picking KSi’s brains. He might act the goat on YouTube (his most successful ever video is him emptying a bottle of milk over his head while performing the Harlem Shake) but KSI is an internet guru. I have met a lot of self-proclaimed social media experts and digital svengalis since I started this job but none of them spoke with the authority and insight to building online audiences like KSI. I treated a brief chat with him over a bucket KFC in the green room as a fast-track masterclass, plugging him for as much advice as possible on when, where and how to share content.
KSI doesn’t come out of his bedroom more than he has to. Would you if you could make millions by just talking into a webcam every day? But he liked Comedy Central and the barmy, confrontational nature of the Demolished format appealed to him. When he arrived outside our offices, passers-by rushed to greet him, shouting his name and requesting his autograph. I was amazed, especially as a great deal of the people I’d mentioned his name to here (mostly those over the age of 25) had never heard of him.
Bear in mind, we share the building with MTV so pop stars are in and out on a daily basis. Cheryl Cole sashayed in the other day with not a fraction of the hoopla that KSI attracted. Even when I edited Heat magazine and One Direction visited the office the response wasn’t as fevered. To be honest, a year ago I hadn’t even heard of the bloke. Seeing him mobbed like a Beatle outside MTV certainly put my mind at ease about the whole thing. As I keep reassuring my bosses, KSI really is the most famous person you’ve never heard of.
Sam Delaney is editor-in-chief of Comedy Central. KSI: Demolished goes live at ComedyCentral.co.uk on 31 July at 11am BST
