How “Girlfriend Reviews” Pulled Off the Perfect YouTube Debut

A basically step-by-step guide on how to make it on YouTube.

Nearly everyone is familiar with the experience by now: you’re browsing your favorite website or social media black hole, and you come across a link. For many, it’s Reddit. For far more, it’s YouTube.

It’s a link to a video. The video’s title is compelling, or its thumbnail somehow attention-grabbing. Maybe there’s a picture of a young kid and his friends both doing the “Home Alone” face next to a Lamborghini that’s, I don’t know, covered in peanut butter or something. Dumb stuff, a lot of the time.

Or maybe it’s something less flashy and more simply, compelling. Something that appeals to a thought you might have had but never really explored. Something that makes you pretty sure, before you even click, that it’s going to be at least interesting.

You’ve walked down the aisle of a grocery store and thought to yourself “how much would it cost if you bought out the entire store?” Well, here’s a guy doing it himself to find out (and then giving everything to charity).

You knew there were mechanical instruments out there that could flatten massive objects without flinching — car compactors and what-not. But what would happen if you put a bowling ball under one of those things? You probably never even thought to wonder.

Or you watched Rob Lowe describe an aggressively gourmet eleven-piece turkey burger on an episode of Parks and Recreation and thought “what on earth must that taste like?” Not only is there a dude out there that cooked it from scratch for you to find out, he filmed it with a Sony A7S Mark III camera and put that Ratatat song you like in the background.

This is what makes YouTube and online user-generated content exciting to many. People — just random, normal people — can hit on the most random and specific ideas and urges a viewer could have, and express them so artfully that one wonders how it hadn’t already existed in the first place.

And so, if you had ever thought to yourself, “man, girls across the country must be so annoyed with their boyfriends playing loud violent video games on the TV all day — I wonder what they actually think about them,” you know what felt like to be browsing Reddit on the day the video Should Your Boyfriend Play Red Dead Redemption 2? was uploaded.

As part of an ambitious media rollout, the video game Red Dead Redemption 2 had bought out billboards and advertising spaces in New York and Los Angeles in much the way film and television usually do. They had flooded the internet with advertising: pre-rolls on YouTube videos, banners on tech and entertainment websites, and in emerging spaces like Instagram and Snapchat. Someone browsing the internet would have had to scroll past headlines and memes about the game for days and weeks. Everyone knew this game was coming out. The advertising worked. This was the landscape of the Internet that week.

Then, someone scrolling on Reddit would have come across a link to a video.

“Girlfriend reviews what it’s like living with boyfriend obsessed with Red Dead Redemption 2.”

So ensued the typical routine. Oh, what’s this? Funny idea. Click.

The video started off with a female voice making a straightforward statement: “So Red Dead 2’s been out a while and this game takes up a lot of my boyfriend’s time.”

Intro beat. Little joke.

“He’s played all day every day for three weeks and has actually begun to start talking like a cowboy.”

And we’re off. There was the simple premise, and the simple joke to support the premise. A viewer is intrigued. As the video’s creator, you’ve just bought yourself another 25 seconds, until she gets to this line:

“This isn’t a review of Red Dead Redemption 2. This is a review of the experience of living with someone who plays Red Dead Redemption 2.”

From there, things were presented plainly, almost like a pep talk from girl to fellow girl, of what someone in this situation was likely going to have to deal with. All practical advice.

“So let’s start with all the stuff you’re gonna have to look at.”

And it was expressed plainly, from a distinctly non-gamer perspective. She didn’t even really engage with it as a game at first, but rather as a collection of images and sounds she’d glanced at or overheard for the past month.

“This game, I’m not gonna lie, I won’t hate on it, is gorgeous.” Cue the shots of sweeping landscapes and graphically-rendered wildlife. Sunsets over a mountaintop. “On the other hand, there’s a lot of violence.” Cue rabbits being shot, and horses running off cliffs. “There’s a lot of murder of innocent little woodland creatures.”

“And even if you don’t like to sit and watch your boyfriend play games you’ve had to at least listen. Your house is going to be filled with the sounds of gunshots and animals gasping for life.”

Right away, lines like these spurred the realization of how special her perspective was. Who else would zero-in on minor elements like ambient noise? It’s the kind of thing that only really sinks in to a passive listener. But it actually got straight to the heart of the game’s construction and the things it focused on.

“There are these beautiful albino moose and the game seems obsessed with getting you to kill them.”

And there was a delightful distance at play between the game and the experience of the game. Usually, a game review is kind of mired in the fact that your game reviewer is also a gamer with decades of experience and jargon swimming in his head.

Instead of a sweaty dude saying that “the control apparatus wasn’t precise,” we had this nice woman kind of sympathetically telling you “talking to someone and pulling out a gun is apparently the same button and that makes my boyfriend very frustrated.” And her version might even help you better understand the issue, especially if you were a layman.

It was a fascinating experiment in perspective and subjectivity. It was also very funny.

“Will your boyfriend let you play this game? Yes, once, but you’ll kill his horse and he’ll never let you play again. Will you cry at the end of the story? Yes and I still don’t wanna talk about it.”

“I don’t know what it’s like to play, but if you’re going to watch your boyfriend play, I give that experience a 5 out of 10. Lots of pretty pictures but lots of brutal murder sounds.”

The video did very well. That initial Reddit post helped it blow up initially, and it was re-posted to a Red Dead-specific forum. You would click through to the original posting of the video on YouTube and find, fascinatingly, an empty channel with no other videos. The only other clue was a slapped-up profile picture with the anonymous face of a girl and a dog with its tongue out.

Comments under the video uniformly praised the humor, editing, and of course, the conceit. And one sentiment was voiced over and over again:

“You have to make more!”

She had after all finished the last video by saying, “Thanks for watching. I don’t really know what I’m doing but I’ll make more if you want.”

So imagine those commenters’ delight when four days later the channel uploaded Should Your Boyfriend Play Fallout 76? And then three days after that when they uploaded Should Your Boyfriend Play Spider-Man for PS4?

These both followed the same format as the original video. Plainly expressed observations, told from that same distanced observational perspective. Very solid jokes. A kind of running theme and voice.

Production quality over these three videos were high, and more interestingly, consistent. There were motion graphics and gameplay captures and properly mixed audio. And, as many commenters were quick to point out, it was sharply and cleverly edited. Every joke had a cue, and every beat was hit frame-perfect. The rhythm felt professional.

It was right around the level of production quality that seasoned and talented YouTubers get to, only after years of working to improve, or after hiring professional producers and editors. And even then, those channels would still often only produce one video a week. So how were these complete unknowns doing this, out of nowhere? Three episodes in a week?

By the end of the run of the Spider-Man video, comments had started to drift to theorizing explanations for their output. Many concluded it couldn’t just be this one girl doing all this work by herself. Editing, writing, voiceover, producing, publishing, managing? Did they record the video game footage themselves? Did they source it from somewhere else?

Some thought it must have been “a full team” of producers, editors, and writers. But what team could come together and make videos with no guarantee of revenue, and especially to make so much so quickly?

Another seemed convinced “they were a fake shadow prop by a corporation.” The next guy said “they’re probably paid by Sony for publicity.”

But it still all seemed too reasonably natural. For all their professionalism, things were still a certain level of raw, as if they were still figuring at least some things out. And in in-between moments and at the beginning and end of videos, you could catch little asides from the narrator that betrayed that she had no idea what was going on.

Four days after that first blitz of videos came Should Your Boyfriend Play God of War?

That one started off with a first acknowledgement: “Okay, 70,000 subscribers in a week, here we go, no pressure…” And it ended with gracious appreciation: “You guys. We can’t believe the love we’ve gotten from YouTube and Reddit. Thank you so much for subscribing!” As well as a promise: “We are definitely going to be uploading at least once a week so leave a comment to let us know what games I should watch my boyfriend play.”

By now I had realized that Girlfriend Reviews had set off on a familiar path for online video content creators, especially those on YouTube. Enough people have followed the exact track at this point — going from unknowns to viral stars overnight— that you could almost write it out as a blueprint.

The process is deceptively simple.

First, the hardest step of all: break out with a piece of content.

To do that, you need a good idea. Also usually required: the talent and dedication to execute it. Simply, make something.

Then, have that first thing you just made explode in popularity.

For many, that explosion in popularity comes much later, only after they’ve made their thousandth thing. Some work for years, or a decade-plus, or their whole lives, and never break out. It is by no means a guarantee.

But, you can hack it. You can jump on a trend, or an already-popular category with high turnover, like gaming. (As internet entertainment culture has matured over the last decade, we’ve noticed that people experience a more cyclical kind of stardom — trends that make stars tend to come in waves.)

If you manage to break out, that’s it. Hard part over.

Step two: once the video has hit, sit there, refreshing the page disbelievingly, slack jawed, for an hour or two. Watch the numbers tick up and comments fill in. Don’t bother trying to stay calm — there’s no fun in that.

If you’re able to gather yourself over the next six to eight hours, pop in the comments of your video, or post a tweet, or both, saying, “oh my gosh you guys I am totally overwhelmed with the response!” “Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined…” You know the drill. For bonus points, throw in something like “I read every single comment. You’re all so nice.”

Then, write the same thing into your script for next week’s video, which of course you already have prepped. Wait a day or two, and post that one.

Exhaust your vault of pre-prepared content. Then get busy making more.

Rinse and repeat for a few weeks. Watch the numbers climb. Keep jumping in the comments if you’re brave. Roll out an upload schedule that you know you can keep — daily, weekly, Monday-Wednesday-Friday, whatever — and stick to it.

After a couple months, accept a compulsory email from YouTube inviting you to the YouTube Partner Program. Install pre-roll and pop-up ads that will occur before, during, and after all your videos. Don’t worry — audiences are used to them, and those that can’t take it have already installed ad-blockers.

Wait 12 hours, then log into your account and freak out at the first AdSense dollars rolling in.

Use that money initially to buy food, or as padding for a rainy day fund. You’re probably not at the “quit your day job” stage yet. But a couple weeks or months later, try paying yourself with revenue and realize it might be sustainable.

Continue, somehow, to pump out videos. Remind yourself, even as you’re clawing at the edges of your brain for any last creativity or idea, that consistency is the number one most important element to your output. Put a video out on time no matter what. Worry if it’s good afterwards.

Once you’re in a rhythm, start a Patreon account. Design a bunch of reward tiers for different levels of contribution. Promise even more content that you don’t have the extra time to make, this time provided exclusively to people who hand you $5 or $10 or more every month: hours-long livestreams that will exhaust you, merch you’ll have package and ship yourself and will almost certainly lose you money, and if you’re really crazy, an extra bonus video every now and then made just for them.

Advertise the Patreon in the end-roll of your next video. Say the Patreon money is going to go right back into the channel — a new better setup, more expensive equipment. This will be totally true. Also, reminder: you’re selling merch now. Make sure to mention that there’s a link in the description. There will also be a link to your new website that you got for free from your new sponsorship with Squarespace.

After all, you need a new microphone. A new computer. Maybe a new capture card. Maybe actually pay for the editing software instead of illegally downloading it.

The audience will see the video quality slowly rise. Soon, you’ll be able to do more with each video, and in less time. After a while you’ll look back at your first videos and wonder how they could have been that bad and how people could have liked them at all.

Start a Twitch channel and broadcast live whenever you can. Now you can cut clips from the livestreams to add to your videos, and then post highlights from both across Instagram and, why not, TikTok. Insane people and young kids will actually just send you money on Twitch for no reason — that’s one of the best parts, you’re gonna love it. If you can find the time in the day, start adapting your content directly to each social media platform — aspect ratios, length, audience — and see if you can grow there too. As more creators like you flood into these platforms every day and start taking revenue share, the pie gets smaller. So get your fingers in, like, at least three or four pies. Seven to eight to ten is probably the maximum. You’d be surprised what other creators can handle, especially as they grow and maybe even hire teams.

Now, ride off into the sunset. Film a profusely appreciative “thank you for 1 million subscribers” video (which often coincides with the “YouTube is now my full-time job” announcement thrown in the pre-roll of a video) and put your head back down. Try to ride the train of regular views and consistent work as long as the market will allow.

Congratulations. You made it through a super complex gauntlet of luck and trends and potential pitfalls and assembled what is essentially a fully-profitable small business with a multi-platform new media strategy, in real time, with thousands of people watching and critiquing your every move.

And now that those thousands of people are here to stay, a community is established. You represent something to people. You bring joy to their lives.

The craziest thing is that Girlfriend Reviews hit every beat on that path.

By Episode 2, GFR had an Instagram and Twitter set up, linked in the description of every video. Often someone would finish watching a video and want to stay in their little universe — those social pages would allow that, and pipe them into more content streams like Twitch streams and Reddit discussion threads, and maybe back for more videos.

As the weeks went on, more details were revealed. There were only two people behind the channel, the “Girlfriend” and “Boyfriend” in question. Their names were Shelby and Matt, and they lived together with two dogs and two cats. Matt wrote the scripts, Shelby recorded the voiceover. Matt, a professional editor in his day job, would edit the videos. Shelby, a musical theater performer and aspiring actor, would write and perform all the songs. Nearly a year in, they would finally reveal their faces, and film Q&A videos that revealed more details about their process, with glowing speeches about how their viewers helped them literally make their dreams come true.

Theirs has been the best executed and most “perfect” version of the path I’ve seen in my time as a YouTube viewer. There were no real missteps that I could see. Growth was steady — not too slow or too explosively fast.

Their success was so clean and sudden and out-of-nowhere that some skeptics even began to accuse them of manipulating votes on Reddit and using bots to boost view counts. The foul-cries got so loud that Shelby felt forced to make a statement on their Reddit account. “We’ve never manipulated our numbers anywhere and we were just as shocked at our initial growth as anyone.”

“It’s hurtful to see people talking about us being fake.”

And it’s the most hurtful perhaps, because they likely deserve the most recognition for their organic success of anyone — for winning what one might consider the combination of the lottery of opportunity and the Olympics of creativity at the same time.

Their’s is a Malcom Gladwell-like story: the phenomena of the right people, with the right abilities and foresight, choosing the exact time to make their move, and executing on their opportunity. It’s worth noting because that hasn’t even happened that much, relatively speaking, in recorded history. But it has happened by far the most often on the internet.

And wrapped in all of it was the allure of it being an almost accidental success story. From the beginning, things were positioned as “I made this one video on a whim and never expected anyone to see it and never envisioned having success.” And there was something charming about that. It’s how we like to think of success stories — like they could happen to anyone.

But think back to the end of the very first video and how she threw in the comment, “Let us know what you want to see next. He’s been playing a lot of Fallout 76 recently; I’ve heard that’s pretty controversial.” We now know that they already had that video recorded and edited. There was a fully-produced song in that one, too. It was posted two days later. They knew exactly what they were doing, from the beginning.

That’s the balance in mindset that any aspiring creator needs to strike as they attempt to make a career. You need a healthy degree of both the sky-high imagination that makes you consider doing it and the serious pragmatism it takes to execute your plan effectively, or to accept if and when it just doesn’t work. That’s why statements like “we were not prepared for the amount of people that saw that video” are absolutely true, as are the fact that they had multiple videos pre-made and ready for launch in that one week.

But at the end of the day, against all odds, and because they did everything right while being immensely lucky, they pulled it off. They made it. And now they find themselves on the other end of the wall.

After a little more than a year, there they are again on Twitch, playing Cyberpunk 2077. There’s a video due in four days. People are anxious to hear their thoughts on it. This is their day job now. It’s a pretty great one if you can get it. And no one can say they didn’t earn it.