The Evolution of YouTube Editing Careers and Challenges

YouTube editing has evolved dramatically, posing challenges for newcomers competing with top creators.

### The World of YouTube Editing: Insights from Top Editors
* 🎥 This video features interviews with four top YouTube editors: **Taylor Rush (Mr. Beast)**, **Jinx (The Sidemen)**, **Hayden (Logan Paul)**, and **Kimberly Moffett (Pokimane)**.
* 🎬 The editors discuss their journeys into editing, with Taylor mentioning that he sent out **300 queries** and only heard back from **two people**, one of whom was **Mr. Beast's team**.
* 💼 Working for top YouTubers can be intense, with Jinx mentioning that she often works **12-hour days with little break**.
* 💰 Pay in the YouTube editing world varies widely, with Taylor starting at **$50 per video** and eventually moving to a **salary position**.
* 🌟 The editors emphasize the importance of **reputation in the industry**, as it's relatively small and **connections are key**.
* 🧠 They also stress the importance of **constantly improving your craft**, with Hayden recommending new editors to "**edit a full-length 10-minute video**" to showcase their skills.
* 📈 Taylor highlights the potential for growth in the industry, mentioning that the Mr. Beast editing team grew from **a handful of people to over 20** during his time there.
* 🎓 The video concludes with the editors offering advice for those starting out, including the **importance of building connections** and **showcasing your work online**.

Is it just me, or is YouTube editing getting ridiculous? Back when I started doing YouTube, I thought this was a good intro. I'm Finar, and welcome. But since then, everything on YouTube has changed. More and more videos are now rivaling even Netflix shows, and viewer expectations have never been higher. For anyone starting out, it can be extremely intimidating trying to compete with the biggest channels. But behind the world's biggest YouTubers are a bunch of people turned editors just like us who have worked their way up. And today, we're going to meet four of them: meet Taylor Rush, Jinx, and Hayden, aka the editors behind Mr. Beast, The Sidemen, Pokimane, and Logan Paul. We're going to learn about how they got their big breaks, what working for the world's biggest YouTubers is really like, and the best advice they've ever been given. But first, it's important to find out how did you get into editing in the first place. What it was was that I wanted to be an actor.

So, I started filming. As I was doing the filming, I went, Wait a minute, this is quite fun. But it all genuinely over time led to the editing. I don't know, I just had the most fun. I was able to tell a completely new story in that place, and that was for me as a filmmaker where I found I had the most control. And yeah, this is where I'm stuck for the rest of my life. I remember pulling the trigger and actually getting the Adobe Creative Cloud for like the 50 bucks or whatever it was back then. I went Ham on everything, bro. I learned how to use Illustrator, Photoshop, After Effects, because I said to myself, Okay, I've always wanted to be a paid creative. Everything I could possibly want to do is in this Creative Suite. If I can learn these tools, I know I'll be successful. And so, I just dedicated myself to not just Premiere but everything in the Adobe suite. I was really into anime and AMVs, so I used to edit AMVs to Linkin Park in essence. Nice, that's so on Windows.

Movie Maker. I always was into making films, films you know um like flip a clip and Viva Video and Time Master. I used to make videos on that [ __ ] and send them on the school group chat and get bullied for it. What was your first big break in the editing scene? Quite a few people have said that luck doesn't exist in this industry. It absolutely does, but you have to get luck and back it up with skill at the same time because you might get that golden ticket. You don't have the skill, you Fu. The golden ticket was me getting the job with Logan Paul. I just came out of film school. I'm trying to figure out what to do with my career, and so I got a job with this Facebook video company. I was doing a pretty decent job there, but there were a couple of things that I just didn't creatively agree with. And so me and the boss started arguing every single day. It then got to a point where we're having such a massive argument that I didn't say to him, Go f

yourself damn most interesting thing with all of this was that I actually became really good friends with the chef of the office, and he happened to be connected with Logan's manager, Jeff. Oh, [ __ ] that connection is crazy. Jeff and Logan then heard that story, and then Logan went, That's the kid I want. And so he then gave me a test edit, and I just blew it out of the water. I knew exactly what he needed and what he wanted for his video without any notes. And I think 2 hours later, he calls me, he says, Bro, the stars have aligned. All four editors have had similar experiences of working hard and trying their luck. Rush, for example, applied for work on the Sidemen's second channel and got given some test footage. I did a test in January. I skipped prom to edit that video, dude, and it worked out. They were so impressed by what they saw that they bumped him up to a main channel editor. Similarly, Jinx edited for a League of Legends channel before moving on to edit

streams for other YouTubers. Most of it was just taking the top clips and then putting it into a video. And from there, she was headhunted by Pokéman. As for Taylor, that would be working for Kimberly Moffett. I think she's right around like 200,000 subs. That was when things financially started to like stabilize. And that's when it felt like a big break, is consistently relying on $1,000 a month or whatever. Yeah, it felt huge, man. For each of these editors, getting their first big break wasn't about who they knew in the industry. It was their talent and hard work that got them these jobs, which is demonstrated really well by Taylor's story of working with Mr. Beast. When my wife and I were both business partners, she kind of, you know, was doing the mom thing. I had to take over a lot of the business side of things solo for the first time really in our whole relationship. I still have this spreadsheet, dude. I sent over like 300 queries to different YouTubers. I only

heard back from two people, and that was my buddy over at Stylized Station and, uh, the Mr. Beast team. Oddly enough, they said, Do you want to be an assistant editor for the Reacts Channel? and I said, Absolutely. And they said, Do you want to move to North Carolina? and I said, I don't know, dude. Like, my wife and I had just bought a house in Texas, like, literally 4 months before that. They said, Would you be willing to do it if we entertained the idea of you becoming a lead editor? and I said, Uh, yeah. You're like, 'Let's, that sounds good. That sounds good.' So they handed me this edit, right? They told me I had 15 days to cut it. I cut it in 10 to try to, like, be impressive. I crushed Red Bulls, and I don't know how many years I took off my life doing that. I watched every single one of Finzar's videos. I just really tried to do my best job, man, and they almost gave me the lead editor position immediately. Like, it was

pretty immediate. It's inspiring to hear Taylor's story about working for Mr. Beast and how hard work pays off. But what many of us don't know is what it's like really working for one of these big YouTubers. Because unlike other industries like TV and film, which have been doing things in the same way for years now, YouTube is a wild west, and each channel works very differently. For Russian Jinx, who worked for the Sidemen and Pokimane, they wake up, they get a new video in their inbox, and they get straight to work. I have no life. I wake up, I edit for 12 hours. I probably pee and eat in between, and then I go back to bed. It's incredibly messy, but it always works out, and the end product is pretty good. It was a very similar story with Hayden when he worked for Logan Paul, except he was working full-time, and the relationship was a lot more intimate. The benefit with Logan was he was doing daily vlogging. He would film his day in

Los Angeles, and he would immediately start loading it onto a Cloud Drive. I would then have it automatically be downloading onto my laptop. As he's finishing his day around 10 p.m., he starts uploading at around 8:00 a.m., 9:00 a.m. my time. There is just footage just on my laptop ready to be edited. He then goes to sleep. I then start my day, and then by the time he wakes up, the video is ready to go. And that then became the process for the first year. Then there was Taylor's work for Mr. Beast, which was as a part of a much larger team, which led to a very different working environment. Yeah, when I originally got there, man, it was just really a handful of people. There wasn't a ton of structure. There were assistant editors, lead editors. I got to be head of post-production. We were able to have coordinator, supervisor, second editors. That whole department was built out to like 20-plus people by the time I left, so it scaled real quick by the end of it.

like titles didn't mean a ton because we were all just crew members on a pirate ship, and we were just trying to get that shi to shore. I would be there literally just running between rooms 'cause there's like two videos getting done at the same time, like okay, is that good? Okay, move on, next. It's just the most chaotic thing, dude. The scale of these YouTubers' organizations is impressive, yet the idea of being a YouTube editor is still a tricky topic to bring up in ordinary conversation. Because while editing has become a real job for many people, myself included, it's not always been seen that way. Again, around the 2016 time, it was still considered taboo for a Creator to claim they had an editor. There was probably a good like 18 months where I rather would have said I was just unemployed and actively looking, being like I'm a video editor on YouTube 'cause you feel like an impostor for a long time. I experienced this myself when I was seeing family or friends. I really struggled telling them

that I was making $20 a video just doing Minecraft rough cuts. But this all changed when I started making real money. But what does real money for editing actually mean? My first paycheck was $100, and it was a week's worth of work. And like, my highest pay video was a week. I worked on it for a week, and it was like $1,300 something. Back when I started, it was $50 per video. And then with Pokey, it first started as a per video basis, and then she very quickly moved me onto a salary. And then per video, I get money on top. My first job with the Facebook video company, even though they're making millions, they were only paying me $25,000 a year. Once I then got the job with Logan, my first salary with him was $50,000 a year, which is actually not bad, especially in 2016. Then it incrementally increased into a place where I would rather protect my income that I had probably around the end of that time. I find the topic of money.

around editing quite interesting because it is especially YouTube editing. It's so, it's like a wild west, man. Nobody really knows whether to price it per video, per hour, do a salary, or like a mixture. I think it's one of the beautiful things and also disastrous things about our industry is that all three of those are applicable. This is really an important distinction to make as far as whoever might be listening and where you're at in your journey in this industry is there's a lot of different ways to get paid. There's a lot of different ways that you can structure getting paid, and there's certain ways to demand certain price points from different clientele. It varies widely on where you're at in your journey. Just because you're at the beginning and you know you're only making $100, $200 per video doing your thing, as long as you're doing the best work that you can be at that time, that's really all that matters. That's the only thing I really focused on. I never pursued trying to make more and more.

money. I only pursued trying to get better at my craft and better at what I was doing for each of these editors. Getting paid was the end of a long and arduous journey that saw them overcome personal and professional hurdles. I'm a perfectionist, and I get very stressed out very quickly during editing, even if the video is not hard. It's because I'm a perfectionist, and I want to make everything really good, and because I know how much Pokey... because I want to make sure it's really good for her. It's not having my own thing that's really a big part of why I wind up leaving pces, because I woke up one day, and I was 34 years old with a kid, and I was like, If I don't start trying to write crazy cool fantasy novels and crazy cool sci-fi novels right now, it's never going to happen. You seem to me like a motivated man. What is it that keeps you going to say that I was a complete loser when my wife met me is...

an understatement. She had her whole life ahead of her, and she got with me, this guy with a neck tattoo and a little bit of a beer belly, and like her whole family's like, What the hell are you thinking? I just want to prove her right. Shout out to your wife, she sounds great. Shout out Shannon. Shout out Shannon. Woo! But I love editing so much that I would never stop, like even if I was the biggest streamer in the world, even if I had more viewers than Pokey gets on stream, I would still edit videos 'cause I just love editing so much. It's so much fun. So yes, editing can be tough, but for these editors, it has and continues to be absolutely worth it. And if you're an editor starting out on your journey, you're going to want to hear this advice they've got for you. Your reputation is everything. This is a very small industry. It's not nearly as big as you think it is. Your ability to deliver on time, be a delight to work with, learn on your own.

time not make your problems other people's problems. You might be a new editor in this industry. There's a lot of other new editors in this industry and thumbnail designers and Motion Graphics artists. Connect with those people and being the kind of person they want to work with. You're all going to come up together. You're all going to rise together. And so that's literally the most important thing I can ever say to anybody. The best thing to do is to grab a VOD of like a twitch streamer just 'cause it's unedited. Just edit a full-length 10-minute video. If you want a client, they want to see you can edit a full video. Be interesting. Have multiple jokes. That it's a story. The Holy fruit well seeing one of their edits that you like recreating it tagging them. They're going to see it. They're interact with you. If it's good, then post some of your own stuff. Once you gather a small audience, keep recreating more edits to sort of like get your name out there to

multiple editors because connections are very important, and that way you're going to have a good base of work that has been shown off, a good base of clients, a good base of connections. And you said showing your work, putting it online, this then essentially becomes a magnet, and then you have to then use that magnet to attract the people that you want to work with, and they will come. You just simply have to find a way to let them know that you exist by being attractive. Be attractive, be attractive. Getting a six-pack also helps, but also being magnetically attractive. That's what I took from that actually was just, yeah, just get a, you know, work out a little bit, be right, get a six-pack, and you'll get any editing job. Editing really can be an awesome job, and it's been great to hear Hayden, Taylor, Jinx, and Rush talk about their journeys today. And if you're looking to improve your work, then I highly recommend you go to my website, star.com, where I've just released two new preset packs. My

animations two pack and my zooms pack. And I also have a course there which will take you from beginner to Pro in Premiere Pro. And if you want more from the editors featured in this video today, then you can go and check out the full interviews in the stores are channel. The link is in the description. So thank you again to those editors who have shared their time with us today. I'm sure we all really appreciate it. Now get the hell out of here. I'm done. Now we're done. Done. We're done here. Get the hell out of here. Go and watch another one of my videos right here. Oh, look at that video. Look at that big old box. Which video is it? I don't know. It's probably the best one that you should go watch. It's picked for you. It's picked for you. Subscribe to the channel as well. Look at this beautiful face. Go press that button. Get the hell out of here.

I Talked To The World's BIGGEST Editors. Here's What I Learnt.

finzar

The Changing Landscape of YouTube Editing

YouTube editing has become increasingly competitive, with videos now rivaling Netflix shows and raising viewer expectations.

Many successful YouTube editors, like Taylor Rush, Jinx, and Hayden, started with a passion for filmmaking and learned their skills through the Adobe Creative Suite.

Luck and skill play a crucial role in breaking into the industry, with one editor's big break coming from a job with Logan Paul.

The Journey to Becoming a Successful Video Editor

The narrator became friends with the office chef, who was connected to Logan's manager, Jeff, leading to a test edit that impressed Logan.

Other editors shared similar stories of hard work and luck, with Rush and Jinx both getting promoted after impressive test work.

Taylor's big break came from sending out numerous queries, eventually leading to an assistant editor position with the Mr.

Beast team and a potential lead editor role.

The Unique Challenges of Working for YouTube Stars

Working for major YouTubers is a chaotic and demanding experience, with each channel operating differently.

Editors often work long hours, juggling multiple videos and tight deadlines.

Despite the intense nature of the job, the scale of these YouTubers' organizations is impressive, and editing for them has gradually become a recognized profession.

The editor's income began at $20 per video, gradually increasing to $1,300 for a week's work.

They experienced various payment structures, including per video, salary, and bonuses, with significant salary increases over time.

The editor emphasizes the importance of focusing on improving their craft rather than solely pursuing higher pay, and they eventually left their job to pursue writing fantasy and sci-fi novels.

The speaker expresses their love for editing, stating they would continue even if they became the biggest streamer.

They emphasize the importance of reputation, delivering on time, and being a pleasure to work with in the small editing industry.

The speaker advises new editors to connect with peers, edit unedited VODs, and recreate successful edits to build their name and audience.

Having multiple editors is crucial for building a strong network and attracting clients.

Showcasing your work online acts as a magnet to draw in potential collaborators.

The speaker also offers preset packs and a course on their website to help others improve their editing skills.