Among younger generations, there aren’t many dream jobs more common than content creation.
More than 50% of Generation Zers said they would become a content creator if they had the chance, according to a 2019 study by the market research firm Morning Consult.
It makes sense. In the internet age, Gen Z has watched thousands of ordinary people make hundreds of thousands, sometimes billions of dollars, by creating content on platforms like YouTube, Instagram and TikTok.
Three Colorado College students are taking a stab at it — and finding success in their own distinct ways.
Nowadays, with the quality of mobile devices increasing and the production of other recording devices like small tripods, GoPros or even the Meta Glasses, content creation has never been more accessible. Every ordinary person can become an instant internet personality with just a click of a button.
“We’re also at a period of time where people like to be known,” said Michael Harris, career consultant at the Career Center.
In many ways, content creation shares a deep resemblance with entrepreneurship. Creators are essentially calculating their own risks with the algorithm, viewership and sponsors, deciding what the best moves are to grow their platform.
It’s an industry that is easy to get into. But finding success and making a career is an entirely different story.
‘I Looked at What Was Missing:’
“People [who] tell you YouTube is a hard job are lying,” said second-year Jude LoSasso, a BESoc major from Chicago, sitting on the second floor of Worner.
LoSasso’s dedication to YouTube is quickly eclipsing his college responsibilities. He makes Minecraft videos on his channel JudeLow, which boasts 1.3 million subscribers. He also just finished a $25,000 collaboration with MrBeast, the most-subscribed YouTuber in the world.
LoSasso started the channel as a passion project when he was 10 years old, but he didn’t gain traction until he began making Minecraft content. From there, it was all good business sense.
“I looked at what was missing,” he said, describing his search for unfilled niches in the content creation space. He noticed a lack of more humorous, laid-back Minecraft content targeted to adults, so that’s where he trained his focus.
For LoSasso, balancing content creation, school, fitness and social life quickly became too much to bear.
“It [was] pretty much impossible to the point where I’d have to cut one thing out,” he said.
First, he decided not to work out for a month. Then, it was allowing his social life to dwindle. Finally, he realized that the real thing that was stopping him from pursuing YouTube wholeheartedly was his schoolwork.
“Some classes would kind of take over and I would have to put the YouTube stuff on pause to build a gigantic finger for 3D art,” LoSasso said. He thought that the Block Plan would help him manage the time he needed to make content, but he found that it often ended up being the opposite.
So now, LoSasso stands at a crossroads, forced to make an unconventional decision, but one that students like him have made and will continue to make: reset his priorities back to school and risk the success of his channel, or leave college to pursue his dream.
“I can literally set myself up for life in two to three years if I play my cards [correctly],” he said. “Strike while the iron’s hot, right?”
For LoSasso, after blowing past a million subscribers in only two years and with his recent Mr. Beast collaboration in the rearview mirror, it’s an easy choice.
Documenting the College Experience:
It turns out sharing your life on the internet is a lot of responsibility.
Hyungyu Kim, a third-year neuroscience major who was born in Daegu, South Korea and grew up in Denver, started an Instagram page the summer before his junior year.
In just seven months, Kim has grown his page to over 17,000 followers.
Kim owns a charity clothing line, withus studios, which donates half its proceeds to protect children with epilepsy. One of his main decisions for growing his online presence was to promote the clothing line.
“I should probably get on social media,” he recalls thinking at the time.
However, his content is not only about the brand. Kim shares all parts of his life on the internet. You can find videos of him studying at the Quantitative Reasoning Center, playing soccer with his brother or cooking with friends.
Kim’s day-in-the-life and studying style is the most popular on his page with many videos reaching well over five million views and 10,000 likes.
His strategy for making content is not having one at all. Kim sets up his phone to record whatever activity he is currently doing. Afterwards, he sifts through his footage and finds clips that are funny or authentic and edits them together into 10 to 20-second shorts.
“I’m just gonna show what I’m doing whenever I’m doing it,” he said.
Authenticity and day-to-day lifestyle moments attract more views.
“If they can see themselves or their situation in your videos, it’s relatable,” he said.
However, as Kim tries to be his most authentic self online, he sometimes struggles to live up to his own expectations offline.
“I’m putting this stuff out there, and I can’t live up to what I’m telling other people to do,” Kim said. But, “that shouldn’t stop you from putting out a good message,” he said.
‘You Have to Do Something You Love:’
Second-year Vinton Euler’s content creation journey is an unorthodox one. The anthropology major from North Carolina is the administrator of at least 30 unique YouTube channels, so many that even he is unsure of how many there truly are.
How? The answer is artificial intelligence.
Out of the 30 or so channels that Euler estimated he has, around 25 of them are completely controlled and managed by Artificial Intelligence (AI.) He uses a program called n8n, an AI workflow automation platform, to turn a series of Google Gemini-generated video prompts into full videos, complete with an AI-generated script, voiceover, slideshow, title and thumbnail. And apart from the occasional error, the program is completely hands-off.
Altogether, n8n creates and uploads a new video to one of Euler’s channels once every 2 minutes. Over the course of a year, that’s 262,800 unique AI-generated YouTube videos. Some of them, Euler said, are a little off the rails. Some notable videos were “How to Humanize Ai Content (easy Method),” “How to Get Your First Ever Period 2025—Easy Guide” and “How to Apply for Qatar Government Jobs 2025—Full Guide.”
That isn’t the end of Euler’s YouTube conglomerate.
He also operates Public Records POV, a police body camera compilation channel, “subscribe if i helped you 🙂,” where tutorial videos are uploaded up to 10 different times with different titles and thumbnails for search term optimization. Then he has Poker Clips, where he uploads short clips of poker tournaments. And there’s Vinton Euler, a channel with over 600,000 subscribers in his name that he no longer uploads to.
For Euler, it isn’t about the money. His AI channels are far from profitable, and channels like Public Records POV and Poker Clips require him to commission others to find and compile clips for uploads.
When asked why he went through all the trouble of setting up these channels if he wasn’t even making money from them, his answer was simple.
“You have to do something you love,” he said.
Content creation is a risky business. It offers little security and guarantees nothing. But for these three students, it’s a risk they’re willing to take. Because alongside the instability is the promise of freedom – to be creative, to be in control and to be known.
If there’s one thing to take from LoSasso, Kim and Euler’s journeys, it’s that there’s no single way to find success in content creation.
As Euler put it, no matter the path you take, you have to do it “for the love of the game.”
Editor’s Note: Following print publication on Wednesday, Feb. 25, LoSasso confirmed that he is currently taking a leave of absence, which was not reflected in the original story.
LoSasso’s Feb. 26 email to the editors reads: “[I’m] taking a leave of absence, I’ll probably be back next year, but right now I need to strike while the iron is hot. If i continue to blow up exponentially theres a chance I do not return.”