Graham Willis of the Alcoa Fishing Team, working on a YouTube video.
BY DAVE LINK
Graham Willis is chasing his dream of fishing for a living.
The home-schooled senior on the Alcoa Fishing Team has a passion for fishing and the outdoors and a knack for computer technology.
And he’s an entrepreneur.
Willis, 17, wants to combine his talents and catch the wave of social media influencers – and make it part of his career.
“I thought about college,” Willis said. “Carson-Newman, they asked me and that would have been fun. At this point, it looks like I’ll just keep working and try to save money and then work on YouTube at the same time and see if I can start making money off that. That’s my goal right now.”
Willis isn’t jumping into a new world.
“I probably started watching YouTube when I was 5 or 6,” he said, “but for fishing, I started watching in 2016 or ’17. I kind of always wanted to do it since trying it a little bit in 2019. About two years ago I started really thinking about it and I just started about six or seven months ago.”
Jackie Hatfield (left) and Graham Willis after the Alcoa Easter Open.
MOTIVATION
Willis doesn’t just watch YouTube fishing videos. He studies them.
A couple of his favorites are made by Brandon Palaniuk and Scott Martin, two Bassmaster Series anglers.
And then there’s Ben Milliken, whose YouTube videos from his life and fishing in Nebraska made him a hit before he advanced to the Bassmaster circuit.
“I watch all my favorite guys and now I study it a little deeper and see what they’re doing, what they do to edit,” Willis said.
Regionally, John Dalton of Cleveland, Tenn., quit his job as an HVAC technician after his “Creek Fishing Adventures” YouTube channel took off.
“All he does now is just film about fishing creeks around East Tennessee (and the region),” Willis said. “He tells you in the videos how much he makes, and I think last year he made $100,000 just on ad revenue.”
For Willis, that’s a ways off. But’s it’s a goal.
Willis said to start making money on YouTube videos, a person needs 4,000 hours of watch time on videos and have 1,000 subscribers.
He had about 350 watch hours earlier this week and is getting close to the 1K subscription mark.
“I should have that (1,000 subscribers) in a week or so,” Willis said. “I just need to get more of those videos out because those average about 50 to 100 watch hours each.”
Once he reaches the YouTube marks, Willis’ goal for the first year is to make enough money to cover his expenses and show a small profit (another YouTube rule to be monetized).
After that, who knows?
Willis is inspired by “Creek Fishing Adventures” and what it’s done.
“He’s really good,” Willis said. “It’s really good. They’re just basic, but it’s filmed on a GoPro. He averages 20,000 to 50,000 (views) per video. Each of those videos is making a few hundred bucks, and he’s making multiple a week, he’s probably making more than that. And his ad revenue is $80,000 to $100,000, plus all the companies paying him to use their products.”
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“BREAKING A BOAT” VIDEO
Willis fishes with Jackie Hatfield for the Alcoa Fishing Team, and most often their boat captain is Jackie’s father, Chris Hatfield.
Willis’s most recent video was done March 30 at the AFT Easter Open tournament on Douglas Lake.
The video’s title is “Breaking A Boat In Search For the Tournament Winning Fish!!!” and it lasts 7 minutes, 20 seconds.
Using a GoPro Hero 11 strapped to his chest, Willis videos the entire day of fishing. He has a 128-gig memory card, so the Go-Pro can video almost all day.
Not only does Willis video himself catching fish, he gets Hatfield and his father (if the boat captain is allowed to fish, as was the case at the AFT Easter event).
Willis plans to buy another GoPro and mount it on the boat’s dash for another camera angle.
“Anytime I see that Jackie’s hooked one or if the boat captain’s allowed to fish the tournament like the last one,” Willis said, “I always try to point myself towards him, and of course have the net ready so I can get the fish jumping and stuff like that.”
Often, video content isn’t just fishing.
The “Breaking A Boat” video includes their boat idled into shallow water and hitting some rocks, damaging the boat’s shaft and propeller. They got back to a nearby ramp, loaded the boat on a trailer, and got pulled back to weigh-ins.
“We had our limit before that happened,” Willis said.
Their limit weighed about 13 pounds and included a 5.2-pound largemouth caught by Hatfield.
“That’s a giant for Douglas,” Willis said.
They finished in second place.
(Watch the video HERE and subscribe to the channel. It’s free).
MAKING VIDEOS, CASHING IN
Once Willis gets home from the lake, his video work begins.
“I have a big desktop gaming computer,” he said. “It’s kind of expensive, but it really makes it quick because it can hold a lot of footage, a lot of storage in it, and it runs really fast.”
Using a program called CapCut, Willis condenses 10 or 12 hours of time on the lake into a video lasting less than 10 minutes.
“When I get back, I start cutting down the actual clips of me and him catching fish,” he said, “and it takes a long time, rearranging them and playing the music and intros and getting all the text into it. You’ve got to compile it all. Sometimes it takes about 3 hours to do it, but once I do it all, it turns out pretty good most of the time.”
Willis has experimented with TikTok, using his PC and CapCut and piecing together clips of fishing-related subjects.
“The most popular one,” Willis said, “was a breakdown video of a guy using the Apple vision reality goggles to see their Livescope (fishing) screen, their electronics, so they put it on and they could see their electronics through their goggles.
“That one had hundreds of hundreds of thousands of views, and thousands of comments from people talking about it.”
Willis said he could have made “a fair amount” of money from that video, but one requirement for profiting from TikTok is the content maker must be 18 years old.
For now, Willis will focus on YouTube as a means of fishing for a living.
“I feel like professional fishing now is super hard to make money in, at least by itself,” he said, “so I kind of started (YouTube) to have a way to make some money on the side.”