A YouTube poster girl whose face you’ll recognize says: ‘I do what I love and make money’

A YouTube star who started “making silly videos” as a teenager has become a real-life poster girl for the company – and now earns a living on the site. The Dondo school, which has 244,000 subscribers, is being celebrated in a YouTube campaign marked by several posters across Birmingham – including on Coventry Road and Kings Heath High Street.

Along with some photos of her content, the wall art advertising the video platform reads: “Do what you love. Do more by doing it”. The Brum-based content creator, who has amassed 21 million views, earns enough money to support his lifestyle and said the bills are “not that worrying” after several years of doing what he loves.

For Scola, 28, YouTube was a big part of her childhood as she grew up watching videos of her older sister. She originally started as a hobby to create short clips and “mini movies” with her friends, but now, after spending “24/7” on the channel and qualifying as a personal trainer, she makes a living by posting content from fitness and lifestyle. .

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Her content, mostly filmed in her home in Birmingham city centre, ranges from ‘what I eat in a day’ and dance workouts to mental health advice and body positivity videos. Scola told BirminghamLive that he started his first channel in 2010 and started his health account when he was around 14 – a decade-long journey to get to where he is now.

She said: “I would just make silly videos with my friends. I started doing silly things like skits and making mini-movies was all the rage, so that’s what I did a lot. Fast forward a few years, I started my health and fitness journey and created a separate channel for that, the main channel I have now.

“It grew and grew and grew. I was making content in response to questions like ‘how do you exercise’ and ‘how do you eat’ and it started to snowball.” But the views and subscribers really started to “explode” when she started filming dance workouts for Afrobeats, she said. “I’m Zimbabwean so I love music from the African continent. That’s when my channel started to explode.”

In college, Scola applied for part-time jobs for extra money, but “didn’t seem to get it,” she said. “I was lucky that my channel started growing at a rate where I was making enough for my age to go to the movies and stuff,” she explained, adding that the money from the channel grew according to her needs -over time.

“Once I left school I couldn’t go to university because I couldn’t get student funding. So I put everything I had into my personal trainer qualification and continued working on my channel. I was lucky I still lived at home. so I didn’t need a lot of money, but I was earning about enough to do what I could at the time.

“I was filming every day, seven days a week, 24/7, it didn’t feel like 24/7 because it was something I loved, it was my life, so it’s one of those things that was non-stop for me. There weren’t many days where I wasn’t thinking about videos or thinking about an idea or filming something.”

Asked how much she earned from YouTube, she replied: “It fluctuates so much it’s hard to even say a set amount.” But she added: “One thing you have to prepare for is the instability of how much you earn every month, it’s still an amount you can live on and that’s amazing as a creative because there are a lot of creative industries where you can’t. always support yourself.

“This is definitely one where you can support it and do what you love and make money from it.” Asked if, with her instability, she worries about bills or money, she explained: “It’s enough to sustain you and it’s something that I can live on, it’s not that much of a concern, especially since I’ve been doing it for so long.”

She continued: “I’m probably from the creative generation that didn’t know what was possible (in terms of making money), it was just for the love of being creative and it still is. It was the love of making videos. , I had grown up watching him, it was something I was passionate about, only after years did the money come into play.

“In the beginning it’s like you don’t want to jump the gun and say, ‘I’m going to do this full-time,’ you wait and see how it works for you and how you can manage it. Since then, it’s not something you have to constantly worry about all the time, it’s just like any other freelance job.”

Asked for her advice to others, she said: “I didn’t set out to be a business. Every day I wake up and do it because it’s a passion of mine, rather than a strategic thing. When you love something, it’s ” I do not feel like working.

“Whatever you choose to create or do, make sure you really love it and are passionate about it – and that you can see yourself doing it for a long time, because I’ve been doing it for over a decade myself I still want to create, I still love it, I still want to do all this, but it doesn’t feel like work.

“I know money is one of those big things that people talk about when it comes to creating, and it’s like the money will come, you’ll get to do what you love while making money, and that’s an amazing feeling , but it doesn’t always happen overnight.”

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