Let me tell you the story of All Rugby Results.

The idea

The year is 2011. I was a computer engineering student in France, and the Rugby World Cup was about to start in New-Zealand. I brought up to a friend of mine the idea of starting a rugby "brand" on Twitter and Youtube, on which we would comment games, create highlight videos and so on. I was already into video editing and always looking for new ideas and projects, and I've always been a major rugby fan, so this felt like a great opportunity to launch something fueled by passion and that had actual potential to grow.

That is how All Rugby Results (ARR) was born. During the World Cup, we would live tweet the games, recap the scores every day, share news, interact with the international rugby community and the account started growing nicely (especially considering we did not have friends or family on Twitter to kickstart us, all of our followers were natural, coming from our activity). I remember waking up at 2 a.m. to watch the most random games, or hiding my phone in my pencil case in class to not miss a minute of the World Cup and share the scores as fast as possible. When it comes to media and breaking news, speed of delivery is everything, and we understood that quickly.

The Youtube channel was opened a bit later, towards the end of the World Cup, and I made a highlight of the French team's entire tournament. I downloaded highlight videos from all the games (from other channels, which would be my downfall, even though I did not realize that back then), in questionable quality, and edited my video with the knowledge and skill I had back then. I'll be honest, watching it 10 years later with professional eyes kind of hurts, but it also brings back nice memories.

The rise

After the end of the World Cup, the ARR train was rolling smoothly, as we would keep publishing more and more content. We would live tweet games from national and international championships on Twitter, share weekly rankings, interact as much as possible with our community and the global rugby Twitter community, and on Youtube I would make more and more videos, be it game highlights, tributes to players, funny bits that happened during matches and so on. Anything worthy of being watched, and not a single thing I had the rights to use (footage or music) and even less to monetize. Back then, there was no threshold to monetize videos. Any creator, no matter the channel reach, could do it, so of course I tried it, and it worked for the most part since not a lot of my videos were being flagged.

In 2012, we reached a peak during the 6 Nations tournament (the yearly European tournament featuring France, England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales and Italy), as we were doing the same thing we had done during the World Cup but even more intensively. I made a highlight video of the whole tournament (15 games) when it ended, which got pretty popular pretty fast. We also started a blog in 2012 (it was originally a school project to create a blog with a topic of our choosing, so that choice was fairly easy to make) on which we would write some articles to break down games, post about our videos, etc.

We also worked on our branding that year: changing our Twitter handle, adding Facebook and Instagram to our networks, making better visuals (profile pictures, banners), intros and outros for videos... Looking at our designs now, I can honestly say that they all suck, but the idea was there.

Work and dedication got us places. We received goodies, created and distributed ARR branded goodies of our own, we got invited to lots of games, grew our networks by the hundreds, our videos were spreading and got featured on other websites, watched and commented by the players themselves... 2012 was a very fun year for that.

The fall

In 2013, when the 6 Nations tournament came back around the corner, I knew I had to make another highlight video. It was definitely expected. My objective was to release it as close to the end of the last game as possible, to make sure I was the first one on Youtube to release a complete tournament highlight video. In order to do so, I was watching every single game, writing down the precise time of actions I wanted to feature in the highlights, downloading the games as soon as I could and edited in my free time, with the objective of being done editing one round of the tournament before the next round would start (typically the next weekend).

And I did it. The last game was on Saturday night, and my video was ready on Sunday afternoon. I uploaded it, and waited. After 4 or 5 days of it being online (it showed like that in my dashboard anyway), the video only had something like 8 views, which was definitely not in my standards, especially for such a hyped upload. And, on the 5th day, I received an email from Youtube, telling me what I was always scared of reading: because of copyright violations, my video had been taken down, my account had been blocked, and if I tried again, I risked a 5 figure fine and some jail time. No more video that I spent weeks working on, and no more ARR channel. I had to watch videos about authorship, rights and all the goods, and then answer a quiz to finally get my channel back online -without that one video of course.

It was normal, and well deserved, but it kind of broke me. After that event, I uploaded way less videos, none using images from the 6 Nations (because they were the ones who flagged me), and every upload came with a constant fear. We were still active on Twitter but we slowly started to fade away, especially since we were going through hard things on a personal level.

The last video uploaded was in late 2014, and so were the last tweets, until the Rugby World Cup 2015. I tried to resuscitate the Twitter account, I went back to live tweeting games and giving results, but my audience was gone, and my tweets were getting lost in the mass, drowning in a sea of tweets posted by accounts created after mine and that kept going strong for the years I had missed.

The lesson

I was young, I was a student, I had fun, I made mistakes and I learned a lot from that period:

• Never try to make a profit using content you don't have the proper rights to use. This is why now, on my Youtube Channel, I would never try to monetize my Trailer Mashup videos, because I don't own any of it, and for the other videos I only use copyright free music, stock footage or videos I filmed myself. It actually pushed me towards creating more content myself and sharing some of this content on stock media platforms, like Shutterstock, Getty Images or Adobe Stock.
• It takes a lot of time, work and dedication to build a brand, to make a name for yourself in an environment where competition is fierce. It's definitely not easy, but it's feasible if you're committed.
• A project fuelled by passion instead of greed is definitely the best way to get you where you want to be.
• Internet will take months, even years, to learn who you are, but only a few days to forget you. This means you should never ever take any kind of online "fame" for granted, and you should always work for it regularly if you want to keep it.

To finish on an ironic note, I would like to point out the fact that, even though monetizing videos was accessible for all creators back then, the minimum amount needed to withdraw the funds from Google AdSense was 70€. I only ever got something close to 30€, and the channel is demonetized now and won't ever reach the new thresholds, so I never actually earned any money from the videos, and these 30€ are stuck forever on some AdSense account, untouchable by me, or anyone else. Oh well.

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