Australian teen blazes a trail on social media

Blaze Pate is making his mark on social media. Photos submitted

By Tom Victoria

Blaze Pate pursued a passion for making videos. Now, he’s starting to set social media on fire with his content.

The Aussie teen explained what folks can find on his channel.

“I make tech YouTube videos, and I make a lot of lifestyle stuff,” he said. “I'm trying to get a bit of a bigger audience. The problem with my channel is when I do a video where I sit down and explain stuff, it gets a bunch of views. But if I do a product review on a product from a small company, it doesn't do very well. You're building an audience. For the most part, I make tech videos. I do some vlog. I mix in some lifestyle with the tech.”

Blaze, 14, picks topics he thinks viewers want to see.

“If I see something that's trendy that I can talk about or if I own a product, I will create a video on it,” he said. “So if I'm scrolling through my YouTube page and I see a topic that's trendy, I will recreate it and take my own little twist on it. If there's a video based on an Apple Watch, I will make it my own and talk how I want to talk about the product.”

Blaze said people seek out reviews.

“Reviews on YouTube, they're fantastic,” he said. “Because a lot of people, they might be thinking about buying something, but they want to see how it is from another perspective.”

Blaze, who is now comfortable in front of the camera, became acclimated to filming himself.

“I had to learn because I've always been a very anxious person,” he said. “I've always had bullying issues at school. And ever since we moved and I got into a new school, I'd started developing a lot of anxiety. I didn't do anything that I wanted to do. It got to a point where I wanted to be happy with myself and who I am as a person, so I started creating videos on YouTube.”

Blaze doesn’t let any haters put a damper on being a content creator.

“I just kept going at it and now it's cool because it's making money,” he said. “I get bullied sometimes like, why would you be making YouTube videos? It's so stupid. But it's just fun. It's my thing. Technology has always been a passion for me.”

Blaze recalled having some trepidation when he started posting videos a few years ago.

“I actually have a lot of deleted videos,” he said. “A lot of the stuff from the start of my channel has been deleted. I remember being very nervous and anxious because I was so scared that someone was going to find my channel from school. I just acted really chill and I didn't want to show myself. I acted very flat in the videos. I didn't want to express myself.”

Blaze now has the opposite view.

“Now, I feel I can express myself a little bit more because I'm not listening to the people at my school and friends,” he said. “A lot of my friends, some of them are really supportive. Some of them let me down, so we've just gotten to a point now where I want to do what I want to do. Whenever I talk to people about bullying issues, they just say that they're jealous because I'm doing something that they don't want to do. That pushes me a little bit more.”

Blaze’s persistence paid dividends.

“It just took a while for me to build the confidence,” he said. “It does take time.”

Blaze wants his audience to glean one thing above all others.

“Knowledge,” he said. “I have some videos that do really well. I had one that got 200,000 views for a long form, which is pretty high for my channel. Those videos are, in a way, educational videos. I did a discussion with Apple animations. I discussed why they were so smooth and how Apple makes them so fluid. Those sorts of videos have some value and there's knowledge in there people can take from that. I want everyone to learn something new. Every time they watch a video, no matter what one it is, they learn something from it.”

Blaze recorded a momentous occasion: meeting his biological father for the first time.

“He lives in Spain,” Blaze said. “My mom has always said I can talk to him if I want. I was on Facebook and it gives friend suggestions, people that you may know. He popped up and I was like, screw it, I'm just going to do it. So I added him and I sent him a message. The day I messaged him, he said it was actually the day of his birthday and it was the best gift. So that was pretty cool.”

Blaze and his father maintained contact.

“I just started talking to him and then that's how I found out who he actually was,” he said. “He was living in Spain, had a photography business that he owned. And then after we got a little bit closer, we did a lot of video calling, video chatting, messaging and FaceTiming. Once we got to that stage where we had built a relationship, we organized a meetup. He flew over to Melbourne and we spent a week together. It was a very cool experience.”

Blaze was an infant when his parents parted ways.

“I was three months old when they split up,” he said. “I hadn't grown up around him at all. I've been with my mum my entire life. We're actually planning to meet up again next year in March we reckon, so that'll be very cool.”

Blaze started his current, third channel in 2020.

“I had another channel in the past,” he said. “Funny story about that channel. I got a new phone and because my old phone was broken at the time and by the time I got a new one, I didn't know my Google login details for the account that I was using. So then I created a new channel. The channel that I have now was actually a second channel to my main channel. I had a channel that I did the vlog style stuff on and then I had my second channel for technology stuff, which is my current channel Blaz.”

Blaze’s tech content won out.

“That channel did a lot better,” he said. “So I was like I'm just gonna make the second channel the main channel and upload extras on that channel. And now I just have one channel. There's a lot of interesting history with my channel in the way it's been used in different ways. But now I've sort of simplified it a bit, and now it's a bit more standard.”

Blaze was motivated to post his own videos after watching others do reviews.

“I remember watching a bunch of tech videos and I was seeing how they always got sent free stuff, and they just had fun talking,” he said. “I've always liked talking about things. I got inspired by a bunch of different tech channels. I wanted to be unique at the same time, but I was just creating content.”

Blaze isn’t discouraged if a video doesn’t garner many views.

“You've probably seen videos on my channel that only have a few hundred views,” he said. “But even when I see that sort of stuff, it doesn't discourage me. I could be one video away from having something that absolutely goes up. Every YouTuber is one video away from possibly absolutely destroying the YouTube algorithm and blowing up and gaining a lot of subscribers and going viral.”

Blaze said a concept could strike a chord with viewers.

“It all starts from an idea,” he said. “Like those videos about Apple animation. I did not expect them one of them to surpass a 100,000 views and then the second one to surpass 200,000 views. That was wild. I remember making the first one. It just was a little idea in my head. The views every time I refreshed, they went up by a few hundred every time I refreshed the page.”

Blaze’s video spawned a sequel.

“A lot of people were saying in the comments that it wasn't really too educational and there was some misinformation,” he said. “So I made a successor to that which was a little bit longer. I've always liked to keep my videos nice and short because people don't really have that much of an attention span these days. But I made a second video and it did even better: 200,000 views, which is insane to me.”

Blaze had success with shorts as well.

“I posted this video and it was this guy that was like, get rid of your phone and get an iPad and use that instead,” he said. “So I stitched it and I was like, oh yeah, that's a good idea. I threw my phone across the room, like an old one. And then I was like, I'm using an iPad now. And that got 4.6 million views, which was very, very high. That gave my channel a bit of a boost, so that's good.”

Blaze’s long-term goal is to gain more followers.

“Just building an audience across platforms,” he said. “A lot of my audience on TikTok is a lot different to the audience on YouTube. I want to build an audience that could switch between both. But in order to do that, I need to focus more on those videos where I explain things about technology because those do really good and that is really what shoots my channel up. So I'm going to focus more on that stuff.”

Blaze plans to invest in equipment.

“I'm going to focus on production,” he said. “All my videos are recorded on my iPhone and that's literally it. But I don't really edit how it looks a lot of the time. So I should start doing that and then maybe when I start making good money from YouTube, I can get an actual camera and use that. Or if I upgrade my phone, if the camera's really good on that, I'll use that as well.”

Blaze’s career path includes helping others with their health.

“I was thinking of doing something in medical just because that stuff's always interested me, becoming a physiotherapist,” he said. “I was thinking of a doctor at first but then I really don't know about that. Maybe a radiologist or a physiotherapist. That's sort of my two options right now. But that could change. It's been on my mind for a while because that's. If I was to choose a career right now I'd go for one, something in the medical suite.”

Medicine runs in Blaze’s family.

“My mom is a nurse,” he said. “My nan is a nurse, and my uncle is a doctor. My uncle's fiancee, she is a nurse. A lot of the family is in that sort of stuff, so it interests me.”

Wanting to repeat success keeps Blaze motivated to make content.

“Maybe there could be a day where I wake up and I'm like, I don't want to do anything today,” he said. “And I think maybe I should make a YouTube video, but then I don't feel like it. And then I opened the YouTube studio and I see that a video has done really well. I need to make another video. That's my motivation.”

Blaze offered advice to aspiring YouTubers.

“Just do it, because you never know what could happen,” he said. “I was thinking that maybe my goal was a 1,000 subscribers by the end of this year. Now, I'm nearly at 16,000. I never actually ever saw myself getting monetized or over a thousand subscribers. But then I had this one video that did really well that was that short I'm talking about. And then I got 3,000 subscribers. I started posting more and then I slowly got up to where my subscriber count is now.”

Blaze now wants to keep growing.

“I feel like once I improve my videos a bit, maybe by next year, I'll get maybe 20,000,” he said. “We'll just keep going up hopefully. So my advice to someone like that wants to start, just do it because you don't know what could happen. It definitely was a surprise for me because I never actually saw my YouTube channel ever going anywhere. Not that long ago, I was on 300 subscribers, which took three years to build up. Just do it. You never know what the future holds. It could be a miracle.”

Blaze said those who are tentative about getting in front of the camera can ease into it.

“You can do faceless videos,” he said. “You don't show your face. You just show the product in hand and that's it. They could just have images on screen or videos or stock footage and talk over it. That's what a lot of channels do that don't want to show their faces. But once they build up that confidence, they can reveal their face. If someone is not feeling it, but they really want to do YouTube, but they don't want to be in front of the camera, just do voiceover videos because that works really well.”

Blaze’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@blazepate

Blaze’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/blazytinsta/