A YouTuber student is a hit by popularizing geography

With La Geozone, Théo Pissard attracts millions of Internet users with videos on geography and geopolitics Théo Pissard is 23 years old and is a student in the Master Grande Ecole at BSB. In 2016, he created the La Geozone YouTube channel, which now has more than 55,000 subscribers and nearly 4.5 million views in total.

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“At the time, I launched La Geozone based on a simple observation: I love geography but I can't really find any channels that address it on French-speaking YouTube,” he recalls. “So I said to myself at one point: if nobody does it, then I'm going to do it! ”

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Théo starts by making a video about Estonia, a country about which he gave a presentation in primary school and which has never really left his mind ever since. Moreover, he will spend the first half of 2022 there in student mobility, which in a way allows him to come full circle.

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Then he goes on to make videos, always with the aim of presenting things unknown to most people: “Countries like Georgia, Tajikistan, Belize or Chad, islands like Aruba, Pitcairn, the Islas of Bahia, the Islas of Bahia, the Islas of Bahia, the Islas of Bahia, the Aleutian Islands, the Aleutian Islands, the Scilly Islands or places like Kamchatka, Karakalpakstan or South Dakota. I like to introduce people to regions that are not really famous, and to share their history and culture.”

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Initially, it was mainly his family who watched his videos closely, but over the months more and more people were interested in them, until a particular video in 2021 was going viral. “It was a video about “5 countries that may exist in 20 years”; it exploded all my figures: I went from 400 views per day to 400 views per half hour, it was huge! ”

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Algorithm, regularity and content that pleases you first of all

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After this big blow, the audience fell a bit and it was at the end of 2021 that he decided to switch to the rate of one video per week — it was on average one every two weeks previously. “You should know that a typical video on the channel is 3 or 4 days of research and writing, then 2 hours of audio recording and 2 or 3 days of editing,” explains Théo. Thanks to this weekly rhythm but also the release of more and more qualitative videos, the channel's attendance is taking off.

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“Regularity is very important to succeed on YouTube” notes Theo. “8,000 subscribers joined my channel between March 2016 and May 2021 when I published a video every two weeks; in December of the same year The Geozone had 656,000 views, and so since then, in one year, I have gained 47,000 subscribers! ”

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“To maintain this pace over time, the recipe for me is above all to create content that we like. It is certainly necessary to feed the platform's algorithm but in any case it remains largely mysterious, even if we know that it involves the average percentage viewed of each video, the number of likes and views, comments, shares...”

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“The advantage of my videos is that they are not very complex to make: I don't do very advanced edits in particular, and overall it gives me time to study and do lots of other things. It seems important to me not to be monomaniac when you are a YouTuber, to know how to turn off your screen and not to fantasize excessively about the potential success of your channel”, believes the man who, however, now generates significant monthly income for a student.

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“Thanks to La Geozone, I was able to be invited to many very varied events, such as a masterclass organized by YouTube France, Arte and the CNC (National Center for Cinema and Animated Image), a conference on geography professions in Albi, giving a TEDx talk at KEDGE Bordeaux or even visiting institutions such as the Palace of Versailles or the Louvre. But my greatest pride is to have been selected by YouTube to be an “Edutuber” — a contraction of Education and YouTuber — and to be included in the National Education list of video makers to use for courses. We feel useful! ”, concludes our student who aims to develop his channel even more and why not make it his main activity in the future.

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Visit The Geozone

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https://www.youtube.com/c/LaGeozone

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Watch Theo's TEDx at KEDGE Bordeaux

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