Ghost Town YouTube Success

Ryan Holiday shares a story about investing in a ghost town that unexpectedly became a successful YouTube venture.

"I was one of the investors in this ghost town project. To be perfectly honest, I thought it was a terrible idea - I was like 'you're gonna lose all your money, this is not gonna work.' I was just a small token investor because I'd known Brent for so long.

I was thinking about it in terms of real estate because Brent and I had invested in real estate in Austin before. Being from California, I thought that area was like a pit. I didn't think about it as a content play, which is obviously what it ultimately became.

Brent started living in this ghost town when the pandemic hit, and it just went to the moon. He was putting out 45-minute videos weekly - television quality content for a million people using just a drone, a GoPro, and one decent Sony camera. The channel went from 0 to about 1.5 million subscribers in around 18 months. It's gotten tons of media attention and done hundreds of millions of views.

The ghost town is basically an enormous set piece to film and create content and have a brand that people care about. Right now, they're in the rebuilding phase, rehabbing different cabins, filming videos, and selling merchandise. My 5-year-old son watches one of those videos every night before bed - he's obsessed with it."