Thato Rampedi’s Fight For Students
How the YouTuber is strategizing to retain varsity students as an audience
Four years ago, Thato Rampedi, a student at the University of Pretoria (UP) ventured into the unknown and started a YouTube channel. At that point, there were a few other black young South African creators on the platform but none as big as today’s youtubers are.
Being a male YouTuber 4 years ago, there were not many content options. The choices were skit comedy, public questions video, vlogs or university-centered content. After releasing only a couple of videos, Rampedi made the decision that would not only define his channel but one that he would stick to for the next 4 years.
During the time that Rampedi started YouTube and grew in popularity on the platform, the industry of black YouTube creators was also growing in leaps and bounds. At this point, students all over South Africa’s campuses were watching YouTube not for music videos or television shows but for content creators on the platform. At this point, many students had a YouTuber they watched consistently and YouTubers were now recognizable figures with hyper-visibility.
Rampedi put in work into his channel during those early days. The consistency was par none. Though he was shooting on a cellphone in the early days, the quality was decent and watchable, he was animated and colorful and included his friends in the channel as much as possible. All this and coupled with his student-centered content, it was by design that Rampedi’s audience would consist entirely of university students.
Having been at UP for 6 years, the growth of his channel and the stardom of Thato Rampedi have been owed solely to university students (and not just those at UP). I have very harsh critiques of the alignment of brands to influencers in influencer campaigns but where Rampedi is concerned, the brands that have approached him and the ones he has collaborated with have had a specific focus on students. The best example of this would be the long standing collaboration he has with Lenovo — a tech company who obviously was targeting students to sell them laptops.
Given that Rampedi could not be in university forever, what would then be of his content and the growth of his audience when he eventually leaves university and is no longer part of that community and culture?
This became a reality at the end of 2020 when Rampedi completed his studies and did not return to university in 2021. He took the decision to be a full-time content creator and was now officially divorced from student culture.
Now this is where I make some conjectures. Rampedi strikes me as a creator who is very much concerned about his subscriber count. Every youtuber cares about that number but there are creators who do not drive their content decisions based on that number. It is my observation that the decisions Rampedi makes about his channel are driven by one question: “How can I get more subscribers?”
As students are his main audience and this has been the case for his entire YouTube career, this is the audience Rampedi is most comfortable creating for — this is his comfort zone. Added to that, there will always be students in university who are need of internet-based local entertainment which means he has an ever-expanding potential audience base.
Here is the central problem — how does Rampedi remain relevant with the student population when he is no longer one of them and there is a new school of young black youtubers flooding the scene?
An old adage goes ‘keep your friends close and your enemies closer’. That is not to say the new school of young youtubers are Rampedi’s enemies but given that they were taking a very big chunk of Rampedi’s watch time, they are in that sense, his enemies.
In 2021 we saw Rampedi form acquaintanceships (friendships?) with the likes of Zille Weezy, Just Daddy G, King Oumar, Ghost Hlubi, Mammi Dearest and Dineo Dube. These are the new YouTubers that university students are watching and in order for Rampedi to direct the traffic of new university students to his channel, he had to be close to these guys.
There was a period in 2021 where every second video that Rampedi released included one of the youtubers listed above. He went on a trip to Cape Town with them and another to Botswana at the end of 2021. The new guys even convinced him to start a vlog channel which he was more than happy to do after successfully hosting all his content on one YouTube channel for 4 years.
I must add here that a (second) vlog channel is often not a great idea. This may prove wrong for Rampedi who has said in Episode 2 of his new podcast Malome’s Mic that the vlog channel is a perfect fit at this moment for him as he can create ‘less production intensive’ content without the worry of messing up his homepage. It is the early stages of Rampedi’s dual channel era, only time will tell if he will be able to divide his time, resources and attention to both channels successfully.
Some concessions must be made here. It is very possible that Rampedi found new youtubers that he formed genuine connections with and that naturally translated into content. From the videos it seems Rampedi does enjoy the company of these youtubers who are also not far in age from him. However, looking at the series of events analytically, it seems this is nothing more than a strategy for Rampedi to retain his student audience.
Ever since Rampedi gained a level of visibility on YouTube (around the 2018 period) and started getting brand collaborations (2018 -2019), he has been very strategic about his content decisions on the platform. It would be naïve of me, or anyone else, to think that this collaboration peak with the new school of YouTubers is completely devoid of business strategy.
I must be careful not to paint Rampedi as a parasite who’s just wants to leach on young unsuspecting YouTubers because that is not the case I’m making here. It is not lost on me that the new class of young youtubers have a lot to learn from Ramepdi’s 4 years of being a content creator and about 3 years of consistently working with brands. Although the relationships that are forming between him and the new guys seem to be symbiotic my point still stands that the primary reason for him putting time into maintaining these relationships is for him to retain and grow his student audience.
A culture of collaboration is one that is encouraged and celebrated not only creators but audiences as well. Added to that, collaborations have always been known to be a tool for audience sharing — there is nothing new here. Collaboration is not something new for Rampedi who, over the years, has collaborated with pretty much every sect of the YouTube scene. What is particularly different about this series of collaborations is that the people he is collaborating with all hold pretty much the same audience, and audience that Rampedi is desperate to keep.
This reading of Rampedi’s sudden friendships with the new school of youtubers may be a misreading however I am confident it is not. UK based YouTube group Sidmen have had an audience of primarily teenage boys for the last 8 year regardless of them being in their late twenties. Perhaps Rampedi can develop a new strategy to retain students. In the absence of that, he will have to face the real challenge of creating content for a new audience and I know exactly who that new audience is.
Special thanks to Moekesti from the Sibu Mpanza discord who’s comments on the draft of this article helped immensely during editing.
