From laughter to labour: how an Irish couple conquered YouTube with their daily lives
CORK City family, the Saccone-Jolys, are Ireland’s biggest internet stars. Their YouTube channel has 300,000 subscribers, and their daily uploads attract 140,000 views.
The 20-minute videos that Jonathan Joly posts each day are a slice of family life. Joly and his wife, Anna Saccone, go shopping, look after their baby daughter, Emilia, or play with their six dogs. Since Emilia was born, a year ago, the show has exploded in popularity.
“Last January, we were doing 30,000 views a day,” says Joly. “Now, we’re doing 140,000. When you look at the numbers — 10m views a month — it’s like ‘what the hell? How did that happen’?”
The Saccone-Joly’s YouTube experiment was a product of the recession. “I graduated university at the worst time ever,” Joly says. “It was a case of go on the dole and wait it out, or try and do something. YouTube was bubbling up in the US — there was nothing about it in Europe, at that time — and I said ‘why don’t we try and do something on YouTube?’ ”
He spent six months experimenting, uploading 50 or so videos of parodies and sketches, before simply filming his life and posting that. Within a week, the channel had 1,000 subscribers.
Most of the viewers are from the US and the UK, followed by Ireland, Germany and more recently, Australia. Popularity on YouTube is largely a viral phenomenon. “If someone in school is watching our show and they’re wearing our T-shirt, they’re going to tell their friends, and when you’re young popularity breeds popularity. Think of Friends, or the Garth Brooks tickets. Everyone wants Garth Brooks tickets because everyone wants Garth Brooks tickets.”
When Joly started posting, YouTube was a youth phenomenon. In the last year, however, Joly has noted a significant demographic shift in viewership.
The younger audience is still there, but they’ve been joined by people in their 20s, 30s, 40s and even 50s. “There’s been a huge shift in young families watching...Some of our audience are raising their children right now. Others want to relive raising their children again.”
The most popular videos centre on Emilia and parenthood; and the day the couple learned they were pregnant with their second child and the ‘gender-reveal’ for the baby. The most popular, however, remains Emilia’s birth. Joly anticipates an even bigger audience when his wife gives birth for the second time, later this month.
Sharing such a private moment with such a wide audience leaves the family feeling vulnerable, Joly says — and with good reason. Not everyone is a fan. Recently, the couple have had to go to the gardaí, twice. They received threatening letters, and then Anna Saccone’s car was maliciously damaged.
“Anna had just bought a Mercedes and it was parked outside and someone came up and keyed it from top to the bottom — it cost €2,000 to fix. They left a note saying ‘everyone in Ireland hates you, you’re a disgrace to the nation’. There are groups out there who are trying their hardest to take us down,” Joly says.
Despite these unsettling incidents, Joly has no intention of halting production. Last year, he introduced a range of merchandise themed around the show. He had intended to manage that element of the business himself, but within hours of launching the range he had taken 4,000 orders and had to close the site and outsource the business to an online shopping specialist.
Keeping the material fresh, says Joly, has become easier as the cast of characters expands. “From a production standpoint, the more characters you have in the show, the less that each individual character has to give. We have six dogs; they all have characters. We have a child; she has a character. And then both of us are characters,” he says. When the show began, Joly was constantly searching for topics to talk about, but now there are sufficient incidents to keep the cameras rolling. It’s a gruelling schedule. A new video is posted every day, and the production values are high — Joly’s previous job was in mainstream media production.
“I make a point of making sure that you, the viewer, never realise the effort involved in shooting, and we shoot on high-resolution cameras, then that footage has to be treated, it has be colour-graded, I have to sort the audio...There’s so much involved now.”
The rewards are substantial. The Saccone Jolys work with a US network and have distribution and advertising agents in LA. While Anna drives a Mercedes, viewers of the show will know that Jonathan favours a Porsche.
“I am competing with our national broadcaster and my numbers are right up there with theirs. The difference is, it’s just me.”
