How I Used Magic Potions To Get A YouTube Silver Play Button

I brewed some potions, the YouTube algorithm liked it, and next thing I knew I was unboxing a coveted YouTube silver award.

In my school's leaving ceremony, my fellow pupils voted me the "person most likely to make a million." After many told me they hadn't voted for me, not because they thought I'd invent something world-changing or build a business empire, but because they thought I'd end up as a kids' TV presenter. In a roundabout way they weren't far off. For a few years I was effectively doing a low-budget kids' show from my bedroom, just via YouTube instead of CBBC.

Did it make me a millionaire? No. It made me a multi-millionaire - in views. In total my channel has had over 30 million views. The bulk of those came from one very weird corner of YouTube... magic potions.

This is the story of how I went from uploading random nonsense to brewing ridiculous potions, and eventually getting that shiny bit of metal in the post.

Can't read? Don't worry. I tell the whole story in this video...

The Early Years Of Random Uploads

I joined YouTube in 2006, back when the idea of making a career of it wasn't even dreamt of. For years I uploaded general randomness, like spoof travel guides, silly sketches, parody music videos, anything that seemed funny at the time.

There was no strategy. No upload schedule. No niche. I'd make something, upload it, and if a few hundred people watched it, that was a good week. Sometimes I even ended up on the 'most viewed comedy videos' pages, a long-forgotten part of the site, which in the early days when the platform was much smaller was essential for content discovery.

The holy grail for content discovery back then was if you achieved the almighty honour of being featured on the YouTube homepage and I was lucky enough to be picked by YouTube's editors twice, giving my channel a big boost.

My channel ticked over for a few years. I'd managed to get about 400 subscribers - which wasn't bad when you consider the most popular channel back then had 30k subscribers - compare that to today, MrBeast has over 450 million subscribers.

The turning point came in 2014 when I decided to take YouTube seriously - or as seriously as you can when you're about to start pouring slimy green shampoo into a plastic cauldron. I treated it as a proper weekly show. Every Thursday night a new video would go up, so it was waiting for people on Friday morning. That consistency was probably the single most important thing I ever did for my channel, and YouTube rewards channels for this.

When I started again in 2014, the old videos on my channel were earning me about £10 a month in ad revenue. It wasn't much, but it was enough to buy a bit of royalty-free music, the odd stock effect, and slowly build up a toolkit.

As the views crawled upwards, so did the revenue. I reinvested everything back into the channel, and that's what eventually gave birth to my first potion.

The First Potion That Actually Worked

Before potions, I was still throwing out a mix of bits like a series of badly drawn and badly animated cartoons called 'Lodrick & Savragob', and more spoof travel guides. Then one day I decided to make a love potion.

The format was inspired by Peter Serafinowicz's BBC comedy series 'Look Around You', which featured deadpan spoof science films where you only ever see the scientist's hands conducting experiments close-up. That style appealed to me massively because I don't particularly enjoy being in front of the camera. Hands and a cauldron felt perfect.

The setup was basic. I shot the video against a piece of blue card propped up against the wall. I didn't have a cauldron or any props at this point, so I just mixed a disgusting-looking potion in a little glass dish that I called a "harpeden jar." I used whatever ingredients I could find in the supermarket that looked vaguely magical. So I had an empty condensed milk tin full of Tic Tacs, green jelly mixed with ripped up cheese slices, and squirty cream squeezed out of a "worm" I'd made from a chilli pepper.

On-screen they weren't normal ingredients, they were "ingrediments" and became belican beans, fresh Alison balm, and a sovereign worm's plantet.

The love potion went online and something odd happened. Within a week it had over 1,000 views.

For most YouTubers that's nothing. For me at the time it was unheard of. My stuff usually limped along for months before hitting 1,000. This did it in days. Even more importantly, the comments weren't just "lol" or "random". People were asking for more.

The Potion That Made Waves

The love potion proved there was something in this format, but the real breakthrough came with the first mermaid potion.

Off the back of that initial video, the comments were full of suggestions for what I should brew next. The most common request by far was a mermaid potion. So I made it.

At this point the channel was still fairly small and the budget was modest. There was no money for elaborate costumes or location shoots, so the payoff of the first mermaid potion was a giant fish superimposed in my bed. Of course, the real reason for watching was the potion itself, which this time featured crushed seashells, a kelapine heart, and sliced kumerial bandit.

That first mermaid video absolutely took off. For a channel that had been excited about hitting 1,000 views in a week, suddenly seeing tens of thousands of people pile in was a big deal. Over time that video alone went on to rack up close to four million views - not bad for a budget of about £8.

This was the moment I realised I'd accidentally wandered into a very specific niche, and more through demand rather than desire, I decided to capitalise on it and start making weekly potion videos and nothing else.

Getting To Know The Audience

At first, I didn't really understand who was watching. In my head, I was making surreal comedy that happened to involve magic potions. In reality, my audience was mostly kids, but of course I had no way of knowing this from YouTube's analytics as they were too young to sign up to the platform and were watching on their parents' accounts and skewing the stats.

Before I realised this, I'd made a few potions that were more adult in tone, including a penis enlargement potion and a "fanny magnet" potion, plus a "sex change" video that has not aged well in any sense. Once it became obvious that the channel was mostly attracting children, those videos were quickly deleted.

The whole thing gradually drifted into a kind of low-rent, DIY kids' show where the magic was played completely straight, but the language and visual gags were there for the adults who happened to be in the room. I leaned into stupid ingredient names, annoying phrases like "stir well your mixture well," and regular mispronunciations like "ingrediments" - jokes that would sail right over younger viewers' heads.

The audience were always a big part of the channel. Their suggestions in the comments constantly inspired future potions videos for the whole time I was making them. It was a symbiotic, heavily viewer-suggested content creation strategy.

From Blue Card To Potion Lab

As I started making a bit of money through YouTube's ad revenue share programme, I started being able to invest a little more in props and sets.

Early potions were shot against that same bit of blue card propped against the wall - it worked, but it was a pain. Eventually I moved to a small purpose-bought folding table with a rigid foam-board backdrop, which was much more stable while filming and easier to work with.

Once I moved out of rented accommodation and into my first home I owned, I had a bit more room and went further by building a folding wooden set. It included a fake wood-effect floor, stone-block wallpaper on the back wall, shelves with bottles and props, and a Bunsen burner with a flame I added in post. It meant I could set up a full "potion workshop" in my office/studio, shoot a video, and then fold it all away again so I could sit down and edit the video in a nice, uncluttered office.

The cauldron got an upgrade too. I retired the cheap plastic toy and bought a heavy cast-iron one, basically a real cauldron. When I hit 50,000 subscribers I gave the original plastic cauldron away as part of a competition I ran on the channel - much better than the time I tried to give away a small watering can I'd used as a prop in a video.



Although I wanted the videos to be entertaining for all, there were some jokes that I put in just for my own amusement. I've always found people's confusion as a result of some of my weirder humour quite funny, so there are a lot of visual gags and hidden references that existed purely to amuse me.

In one video, instead of using the cauldron, I poured about five litres of liquid into a tiny chalice. It just kept going and going on camera, and the chalice never overflowed. There's no real punchline, it's just inherently wrong, and that's precisely why I enjoyed it.

Soon I found I'd made all the obvious potions, so naturally, over time the videos got weirder. I made a potion that caused me to lay an egg. Another that grew a giant peach in my living room. One made fingers grow freakishly long. One grew an entire tropical rainforest in my living room.

In fact, one whole video was made for my own amusement. It was a guide to brewing a "clentifini barsayzues" potion, though what this was was never explained. The video broke from my normal format. Instead of my voice over guiding viewers through the brewing process, the voiceover and familiar background music became distorted and overlaid with the eerie sound a child crying. The usual potion ingredient captions at the bottom of the screen were corrupt, and the whole video was full of weird and unsettling visuals, such as unfamiliar occult symbols and digital glitches. Towards the end of the video, the cauldron itself began to excrete an ominous green slime, before it was revealed the cauldron was full of nightmarish, wriggling insects. I enjoyed that one.

I liked the idea that some kids were watching with parents who quietly appreciated the stranger jokes, the subtle edits and the deadpan delivery. Adults who did stumble across the channel and got the humour were always very vocal about it in the comments. It was reassuring to know it wasn't only eight-year-olds who thought it was great that I'd just put a microwave lasagne into a cauldron.

The Never-Ending Quest For Ingredients

Dragon's stomach, murtlap spikes, boomerang bark, plutonium, bellamy balm, tawnymoth weed, and elephant puss.

It was always pretty easy coming up with the names for my potion ingredients, but finding real-world items to represent them was the tricky part.

Every week I needed a fresh pile of things that could plausibly be turned into weird magical ingredients. Often it was a case of looking for unusual foods that would look strange on camera while shopping and then finding an alternative use for them later. Sometimes I'd be lucky and find something like an unusual variety of black carrot that I could as as-is.

Sometimes I'd feature those everyday items as they were, things like cat food, a microwave lasagne, an egg, squirty cream, and even a whole Christmas dinner. Other times I repurposed the items, like the time I hollowed out breadsticks and filled them with milk and green food colouring to make "dandy snaps," or painstakingly painted quail eggs to make ashwinder eggs.

All of this was funded by the channel itself. In the early days I could only afford to make a potion video once a month. As the views grew, I could move to one every fortnight, then eventually a potion every week. The more I uploaded, the more I earned, which meant I could push the visuals a bit further each time.

At my peak, I had a comfortable budget per video. The original breakout mermaid potion had been done on the cheap, but later on I went back to the idea with more money to play with and made a much more ambitious mermaid transfiguration potion that cost over £300. By that stage I wasn't just buying ingredients, I was hiring people.

One of the more surreal moments in my YouTube career was finding a performer called Melissa on the casting website StarNow and paying her to come over and sit naked in my bath as a mermaid. That video went on to pay for itself many times over and I'm sure, even to this day, it's probably still Melissa's strangest job.

Feeling Like A Real YouTuber For The First Time

One thing that really made me feel more like a real YouTuber was being invited to speak at Summer in the City, which at the time was the UK's biggest YouTube convention - a huge annual gathering of creators and fans at the ExCeL Centre in London.

It started when my Partner Manager at YouTube, Jules, emailed me out of the blue saying, "I'm putting together a panel called 'Quirky Is The New Mainstream' at Summer in the City on Sunday, would you be interested?"

I replied saying I'd have loved to come along and watch, but I was only going to be there on the Friday.

He came back almost instantly, "No, I meant... do you want to be on the panel?"

So of course I said yes.

The panel was chaired by Jules and included luxury fashion vlogger Sophie Shohet, maps expert Jay Foreman, and the Vaping Biker. We talked about why we'd started our niche channels. Well, in my case, it was more how I'd randomly blundered into it. We discussed the difficulty of collaborating when you're not part of a big network or community, and how to grow a niche channel without losing what makes it niche.

And then, not long after that panel appearance, another moment arrived that made the whole YouTube thing feel strangely legitimate... my first product placement deal.

It started with an email to the business address on my channel, "I absolutely love your YouTube channel, and I think you would be the perfect partner for a new initiative we are running..."

This could easily have been for something awful and jarring, like Surf Shark that seems to sponsor every YouTube channel today. Thankfully it wasn't. It was a genuinely nice wooden watch. As soon as I clicked the link I wanted one myself, which is a good starting point if you're going to be promoting them.

They were after a mentioned in one of my upcoming videos, and in exchange I would get a lovely wooden watch and a gift card to give away to a viewer.

If you're a fashion vlogger, that's easy. You hold the watch up, talk about it, job done. If you're a bloke making potions in a fake potion lab, it's slightly less natural. My audience would have instantly switched off if I'd just sat there talking about a watch at the start of the video.

So, to make it work I featured the watch in a video on brewing a potion to speed up time. The video opened with, "In this video I'm going to show you how to make a potion to speed up time. I'll be demonstrating the effect using this wooden watch. Stay tuned until the end of the video for your chance to win your own."

The watch appeared throughout the video on my wrist in close-up shots as I poured ingredients into the cauldron. When the potion took effect I cut to a tight shot of the watch and used visual effects to spin the hands forward rapidly.

The brand loved it and emailed to say it was the most creative integration they'd seen in that campaign. And for the record, I still love this watch and wear it regularly. Whenever I do it gets compliments due to its unusual wooden design.

Adpocalypse & COPPA

For a while, things were fairly stable. I was posting every week and had built up to around 76k subscribers and over 20 million views. In YouTube terms that's tiny, but for someone making extremely niche, kids' content, it was a bit of a win, but the easy ride was over.

In 2017, YouTube was hit by what has come to be known as the "adpocalypse." Big advertisers pulled their spending, YouTube panicked, and the knock-on effect was that healthy channels like mine suddenly started earning a lot less per view. My views stayed the same, sometimes even a bit higher than the year before, but the revenue dropped. My budget per video fell to around £30, which was a little restrictive compared to what I'd been used to. No more hiring attractive young models to sit naked in my bath.

Just as things started to stabilise after the adpocalypse, YouTube changed how it handled videos aimed at children in response to the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).

Overnight, channels like mine - which weren't technically kids' TV but were mostly watched by kids - saw revenue collapse. If a video is marked as "made for kids", YouTube disables personalised ads and a few other things that make those videos more valuable to advertisers.

As a result of this, my revenue dropped by about 80%. For a channel that required a budget just to exist, it basically became inoperable. Some YouTubers have very low costs, they just stand in front of some generic IKEA furniture with some cheap LED lights and talk, but my videos required a budget for props and special effects.

By this point I was closing in on 100,000 subscribers. I'd come this far, and that silver play button was now in sight. It sounds ridiculous, but that little metal plaque became the main thing keeping me going.

The Halloween Ending I Probably Should Have Taken

In 2019 I made what I still think is one of my best videos. It was a Halloween special with a pretty creepy ending that shifted things into darker, stranger territory. There was an on-screen message at the end of the video that would have made the perfect way to end the series. It read: "The current whereabouts of Higgypop is unknown."

By then I'd made around 130 potion videos. Trying to come up with a brand-new magical premise each week - often tied to something topical - was getting harder and harder.

Topicality was a big part of it for me. I did potions for big film releases of the time like 'Jurassic World', 'Star Wars: The Force Awakens' and 'Ghostbusters: Answer The Call'. I jumped on trends like 'Minecraft', Slenderman and Pokémon, plus the obvious seasonal stuff - Christmas, Halloween, Easter, Valentine's Day, St Patrick's Day, you name it. If it was vaguely relevant, I brewed a themed potion around it.

Eventually I hit 100,000 subscribers. In 2020 a box arrived from YouTube and inside was a silver plaque with my channel name engraved on it. That was the moment I'd been chasing since I first started taking the channel seriously. It's still one of my proudest moments and most treasured possessions.

Once the award was unboxed and safely in my possession, I had no real need to carry on making videos. There was no longer enough ad revenue in it to fund the videos, and I had really exhausted my ideas list.

On a personal note, I think it's a shame that children's entertainment always suffers in this way. Growing up I had Children's ITV, Andi Peters in the broom cupboard on the BBC, and plenty of children's programming on Channel 4. But one by one, they all either stopped or reduced the amount of content they made for kids.

Anyway, I retired the cauldron. It was placed on a shelf in my office, where it has remained ever since, a memory of that six-year period of my life.

One Last Potion

While I was writing all of this, I took a break, went out to the garage, and dug out the old potion set. It has been out there for almost six years, propped up against a wall, quietly gathering dust and memories. I cleared some space on the workbench, lifted it onto the surface, and opened it up. The whole thing is hinged so it folds open into a little room.

I was expecting the worst. I thought the stone effect wallpaper would be peeling, the sticky back plastic wooden floor would be warped or bubbling, and the whole thing would look like it had spent too long in a damp shed. Instead it looked almost exactly as it did the last time I packed it away. No curls, no bubbles, nothing falling off. It looked ready to shoot on.

Seeing it set up again on a sturdy workbench in a spacious garage made me think how much easier life would have been if I had always had a dedicated space like that. So many of those early videos were filmed on a wobbly table in my office. The garage version felt like the grown up, sensible way of doing it.

Then I had a stupid thought. "What if I do one more?"

So I did.

I decided to theme it around this blog post and made a video called 'How To Brew A YouTube Success Potion'. I went out shopping for horrible ingredients, just like I used to. This time they were loosely based on things that might help someone grow a YouTube channel. I picked up some very unappealing prunes to keep them regular at uploading videos, some fish for brain power and creativity, and a few other bits that would look nicely wrong in a cauldron.

Shooting the video felt oddly familiar. It was nice, but also very businesslike. I had made so many of these that the process came back straight away. Little things like how far to move my hand in and out of shot so I didn't make my life difficult when it came to editing, how to pour ingredients so they were visible and clear on camera, and where to leave gaps in the action for edits.

I used the same old music I always used. I cut it in the same way. Then I uploaded it to YouTube on the Higgypop channel like it was 2016 again.

Did it get millions of views like the original potions? No. Did it even get tens of thousands of views? Did it heck. A week after uploading it, as I write this, it has not even broken 100 views.

What it did get was a handful of really nice comments from people who had clearly grown up a bit since they last saw one of my potions. Things like, "I loved these videos when I was younger, I did not think I would ever see another one of these potion videos again." That alone made the whole exercise worth doing.

It was always intended as a one off. A small epilogue. The cauldron is now back on its shelf in my office. The potion lab is folded away again in the garage. I am not planning any comebacks or reboots. But for one afternoon, it was nice to step back into that little world and stir well my mixture well one last time.