How to Dad, Jordan Watson, on influencing in NZ: ‘I can’t live off my YouTube money’

Jordan Watson, aka How To Dad, gets into the nitty-gritty of life as an online star.

Jordan Watson is not wearing his signature How to Dad uniform of military green T-shirt, stubbies and jandals when he joins me at a small cafe, although the outfit is pretty close. Today, the tee is black.

Even in his hometown of Pāpāmoa in the Bay of Plenty, target="_blank">where he lives with wife Jody and daughters Mila, Alba and Nala, it counts as a relaxed look. But Watson is a relaxed dude. A few people recognise him when he walks in before their faces crumple into a quizzical look as they try to place him. When I order our drinks at the counter, coffee for me and a hot chocolate for him, the barista excitedly asks, “Is that How to Dad?”

This is how Watson is known. Not by his name, but by that of his YouTube channel. He’s one of Aotearoa’s small number of legitimate social media stars. His humorous parenting advice channel How to Dad has a whopping 1.37 million subscribers on YouTube and a massive 2.4 million followers on Facebook.

“For anyone who thinks a million subscribers means that you’re a billionaire, I can’t live off my YouTube money,” Watson says.

But before getting into the nitty-gritty financials of being a social media star let’s talk about how Watson got here. How to Dad was, essentially, a fluke.

“I was home with my 4-month-old and made a video for a friend. I was in stubbies and a bush shirt. That’s now become the famous uniform but it was just my casual weekend attire. There was no plan of, ‘Hey, I’m making a viral video,’ it was just, ‘I’m bored, I’m gonna make a funny video.’”

Jordan Watson with wife Jody and daughters Nala, Alba and Mila. Photo / Jordan Watson

What he created was an instructional video for new dads. Delivered in an exaggerated blokey way and running under a minute it shows Watson demonstrating various ways to hold a baby. It starts sensibly enough but quickly spirals into absurdism featuring unorthodox holds like “box of beers”, “baby Jesus” and two variations of “the rugby ball hold”.

His mate posted it on his Facebook page. And then his mates posted it. And then their mates posted it. A week later the video had clocked up millions of views. By accident, Watson had made his first viral video.

“Me and my wife sat down and were like, ‘What should we call this? Let’s commit to making a funny little one-minute video every weekend with the kids and see how it goes.’ That’s when we started How to Dad. We’d committed to posting a video every Monday but it would get to three o’clock on Sunday afternoon and we’d be like, ‘Oh no we haven’t done a video.’ But that looseness worked with it. It wasn’t overly produced. It was just us having fun.”

This was back in 2015. He thinks he was the first in the “comedy dad” parenting genre on YouTube and had a relatability because of the DIY aesthetic and the fact that while he was making funny videos about, say, changing nappies, it was clear he did actually change nappies. This, he reckons, meant it wasn’t just dads getting a chuckle out of his videos. Mums were keen on them too.

A still from one of Watson's early videos. Photo: How to Dad / YouTube

Despite his literal overnight success, Watson was initially reluctant to give up the security of his job working behind the scenes at Three. It wasn’t until the tail end of 2017 that he finally took the plunge into full-time content creation.

“As soon as you have a video go viral, your inbox fills up with random things. Ninety-nine per cent of it is crap. But there are also cool opportunities for travel and working with brands. You can make money. The hardest thing is figuring it out because there’s no manual to becoming an overnight internet sensation. We didn’t want to be a one-hit wonder.”

With Auckland’s house prices way out of control and Watson realising he could How to Dad anywhere, he and his family bought a home in the Bay of Plenty in 2019.

“My only regret is the lack of Supercheap Autos, Bunnings and Mitre 10s,” he says in classic How to Dad fashion. “I think Tauranga constantly forgets it’s a massive city.”

Then, with an air of genuine bewilderment, he muses, “How can you only have two Repcos in this whole place?”

Watson’s parenting style is far different from that of his own dad. He grew up in Te Kauwhata, population 1500, a small township north of Huntly that’s surrounded by dairy farms.

“My dad was very strict. Not a good communicator. Just a classic, small-town rural dad. Watching him fix the ute on a Sunday was hanging out with Dad. He wouldn’t say, ‘Come and help me fix the ute,’ I’d just sit there watching him fix things,” Watson recalls. “But he was awesome with adventures. We’d go on family holidays, camping at different places. That was his way of teaching, his dad style; ‘I’m going to teach you stuff.’ I learned how to DIY from watching him.”

These skills served him well when he moved to Auckland and entered the TV world. His ability to use a drill and knock up cheap props using basic materials dazzled his colleagues, quickly making him an essential part of the team.

“I’d go home and tell my dad and brother and they’d be like, ‘What? You can’t do s***!” he laughs. “I’d say, ‘Yeah, but up there I’m amazing.’”

While there he was constantly looking over the shoulders of everyone he worked with, learning how to film, edit and be on screen by watching others. When How to Hold a Baby went viral, he had the skills to capitalise on it. But ask him the secret to creating a viral video and he shrugs.

“That’s the thing. You can’t plan it. I’m just really lucky,” he says. “We jumped on it and we’re doing as much as we can with it. If someone said, ‘Now Jordan, you’ve had eight years of YouTube experience, quietly and anonymously make a second channel and go viral,’ I couldn’t do it. Every time I make a video I think is gonna go big, it bombs. And the ones I think are pretty bad go big. You never ever know. It’s so hard.”

Clint Roberts and Jordan Watson share the best and worst things about having kids in their podcast The Parenting Hangover.

At the heart of social media success is the mysterious force of the algorithm. This unknowable, computer-powered set of rules separates good content from bad to serve up videos it believes you’ll enjoy. The problem is that every platform has its own algorithm. And these twains seldom meet.

“A video on Facebook will get 20 million views and that same video on YouTube might only get 100,000 views,” he says. “The people at YouTube and Facebook, say, ‘The algorithm’s fair. It just likes good content,’ but my argument is, ‘How did I get 20 million views here and nothing there?’ Then it will flip the other way the next week. I’d rather the content do good or not do good on all of them. That would make me understand it. You’re constantly going, ‘I don’t know what to do.’”

So he decided not to worry about it. The goalposts of the various platforms constantly move, platforms keep changing their algorithms to prevent people from gaming the system. Better just to go with the flow, keep putting out videos on a regular schedule and look for opportunities where you can.

“When my first video got a million views I was like, ‘Holy s***, we’re millionaires!’” he laughs. “We’re waiting for the YouTube cheque, they pay once a month, and it came through and I made $1100. I was like, ‘How is this a million views? Surely it’s more than that?’”

Readers, it is not.

“A million views on YouTube works out to about a grand in your pocket,” he says. “And I’m not getting millions of views on everything. I couldn’t live off my YouTube, that’s for sure.”

The only way to sustain the job is to do sponsored content. Knowing how divisive this is with viewers, Watson has been incredibly selective about the brands he works with saying he’s turned down “a crap ton” of offers over the years.

“My wife definitely gets a bit annoyed at me when I’ve said no sometimes. But you don’t want to end up feeling like you’ve sold your soul or changed yourself completely,” he explains. “The dream would be to make enough from my own videos that I don’t ever have to do brand stuff ever again. But you’ve got to have all your fingers in all the pies. I need to bring it all together to make a manageable income.”

He’s constantly looking for more ways to get more fingers in more pies. He’s recently launched a podcast with ZM’s Drive host Clint Roberts called The Parenting Hangover, a candid weekly discussion about modern parenting, and started a jandal brand called Golden a couple of years ago.

“If something falls over I can throw more energy into one of these other products I’ve got under way and still survive.”

In many ways, content creators are this generation’s rock stars. Forget guitars or drums, most kids these days want their own channel. Just a few days ago, while wheeling his wheelbarrow around to a mate’s to pick up some grass squares for his lawn, a couple of kids yelled out at him. They wanted his autograph.

“It was one of my first autographs ever,” he grins.

He signed his name on some paper before realising that Jordan Watson meant nothing. So he wrote How to Dad beside it. Unsure what to do next, he drew a big thumbs up.

This may be a prime example of “Dad cool”, but the teens were stoked.