Q/A with UrinatingTree

UrinatingTree is a sports-based Youtube channel founded by Steve Linkowski in 2010. Starting as an unknown video game reviewer and bartender, Linkowski’s historical videos on sports franchises and weekly uploads that cover the NFL season jolted him to over 500,000 subscribers. In preparation for my upcoming article series, I had the chance to interview the fellow yinzer about his early years on the expanding platform.

How did your career as a sports content creator start? 

  The first sports video I remember doing, I expected it to be a one-off. I mainly was looking at the Cleveland Browns at the time, but I remember trying to find a video that I had watched a while ago and it was a re-upload. I believe it was called “Only in Cleveland”. It covered the history of the Browns after “The Move” and it goes through pretty much everything, but it only goes up to the beginning of the Haslam era. So there was so much more that happened after the Haslam era that wasn’t really talked about until that point. I just started doing a few random bits here and there, and I’m just in there like, you know what, why don’t I just do a video on it? 

If that video was supposed to be a one-off, what pulled you back into sports content? 

  What ended up happening was I waited a couple of weeks, still doing some random stuff, and then Jacksonville completely bottoms out. They fired their head coach, Gus Bradley. They’d just gone to complete s***. Their defense was solid. I think they were in a four-and-twelve stretch. If I remember correctly, this was the year before “Sacksonville”. So I’m thinking, “Man, this team is terrible.” Now I’m just in there thinking, “why don’t I do a video on it?” It aged poorly in a year. I remember people saying that and then it aged really well after that.

Which video was your huge break-out on the YouTube platform? 

  It was “The Haters Guide to the 2017 NFL playoffs”. At the time I thought, “Okay, you know what, I’m doing a few sports videos and I will do it as an experiment.” I was expecting maybe a couple [of] hundred views, get a couple of [of] comments telling me how much I suck, that sort of stuff. 

  The video ends up getting like a couple thousand to ten thousand views. The moment I remember though was that I had 550 subs, which was slowly growing [at] 10 or 20 subs [a day]. The next morning, I woke up and found 650 [subs]. I was like, “wait, what?” When you gain 100 subs in a day, it feels surreal. Like, did that just happen? 

After that video exploded, what was the transition like going from casual uploads to a career, even when you were bartending? 

  It was a little difficult to get used to it because when you start making it on a casual level, you don’t think about the production quality. You don’t think about a lot of what goes into a video. But then when you are doing it [on] a weekly basis and you know you have such a large audience, you start to think about, “Okay, maybe I need to do this professionally, maybe I should do this or that or X or Y.”

After five years of content creation, Linkowski unique brand expanded in different ways. He is a part of the group “Clickbait Sports”, which includes fellow stalwarts of the sports YouTube platform such as Tom Grossi and Brandon Perna. Notably, he helped host an exhibition baseball game that wrangled up a multitude of sports content creators. To explore Linkowski’s channel, click here.