What a YouTube audience is, and isn’t, worth when you start a business. By Denver Jackson, founder of CalledItMate.
When people hear that I run a football YouTube channel with around 60,000 subscribers, they usually assume that launching a business on the back of it was easy. Six months after launching CalledItMate, a free live football prediction game that I built on my own, I can say that an audience is worth a lot, but not in the way most people think.
Where did the idea come from?
I host live watchalongs on my channel, including Bolton Wanderers games. During matches, the chat would fill with predictions about who would score next and how the game would finish, and by full-time nobody could remember who had called what. CalledItMate grew out of that. Fans call the next goalscorer, the next team to score and the final score while a match is live, every prediction is graded the moment a goal goes in, and each week the top two players on the leaderboard win real cash prizes. It is free to play, with no entry fee and no betting.
Since launching on 21 March 2026, 1,184 players have signed up and made more than 98,000 predictions.
What is the audience worth?
The first thing an audience gives you is honest feedback, fast. When something in the game confused people, my live chat told me within a minute. For a one-person business, that is worth more than any survey.
The second is an understanding of attention. Making videos teaches you that people decide in seconds whether something is for them, so I designed CalledItMate so that you can make your first prediction in a couple of taps.
The third is a reason to take trust seriously. My name is on the channel, so if the game ever felt unfair, it would cost me far more than a few users. That is why it is free to play and why the prizes are paid in real cash.
What isn’t it worth?
An audience is not a growth plan. Subscribers watch videos; that doesn’t mean they will sign up for an app, and video views rise and fall with the algorithm. Paid adverts taught me a similar lesson: they brought sign-ups, but not players who stayed. The players who have tended to stick around are those who found us by searching, including through AI tools such as ChatGPT.
What would you tell another small business owner?
Build the thing your customers are already doing. My viewers were already making predictions in the chat for nothing; I simply gave it a home, rules and a prize.
Expect the unglamorous work to take most of your time. A new feature can take a weekend, but making a live product reliable when several matches are running at once and a data source drops out takes months.
And treat any audience you have as the door, not the house. It can bring people in, but only the product will keep them coming back.
Next up for CalledItMate is the iPhone app, and in the longer term I’d like to take it beyond football.
About Denver Jackson
Denver Jackson is a football YouTuber (@Denveloper) and the founder of CalledItMate (calleditmate.com), a free live football prediction game with weekly cash prizes, which he built himself and launched in March 2026.