How Brave Wilderness Turned Wildlife Education Into a YouTube Empire  🔗 **Source:** [How Brave Wilderness Turned Wildlife Education Into a YouTube Empire](https://share.snipd.com/episode/a548c011-bbb4-48fd-9910-53885e7c3071) ## Highlights - **Audience Reaction Was The First Growth Signal** - Audience comments were Brave Wilderness's first real growth signal before revenue. - Within a month of uploading they saw comment-driven engagement asking 'what's next?', which motivated continued uploads despite no initial income. Transcript: Coyote Peterson And what was unique is that we're uploading to YouTube and you're seeing likes and you're seeing comments. That became such an important motivator. And that's why we always look back to the audience that we've built. And we always say we are so thankful for the people that clicked, subscribed, watched, continue to watch for these past 12 years, because that was the thing that showed us, oh, we're Actually reaching an audience here. And for a lot of new YouTube creators that are out there nowadays, you realize that there's quite the reward, even if it's not monetarily based in receiving the accolades of those that Are watching your content, either sort of professing their excitement for the quality or the subject matter. And then you see that build up and within a month of us releasing probably our first six pieces of content, we saw there was actual action happening with an audience beginning to follow Us. That, of course, then gave us that motivation to be like, we've got to keep going because these consistent audience members that are writing in in the comments and that we're responding Back to are like, what's next? What are you guys going to where are you taking us? ([Time 0:10:52](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d1b2875e-5935-4610-82fc-ca7a2241b484)) - **Reinvest First YouTube Dollars Into Growth** - Reinvest early ad revenue back into the channel to scale production and hire help. - Coyote and Mark tracked YouTube earnings from pennies to dollars and waited until June 2016 to quit day jobs and hire their first employee. Transcript: Coyote Peterson It's, it's funny to talk about this stuff. And, and honestly, I love talking about it because it really takes you back to a time where people didn't understand that there was revenue to be generated and eventually the structure Of a business to be had. If you're distributing content on a platform like YouTube. And I remember when it was pennies. I remember when it became dollars. I remember the first day that we hit a hundred dollars on YouTube ad revenue. And we were like, whoa, and Mark and I would sit down and we would do calculations to be like, if we can repeat this for this number of days in a row, or we get it to this number, like we have This like graph in our office that we shared, um, where we still had our day jobs, mind you between 2014 and June of 2016, Mark and I had day jobs five days a week, nine to five. And every spare hour was spent working on the channel, uploading content, filming, editing, you name it. And it wasn't until June of 2016, where those numbers had grown to the point where we said, okay, now the equation is this plus this equals Mark's amount of money he's making, the amount Of money Coyote's making, and the amount of money for us to be able to travel and do what it is we're doing. And for us to be able to hire our first official employee. ([Time 0:12:25](https://share.snipd.com/snip/6aaa0d89-0a7a-4f26-9d9b-b03b9da0704f)) - **Invest In People Before Fancy Cameras** - Reinvest in people as much as gear to sustain a creator business. - Coyote credits longevity to funding staff and talent, not just expensive cameras, to maintain production and avoid burnout. Transcript: Coyote Peterson Say one of the things that has equated to us being able to have the longevity of 12 years worth of existence in the digital distribution space, YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, You know, the whole spectrum of it all, because you've got to really be involved in all places to build a brand. We built the success of this brand based on our dedication to reinvesting back into what the product was and who the people were that were helping us make the product. Because at the end of the day, you're keeping the sustainability in this space specifically. ([Time 0:14:51](https://share.snipd.com/snip/20c2dc5b-2da1-481a-a2ce-6be7e9135ae8)) - **Hire Editors To Prevent Burnout** - Hire editors to avoid burnout and improve storytelling quality. - Coyote edited everything through 2016, then hired editors so he could focus on hosting and higher-level production decisions. Transcript: Coyote Peterson And for people that don't make content, you don't understand how hard it is to not only find the right subject matter, get that on camera, but then by the end of the day, say, now I'm going To edit this all together, have it uploaded and released by eight o'clock the next morning. It was really burning people out substantially. And the way that we avoided that burnout, again, from the investment perspective was to bring in our first round of editors. That was the first thing that we relieved from my duties, which was, you know, hosting and also editing every episode from 2014 through basically the end of 2016. I was cutting all of the content, which is tough to be in front of the camera and then also edit yourself because nobody's going to be more constructively criticism of one's performance Than the person giving the performance. So it was a huge mental lift for me to put the editing responsibility on somebody more talented than myself when it came to cutting the story. ([Time 0:15:58](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ddfbd9dc-fa7d-400f-84f0-f363130fcb20)) - **YouTube Is One Part Of A Larger Production Ecosystem** - Coyote balances YouTube with large side projects like a grizzly bear documentary and a Bear Grylls TV series. - He also documents a potential world-record tyrannosaur dig, following skull finds to possible auction or display outcomes. Transcript: Coyote Peterson Recently i just directed a feature documentary film about grizzly bear attacks that we currently just finished through post-production and are in the process of shopping to networks, Which is a very complicated time to shop anything to anybody right now, but we won't get into that story in the state of the current industry. I've got a larger treasure-oriented television series that I'm currently developing with one of my business partners who most people probably know, Bear Grylls. We're partnered together with his natural studios division and we're working on a television show development right now. Also working on a couple of big dinosaur projects, one specifically being the unearthing of two tyrannosaur skeletons out in Montana at the moment. So that's something that is a little bit more public through social media, but we've also filmed some content around and we're now developing a documentary that is about the unearthing Of these dinosaur skeletons one of which may end up be a world record size for a t-rex which will be a huge story uh if this skeleton does in fact come out of the ground this summer and it's A world record i mean it's it's going to be worldwide news so pretty cool to be involved in all this stuff you're you're you're documenting that process is that of what they're uncovering Yep we've already found the skull and many of the teeth that belong so basically if you're talking about treasure hunting from a paleo perspective finding the skull of a tyrannosaur Is the the ultimate find in the world of fossils um and this all happened at the very end of 2025. So now as we're getting into the 2026 dig season, we're bringing in several other partners into the project and trying to determine, you know, is for sure that skeleton going to be in The ground? Finding a skull is one thing, finding the majority of the dinosaur skeleton is another. And then of course you go from dirt to display to what will then ultimately be auction house, which the market right now for dinosaur fossils is just beyond anybody's wildest expectations. ([Time 0:20:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/faa4f3b3-8b98-426b-b1d1-edad8fad20a1)) - **Animals Don't Follow A Call Sheet** - Most Brave Wilderness episodes are improvised and rely on being in the right place at the right time. - They pre-produce and contact reserves, but roughly 50% of shoots fail and they pivot on-location to capture alternative species or moments. Transcript: Coyote Peterson Such a great question and it's such a such a complex answer when you go at it from the way that we produce content and i think that's one of the things that again appreciative of the audience That i think that they've recognized over the years is we always say animals don't have a call sheet and 98 of the stuff that we do on Brave Wilderness happens from being in the right place At the right time. Now, we do do careful pre-production work. We do reach out to specific wildlife reserves or protected areas or experts working in a field so that we have to show up in some country and be like, well, hopefully we're going to wander Around today and find this species. Because it really doesn't happen like that. So what we'll do is a lot of research on many species that are in a specific area. And we go in with the best intention to be able to find and then get these moments in front of the camera. And where it gets really complicated because the world of animals is so unpredictable is that not only are you dealing with nature itself and the weather and time of year and migratory Patterns and I mean you name it something is going to come into fact or how you produce an episode but you just really have to be constantly prepared for any situation to present itself Actually right before I jumped on this podcast we were in a pre-production meeting on an episode for us that's in post production where it started with us looking for two snake species We found one we didn't find the other one then we found this giant centipede then i didn't get bitten by the centipede because we didn't know how bad it was going to be we left the scene thought About it overnight went back and we're like maybe we can find the centipede because now I do think I want to get bitten by it. Couldn't find it again. Found this other thing called a whip scorpion that was the biggest one I'd ever seen. It was like this big. And I ended up getting bitten by that. And the episode concludes with us actually answering this question. People always want to know, coyote, do you always find the animal and does it always work out? And the answer to that is no. It only works out 50% of the time. So there may be content you don't see, or we are just very calculated in the field to know how to pivot and construct a given scenario into something entertaining that can then turn into Something in post-production and be something for the audience to watch. ([Time 0:25:25](https://share.snipd.com/snip/56e245e1-f0db-4777-8ea5-b442b7f9ef0f)) - **Porcupine Quill Video Created The Channel Hook** - Coyote's porcupine quill moment created a signature series moment that surprised them. - A messy 2014 shoot with quills, flubbed lines, and DIY removal tips unexpectedly hit 100k views on <10k subscribers and changed their approach. Transcript: Coyote Peterson And, you know, porcupines have quills. And as the animal handler that we are working with brought the little porcupine out of his carrying enclosure because we wanted to put him in natural looking environment. He had these crazy leather gloves that like came all the way up to his bicep. And I was like, I thought porcupines can't shoot their quills. And he's like, oh, well, they can't. But if I've got to rearrange the porcupine, all you got to do is touch the guard hairs and then they whack their rump up and you get quilled. And we're like, that's crazy. And then he went on to explain to us the removal process of porcupine quills. And we're like, we didn't know that. And I don't think anybody else knows that. What if I got quilled and showed people the right way to do this in case their pet gets quilled by a porcupine? And the handler was like, I guess you can do that if you really want. Sounds like a horrible idea. And I'm like, let's do it. We did it. And from a production standpoint, the episode was all over the place. We had light shifts. The porcupine would never sit still. I was flubbing my lines because the porcupine kept trying to walk off the log. And then I couldn't remember what the last thing was. I said, long story short, we never thought it was an episode that was going to see the light of day, but it was several months after we filmed it. I brought it into Adobe and we started to edit it. And I was like, I think there's something to this. It was just funny to see me in pain and like my handful of quills. We put the episode out and at the time we had fewer than 10,000 subscribers. And it was our first video that made it to 100,000 views on less than 10,000 subscribers. And Mark and I kind of scratched our heads and we said, wait a minute, there could be something to this. ([Time 0:29:55](https://share.snipd.com/snip/7aa8923b-99c3-4037-87ee-def9f37bc570)) - **Avoid Lethal Venom; Plan For Allergic Risk** - Never intentionally get bitten by highly venomous snakes; prefer painful but non-lethal stings for demonstrations. - They carry an EpiPen on location and avoid rattlesnakes or king cobras, choosing species whose venom presents low fatality risk unless allergic. Transcript: Travis First of all, I still think it's crazy. But I'm sure that in some way you know that, I don't want to call it safe, but as safe as it could be for what it is, what are the different precautions you guys take well we do take a lot of precautions Coyote Peterson Right so let's let's just really quick um sort of decipher the difference between being bitten by a venomous snake versus being stung by a bullet ant for example um venomous snakes and The components that are in the venom of an animal that is looking to subdue its prey to the magnitude that a venomous snake would be using its venom for, that's something we would never Mess around with, right? Like I'd never intentionally get bit by a rattlesnake or a king cobra. That's a potential death sentence or a very expensive medical bill. What we do know about a lot of the things that I've intentionally been bitten and stung by is that while these venoms or poisons are particularly painful when subjected to you know human Nerves and whatnot unless my body has an allergic reaction there is very little chance that i'm going to die now when we started all this in all fairness i had no idea how my body was going To react so people are, I was like, coyote, does it become easier over time to get bitten and stung by things? And the answer to that, Travis is surprisingly, yes, because I've been through so much pain at this point, anything that doesn't like eclipse the highest level of pain, I'm just like, Oh, cool. I'll take that in stride and go about my day. And it's strange just how much venom I've taken at this point and have, you know, knock on wood, seemingly be okay. But I must say as a warning to anybody watching, you never know when your body's going to have an allergic reaction to the next thing. So to play that out with intelligence, we always have an epinephrine pen on location. So if I were to be stung by the next flying insect and all of a sudden my body's like, that's the one time for you to go into anaphylactic shock. We've got an EpiPen right there that will boost me up, get me to the hospital and I should be fine. But I say that now, and at some point, somebody, if I do end up having something catastrophic happen, people are going to be like, see, we told you eventually this is going to happen. ([Time 0:31:56](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b1eb0d56-0143-4315-8b75-dd6add4aa9a3)) - **Short-Form Habits Shrink Long-Form Attention** - Algorithm shifts and short-form habits compress attention and make long-form retention harder. - Coyote notes evergreen content still works, but similar videos that once got millions now may only reach hundreds of thousands due to Shorts and oversaturation. Transcript: Coyote Peterson Hard. I mean, it's as simple as that, man. Like it's changed so much. Every time that algorithm shifts it affects the organism as a whole and you know we've also been on the platform for a really long time and you can look at the fact that we've got almost 22 million subscribers and you know billions of views and our content is evergreen it goes everywhere but it is harder and harder and harder to get the audience to want to not only click On a video, let alone have an attention span to stay connected to it. And I am, again, extremely grateful for the work that we do and the opportunities that are presented to us, but it does become mind maddening to work as hard as you do and then realize that An episode where you once were getting millions of views, now you're lucky to get hundreds of thousands of views. And is that because Brave Wilderness has been around for 12 years? Probably a little bit in part. Is it to the fact that we've now got TikTok and we've got Instagram reels and we've got YouTube shorts and people are like, next, next, next, next, give me the action immediately. And we don't want to wait 10 minutes to get a resolve. Also probably a thing, but there's also so many people as in everybody that's got one of these in their hand with a camera good enough to shoot that content, edit on their phone and upload It. ([Time 0:35:57](https://share.snipd.com/snip/965e47c4-c0e7-4a67-8612-621eaa48cf2e)) - **Use Lightweight Gear For Immersive Episodes** - Simplify gear and make episodes more immersive to match current viewer preferences. - For 2025–26 Brave Wilderness switched to lightweight DJI action cams and Pocket OSMOs to create a vloggy, in-field experience. Transcript: Coyote Peterson So we've realized that while over the years we've spent insane amounts of money on keeping up to date with the highest quality gear, right now, this year, the majority of the content That we are shooting is going to be shot on DJI action cams and Pocket Osmos because they're lightweight, The audio is fantastic. The quality is incredible and it's very lightweight to carry and get into the field. And it gives you a vloggy approach. We feel the audience right now, and this is just our opinion, is that they want to feel even more immersed than they felt before with our content to feel like they're actually there on The journey. And that means not having shots that are mathematically structured or that would, you would have a cinematographer in Hollywood look at and be like, wow, you actually know your rule Of thirds with framing and, you know, depth of field and all these things that are like, you're thinking about this like a movie maker. We have to think about it as somebody who's just getting out of their car and being like, give me an experience. I want the action and I want it quick. So this year's approach for us is very much less is more. Make the gear less, make the episodes faster, try to pump more into an episode all at once, which again can be difficult because animals don't have a call sheet. ([Time 0:38:46](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4c38a8c8-fdba-4d41-9b22-4346a483ec9b)) - **Pick Evergreen Topics For Longevity** - Choose evergreen subject matter to ensure long-term relevance and repeat viewership. - Coyote contrasts animals' infinite subjects with travel's cost, recommending niches like video games that allow home production and sustained content. Transcript: Coyote Peterson Oh, that's a great question. Wow, something that is not animals, not outdoors, not adventure. Well, without necessarily picking the subject matter right out of the gate, I would first probably step back and say, okay, what are, what are people most likely to click on these days That could keep some sort of a consistency that you can keep going? And, and I'll, I'll stream a thought consciousness more in a second, but what we saw animals very early on is that animals are infinite. There are so many animals on the planet, we are always going to have a subject matter. So for me, as something that I guess I would be interested in, in parallel to the world of animals, honestly, would probably be the immersive state that video games are transcending Into, and how those create extreme watch time. Now, me personally, I'm not much of a video game player, but if you were to come to me and say, you've got no money, but what is something that you could do from the comfort of your own home, Set up cameras around you, record what it is that you're doing, and also take somebody on a journey into a space where you would be able to capture their attention and hold that runtime, It's kind of been the staple since the start of YouTube, it being the video game realm. And as we're advancing in technology and immersive world video games like the Zelda Breath of the Wild, there's a new Jurassic Park game that's getting ready to come out that they've Been hyping up for years, getting somebody entrenched into that world. And if you're good at playing what that game is, that's going to keep the audience hooked and whether you're just playing for the fun of showing them the adventure or you're playing and Educating them with tips almost like that old nintendo call-in game line most people probably don't remember that i remember i remember my neighbors had it back in the day i didn't have Nintendo we used to call be like we can't get past level seven of super mario brothers what's the code for the up and down with the warp zones, you know? And like, they would help you through that. Like give people that may not be good at the game an education of what you know. And that just ups the value of the entertainment. So I would probably go that route because what I can tell you about producing wildlife content is it is expensive. Anything that requires you to travel to a distant location puts you in airports. It puts you renting establishments for, for lodging. It comes with vehicles. It comes with hiring help on the ground to make sure that you're safe within countries. It means that budget goes and grows versus cool. I've got a world that I can bring you from the comfort of my own basement or man or lady cave or your bedroom, whatever it might be to give somebody that content that you can film and literally Turn from the video game screen to the editing screen and be like this to upload to rinse and repeat. That's how I think you could make it this day. But it's got to be what is the game and is it going to be super entertaining and how do you sustain the evergreen nature and longevity of it that is one of the biggest keys for anybody watching Or listening pick something that is evergreen because that then makes your content relevant not only today but a month from now or two years from now, you can go back in the brave wilderness Library and watch an American badger episode that we did in 2014. And let me tell you what hasn't changed between now and 2014. Anything I could tell you about an American badger, the animals, the same, the facts are the same. The only thing that changes is my beard is grayer. I probably have less hair on my head and the cameras have changed. You know what I mean? Like that's it. ([Time 0:40:55](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e1b670cd-6b14-4d59-b9a3-6774fac1c498))