Anthony Padilla claims leaving Smosh still pains him: \u201cIt was sad to let that go\u201d YouTube: Anthony PadillaAnthony Padilla was once the face of Smosh, YouTube\u2019s first real breakout success. However the star split from the group he made in 2005 twelve years later, just a year before owners Defy Media went under. Nearly five years on, there\u2019s still a hole there \u2014 especially given how it ended. Smosh was everywhere during YouTube\u2019s early days. The duo of Anthony Padilla and Ian Hecox made one of the most successful brands in the platform\u2019s history thanks to her unique sketches. However things weren\u2019t sunshine and roses forever. After Ian and Anthony sold Smosh in 2011 to Defy Media, the brand Padilla made slowly stopped reflecting his goals. After six years he finally split, leaving with a sizable check but with his childhood website behind him. At the time, Padilla spoke about how things had changed since the iconic brand was taken over by Defy Media. He explained how his creative decisions were \u201cbeing put through a filter\u201d and were silenced by higher ups if they weren\u2019t \u201cappropriate for the Smosh brand\u201d as they saw it. He later opened up after Defy Media closed down in 2018, speaking more publicly about his turmoil under that ownership. \u201cThey screwed over my friends, and I can\u2019t keep faking that I\u2019m cool with Defy Media like I\u2019ve done for so long,\u201d he said. Five years on, and Padilla still thinks about how it all went down: \u201cThey came to us and we\u2019re like \u2018we will take care of the website\u2019 and no longer have that stress to deal with,\u201d he told Trash Taste of the Defy deal. \u201cThey had this huge plan of all these things they were capable of and how they had the infrastructure to allow us to do all of our dreams. We had these huge lofty goals, and they said they had all of that on lock.\u201d When Ian and Anthony sold Smosh to Defy Media they did it for no cash \u2014 only stock. Because the company never went public, they never saw any of that money. It was a silly decision in retrospect, Padilla admitted, but things started out okay. They had a salary, albeit not a huge one, and Defy promised the world in terms of growth. The cost was losing his creative freedom over the brand, and that ended up being a bigger cost than Padilla wanted to pay. \u201cI did give that control away and everything was not how I would have done it, so I ended up working double time to teach them how to do the things but then they were rehiring,\u201d he explained. \u201cThe way bigger companies work is you\u2019re never building a 1-on-1 relationship with someone who \u2018you teach them one and they keep going with that thing\u2019. You\u2019re reteaching and reteaching until \u2018let\u2019s abandon the website\u2019 and then it was us abandoning a lot of the things I had a dream of growing because I was not able to keep that up and do the videos.\u201d The steps to Anthony leaving were gradual \u201cover a long period of time\u201d. Certain factors did exacerbate the problems though. One was over the Smosh Food Battle game, which was \u201cso forced and rushed\u201d by management in order to capitalize on the trends of 2013. \u201cThey had just seen the success of other people who had done fundraisers for games through Indiegogo, and they raised $250,000 for these games which were mobile games that you could also play on the computer and it was a really cool thing with all these inside jokes from the community. They said \u2018that\u2019s cool you do that\u2019 and we said \u2018we don\u2019t have a concept for our game\u2019 and they said \u2018we will figure it out later, just raise some money\u2019. \u201cWe said we needed to have something to pitch to people, and they said just come up with the idea then. I came up with the idea, Ian also, and they were like \u2018cool you\u2019ve got the idea let\u2019s do it\u2019 and we were like \u2018we need to have concept art, we need to show a build of the game, we need to be able to show what we want to do with this thing!\u2019. \u201cAll we were able to launch with was this concept art, and launching this campaign, incentivizing your fans to give you money \u2014 it did not feel right to me but I felt backed up into a corner and that\u2019s one of the things I regret from my time there. \u201cThere was some shady stuff about the way they contributed to certain donations to inflate the way certain things looked. That\u2019s all I\u2019ll say about that but it made me feel so weird about it. I was like \u2018I need [to get] out as soon as possible\u2019.\u201d The related segment begins at 1:00:24. That feeling of being \u201cbacked up into a corner\u201d never left Padilla and after the company slowly tried to take over his social media \u2014 successfully getting his Facebook page but nothing else \u2014 he needed to leave. It did allow him to go back to his roots as just an independent content creator, making videos for fun like he did from his Sacramento home in the early days. \u201cI realized the way they treated that was the same way they were treating me and all the other people,\u201d Padilla said. I didn\u2019t foresee anything but I ended up getting out a year before they ended up closing down. \u201cIt really got me thinking, could I do something on my own outside of this brand I had created? I had made that brand when I was 14 years old as a little shitty website, as a forum for my group of friends at school to go on and hang out. We were either talking on AIM or going on this website. Despite how it ended though, there was one overwhelming feeling. \u201cIt was sad to let that part of me go.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Anthony Padilla claims leaving Smosh still pains him: \u201cIt was sad to let that go\u201d YouTube: Anthony PadillaAnthony Padilla was once the face of Smosh, YouTube\u2019s first real breakout success. However the star split from the group he made in 2005 twelve years later, just a year before owners Defy Media went under. Nearly five […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44437","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44437","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44437"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44437\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44437"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44437"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44437"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}