2012 - 2015
a child’s dream
On New Years Day 2012, when I was only eight years old I created my very first YouTube channel: “legofanciaran”. Lego was my special interest and inspired by the stop-motion Lego videos available on YouTube, I created my own stop motion videos with the camera I received on Christmas Day 2011. This channel was very short lived as a few months into this channel, my father whom I trusted with my login information would suddenly decide to delete my YouTube channel, starting my lifelong cynicism of authority figures.
This was only the beginning of my journey as in March of 2013, I created a new channel called “MrMarioSeries” which is actually the same channel I use to this day that would later become CiaránPixelz. This new channel rather than making stop-motion Lego videos, I made videos about my new special interest, Mario plush videos, I was inspired by popular plushtubers at the time such BigYoshiFan, SuperDentBros & TheCuteMarioBros and I made many of my own plush videos before soon delving into creating Minecraft videos as Minecraft had since replaced the special interest I had in Lego. I would make both Minecraft and Mario plush videos around this time, transforming my channel into “MrMarioMiner” which better represented the two types of content I was creating at the time.
The Rise of CiaránPixelz
2015 - 2017
By late August 2015, my interest in making Mario plush videos had begun to fade and I wanted a new username, something iconic, timeless and something more… “Ciarán”. At this point in time, I was fascinated with retro video games, partly due to the YouTube show the “Angry Video Game Nerd” so I decided I wanted to pay homage to the retro era of gaming by renaming my channel to “CiaránPixels”, however at the time many videos were getting false-DMCA’d by including the word “Pixels” due to the recently released Adam Sandler film of the same name, so I decided to change the “s” to a “z” in Pixels to avoid getting possibly receiving a false DMCA takedown and so the username “CiaránPixelz” was born, which I still use to this very day!
I leaned into more variety gaming content around this time, reviewing indie games and making video game related skit videos poking fun at the games I was playing around this time, and it was through these silly skits that I would soon develop a passion in filmmaking and acting.
The Short films era
2017 - 2020
After the YouTube Adpocalypse of 2017, YouTube added new rules regarding monetisation and I was kicked out of my YouTube network and no longer earning money on my videos, although I didn’t make much from my videos to begin with, this was heart breaking and I soft-quit YouTube as a result, no longer posting gaming videos but instead experimenting with creating short films and skits, creating many such as “The Dirt Salesman”, “How to KILL a Leprechaun” and “FEAR of CLOWNS” to name just a few. Most of these films were absurdist comedy skits that were mostly improvised with very little script writing. Although I was inexperienced, creating these films taught me the basics.
I had a lot of fun creating these silly short films even if they didn’t really have any meaning to them. I briefly wanted to pursue a career in acting as I have long been passionate about acting, I even studied film in college, taking class with people who had never made any short films of their own, let alone touched a video editor and it made me realise that by making those gaming videos and silly short films over the years, I had developed a very specific skill-set and that my true passion wasn’t in acting or filmmaking, but storytelling through creating YouTube videos. I slowly lost interest in college, seeing it as a dead-end, and my college noticed. I received a phone call one day where the head of the course I was studying gave me an ultimatum, they said I could either abandon my YouTube channel and focus only on the course as to “have a future” or I could abandon college and focus solely on my YouTube channel as to “not have a future”, Given these two options, being the rebel I am, I chose the latter, dropping out of college to pursue my dream in creating YouTube videos, it might not be the most stable future but life isn’t worth living unless you’re happy and nothing makes me happier than pursuing my dreams.
the return of CIARÁNPIXELZ
2021 - 2023
In January 2021, I revived my YouTube channel, uploading a video every week. I initially started with silly video game reviews, being inspired by Scott the Woz, these reviews would take advantage of the expertise I gained by making short films while also utilising my experience making gaming videos. In the years that I was inactive on YouTube, the platform changed completely. It was exceedingly hard to grow as a content creator if you were making variety content and having a niche was more important than ever.
I spent these years experimenting around with variety content but it was in 2022 when I made a video on Ish’s State 1.7 prison experiment that I found a new passion: Minecraft civilisation content, and these videos preformed well too! I transformed my channel from doing variety video game reviews to playing in Minecraft events and my channel for the first time in years began to grow and in September of 2022, after 10 years of making YouTube videos I reached 1,000 subscribers.
While for many, this achievement might seem small, for me this was the culmination of years and years of effort and it gave me a renewed sense that one day, I would make it on YouTube. My Minecraft content preformed consistently well, dwarfing all and any other forms of content I was making, I did still want to make variety content but I would need to do so in a way that wouldn’t take away from the success I achieved with my Minecraft civilisation videos.
2024 - PRESENT
livestreaming: Expanding horizons
At the beginning of 2024, I abandoned my 3 videos-a-week upload schedule to instead focus on another medium: livestreaming, where I started out livestreaming the second season of my Minecraft SMP, the CiaránPixelz SMP. I believed through livestreaming I could stop making low-effort videos and instead focus on bigger and higher quality videos, with the livestreams giving people their CiaránPixelz fill in-between big video releases.
In my personal life, I had started to confront my social anxiety which lead to me beginning to attend anime and gaming conventions in the Summer of 2023, meeting new people and opening several doors of opportunity, expanding the CiaránPixelz influence into real life and across the skies when in November 2025, I flew to Orlando, Florida to meet with my online friends whom I’ve known since I was making Minecraft roleplay videos back in 2016.
The most important thing to me currently as a content creator, is expanding my community and making it a safe and fun place to be, and livestreaming I’ve found to be a great tool for building one’s community. My YouTube channel has skyrocketed in watch time and subscribers where as of writing this, I currently have over 6000 subscribers, in this time I have also expanded my reach beyond just YouTube as I also begun livestreaming on Twitch, streaming on both platforms and growing one consolidated community over on Discord and Twitter (sometimes known as X).
I look forward to the future and the thought of further expanding the CiaránPixelz community!