Full Chat podcast: FortNine star Ryan Kluftinger on living his YouTube motorcycling dream

One of the world’s biggest motorcycle content creators is the latest guest on Full Chat as the popular podcast goes international.

Ryan Kluftinger, better known as Ryan F9, is the face of the hugely successful FortNine YouTube channel. It has over two million subscribers and produces a wide array of videos around machines and equipment that has helped put motorbiking in Canada on the map.

Co-hosts David Prutton and Iwan Thomas couldn’t hide their excitement about being joined by the online sensation, whose appearance you can watch in the video below.

Ryan F9 shares fascinating insights on his FortNine journey

The popular platform is powered by FortNine, Canada’s largest online powersport retailer. Its decision to use YouTube as part of its marketing strategy has allowed Kluftinger to produce a consistent stream of videos as his job – a career he still can’t believe he calls his own.

“We make videos about motorcycles, that’s pretty much the brief,” he told our show.

“As long as it’s entertaining to riders, or useful or educational, then we’re interested in it. Our parent company FortNine is much like Sportsbikeshop in the UK or RevZilla in the States, it’s like an e-commerce retailer. But they pretty much don’t care what we do on the content side. From day one they were just like: ‘Make stuff that you love and our name’s on it and we’re happy about that’ so we have a lot of freedom.

“I don’t think we ever thought it would grow to the extent it did. In the early days it was just like an SEO branding project. FortNine used to be called Canada’s Motorcycle. Now you don’t switch the name of an e-commerce company overnight, as much as you want to, because Google will just say ‘aah, we don’t know what this is’ and no one will ever find your business again.

“We knew we wanted to rebrand, so we made a channel called FortNine on YouTube six months in advance of switching the website over. That was all the function that it had to play but of course we were willing to ride the wave as far as it carried us. When the channel started to do well my job suddenly turned into a dream job so I didn’t want to leave that.

“The fortunate thing about YouTube, and it’s cool for companies, is that you have a marketing initiative that also earns money. Channels are profitable, they earn money off AdSense, affiliate commissions and sponsorships, so pretty soon we had this ship that floated itself. That justified hiring more people, upping the production value further, maybe travelling further to make a video, so at this point we’re robust enough to steer this thing where we wanted to go.”