Is this a good video? What if people think it’s stupid? Will my friends laugh at me?
These thoughts raced through Anton Andersson’s head right before he pressed “upload.” How would people react to his first-ever TikTok video? Probably with ridicule and criticism, he figured. After all, had no idea what he was doing. All he knew was that he loved table tennis and that he wanted to keep it in his life for as long as possible.
He also knew that this would be scary. Not so much the content production process, but the potential aftermath of posting a bad video. That’s why he would post this video to TikTok and not Instagram. At least with TikTok, that criticism wouldn’t come from his friends and family. Nobody he knew followed him there. And in the back of his mind, he hoped that none of them would.
“It’s a little bit embarrassing to post content [at first],” Andersson told Table Tennis TV, “Especially if you make ‘cringe’ content or try [too] hard.”
But if creating content was the only way he could keep table tennis in his life, then that’s what he was going to do. The money he was making as a professional wasn’t enough to sustain a living, and his chances of competing at the highest levels weren’t looking so good. He would probably have to devote his life to something else, something that involved using his degree in human behavioral science, and not his passion for table tennis.
That would have been a shame. Table tennis was all Andersson had known since he was eight. Chasing his professional table tennis dreams took him all across Europe, from Switzerland to Denmark to France to Norway, and he even found time at the table during his studies at Högskolan Kristianstad.
That’s what made this reality so hard for Andersson to accept. For the first time, there was a real possibility that his life would continue onward without the one thing he’s dedicated it to.
“When I had around one year left of education, the reality starts to kick in [that] you need a job soon,” Andersson said. “And that's not a reality I like, mostly because that means I cannot play table tennis when or where I want.”
That’s why Andersson had to press the upload button. The alternative was having no reason to devote a second of his time to table tennis. So he did. Andersson posted his first video to his new TikTok account, refusing to let his favorite sport go so easily.
From that video on, the content kept coming. Sometimes Andersson would record a match. On other days, he would record his training sessions. And if something interesting happened, he’d share it on his TikTok account. The videos did pretty well, too. The reception from his newfound followers wasn’t as critical as he anticipated it would be. Most importantly, he had fun with every post he made. At that moment, that’s all it was supposed to be. If this content creation thing worked out, great! But if not, he was okay with it being little more than an outlet for table tennis, something he could do whenever he wasn’t working.
Whenever he wasn’t working, he was probably working on his videos. He made sure to record something before going to bed. He spent his bus rides and even his bathroom trips editing those recordings on his phone. If he wasn’t making a video, he was studying his analytics, learning how to make those videos better. How many people watch after the first three seconds? Why were people clicking off if so? Andersson devoted at least a small portion of every day to finding those answers, just as he’s done with table tennis for most of his life.
“I have worked on it every single day,” Andersson said. “Then some days it's maybe 30 minutes, some days it's maybe 10 hours, maybe, or a little less.”
The hard work paid off. Andersson earned around 500 followers on TikTok by December 2022, and he was impressed with how much he’d already accomplished. That’s when an interesting video idea came to his mind. The concept was simple: Andersson would perform three strokes at the table, two of which were completely legal. The other was explicitly forbidden in the rulebook, and he would leave it to his audience to guess which of his three moves that was. If his plan succeeded, the number of comments he would receive from viewers would indicate to the algorithm that many people liked this content, encouraging platforms to push it to more people’s “For You” pages.
With that plan in mind, he posted that video for the world to see. And people watched it. And then more people watched it. And then even more people watched it.
Until that video had been viewed 15 million times.
So many table tennis fans flocked over to his TikTok account, hoping to correctly figure out which of the three strokes Andersson made was illegal. He wanted to keep those fans coming back. So he turned that video into a series, hiding a different illegal move each time for his new audience to find. That new audience of roughly 10,000 followers tried to solve Andersson’s puzzle every time.
“I knew it was a safe zone to always go viral,” Andersson said.
As the "views" count on Andersson’s videos climbed higher, he realized he had something special on his TikTok. But why limit that success to just one social media platform? Andersson didn’t see a reason not to. A new idea popped into his head: he should create a YouTube channel and an Instagram account dedicated to posting more of these videos, with the hopeful goal of expanding his new audience.
So that’s what he did. He had two new social media accounts. He had a plan to keep posting on them. What didn’t he have? A name. And that was tough to figure out at first. It had to be something catchy, snappy and table tennis related … but he just couldn’t figure it out. Andersson and a friend got together for a brainstorming session, and together they came up with a variety of names before narrowing them down to about 10.
One of those 10 stood out most to Andersson: PingPongMaestros.
Just like that, PingPongMaestros was born. Andersson posted his table tennis videos to his new YouTube and Instagram accounts just as he did on TikTok. And like TikTok, he grew a large following on those accounts by creating table tennis videos and having fun doing so.
Soon, all three of his platforms were full of content. And not just his illegal serve series, either. He actually grew tired of making those videos after a while; there were only so many illegal moves he could show off before running out of pages in the rulebook. Though many fans came for that series, they stayed for everything else. They began watching his educational and challenge videos with just as much engagement as the series that made him viral.
As of this article’s publication, PingPongMaestros has 543,000 subscribers on YouTube, 331,000 followers on Instagram, and 215,000 followers on TikTok. Andersson is now one of the top table tennis creators in the world, a partner with Table Tennis TV, and a global ambassador for the sport he loves, all of which he never could have imagined when he posted his first video. Those fears he had? None of them came true. His family and friends support the work he does, and the hundreds of thousands of new fans he has overshadows any negativity he may face.
“I think it's some kind of social anxiety … that people think what you're doing is embarrassing or ‘What is he trying to do?’ or ‘Why is he doing this?’” Andersson said. “I think everyone has this very wrong view of the world that other people actually care about what you're doing.”
But the best outcome of all? Table tennis is still a mainstay in Andersson’s life. It took him a while, but Andersson eventually learned how to monetize his content. Now, the 28-year-old has a career that earns him enough to make a living, and he never had to give up table tennis to achieve it.
Andersson hasn’t forgotten about the time when that didn’t seem possible. He still remembers the harsh words he imagined would appear in his comments section, and all of the worst-case scenarios that made it so hard for him to upload his very first video.
And after the millions of views he's earned since he first pushed that “upload” button, there’s only one thing that Andersson regrets:
He should have started this amazing career sooner.
