So I started my channel @reysu around December of 2022. It’s been over a year now and I just recently hit a sub milestone so I wanted to write a blog post detailing some of the things I’ve learned on this pretty interesting journey I’ve been on.
Subscribers don’t mean shit
One of the things you’ll quickly learn if you decide to start YouTube is that although subscribers is a useful metric, it’s not everything. In the beginning it’s easy to make that the number one thing that you focus on, because it’s the thing that’s right next to your name after all.
If I could give one piece of advice for someone starting out making videos, it would be to ignore metrics. I’m sure if you’ve taken any YouTube course or listened to any guru talk about YouTube growth, they always make it about improving your “metrics”, like retention, subscribers, likes, ctr etc.
But these guys often have forgotten what it’s like to be a truly new, niche channel with no following from anywhere, no instagram, twitter, or newsletter to push views.
You’ll post a video that will literally get 0-10 views, and most of those views will probably be yourself refreshing the page.
When you have such low signal, it’s not really worth optimizing based on any data YouTube can give you. Instead you should improve your videos based on your own taste, or direct feedback from people you trust. Having a group of creators in the beginning can be helpful to give each other feedback, but don’t fall into the trap of circle jerking too much about YouTube optimization, just focus on making great videos (whatever you might define that as.)
Not all lemons need to be squeezed
If you’re an educational creator, quickly after you start getting some traction or even just after one viral video, you’ll get a lot of inbound from different brands, agency owners, and freelancers wanting to work with you.
Now you have the attention, so naturally there will be people looking to squeeze money out of the attention you have gathered.
With agency owners, it might be tempting to sign up to whatever they’re trying to sell you, like a zero involvement way of increasing your income by whatever amount per month. But if there’s one thing I learned is that just because there’s a lemon on the table doesn’t mean you need to squeeze it.
Brands might be hitting you up left and right and you might be tempted to hit them all up so you can quit your job immediately. But imo it might be worth putting that off for the longer term pay off of your personal brand itself. By not making it a monetary transaction between the viewer and the creator, you create more trust and authenticity, which is why people watched you in the first place.
If you have a full-time job you don’t hate, maybe continue working there until just the AdSense money can pay your basic expenses. Then you have the freedom to choose the brands you actually want to work with and sell the products in the way you find the most genuine and fulfilling.
Be careful about following the algorithm
Chances are, at some point you will have a video do significantly better than the other ones, like maybe even 1000x more views than your last video. It might be tempting to immediately follow up with something that like the “Finding Dory” to the “Finding Nemo”, but you might be walking down a path you didn’t intend to.
If you make a follow up video, you’re almost guaranteed a % of the views of your “viral” video, which could still be 100x more than your last video, but the tradeoff is that you’re niching down your channel into that video.
Let’s say you have a channel that’s about fitness and you make a video titled “5 Best Types of Tea for Optimal Focus”, and it get’s 100,000 views. You immediately follow up with another video “5 Best Types of Coffee Brands for Optimal Focus” and it gets 30,000 views. Success!
The person that watched both videos might now feel like “huh, this is a cool channel on types of tea, let me subscribe”. But then when you post a video on fitness, they probably won’t click on it. This leads to negative signal towards the YouTube algorithm, where YouTube is getting data that your audience doesn’t enjoy your videos.
The more you chase the algorithm and the more you chase getting a viral video, the further you stray away from authenticity and most likely the more you stray away from making the videos you wanted to make in the first place. Veritasium has a great video on this.
If it’s the type of video you want to make that blows up, then definitely go all in and keep making that. A follow up on a random viral video is still fine imo, but it might be better to do that follow up 5 videos later versus the next video right after so you aren’t heavily niching into that video.
Once your channel gets bigger this matters less, because 1. you have a library of videos and 2. you have an actual subscriber base. But when you’re a small channel that gets a viral video, that viral video is going to heavily skew the data associated with your channel.
Slow growth could be better than viral growth
In relation to the above point, one of the realizations I had is that slow growth might actually be better and more preferable than sudden explosive growth. You’ll often see those videos talking about how someone reached 100k subscribers in just __ days or how they got x views with their first video, but you’ll quickly find that attention gathered quickly also leads to attention being lost quickly.
When you grow consistently, when you just put out great videos every single week without fail and grow your loyal base of followers, you’re really creating YouTube channel the way it was intended. I mean, there are no hacks to suddenly building an amazing business or suddenly having thousands of people become your fans. Of course there are ways you can get your face in front of people quickly by “hacking the algorithm”, but no matter how you do it, it still takes a long time for people to build trust and actually begin to look forward to your videos.
And this is probably true in most facets of life. The person that hits the gym consistently even if less efficiently will win over a long enough time frame.
It doesn’t matter how long it takes as long as you do not stop.
Less subscribers might be better
So there’s a guy I follow on Twitter named Cobie, and after he reached about 700,000 followers on Twitter, he kind of got sick of being a public figure and made his Twitter private. He’s made a few comments on this of how he doesn’t enjoy having a big audience, stuff like how he has to censor himself, his tweets sometimes influence certain markets, and he has had to become more conscious of his family’s security because of his following.
Interesting because on YouTube you can never just “make your account private”. But maybe if you could, would you after a certain point?
After reading Tim Ferriss’ famous article 11 Reaons Why You Shouldn’t Be Famous and seeing several creators like MrBeast at VidSummit, I realized that more is not always necessarily better. Even at a niche YouTube conference, he can barely walk around without being mobbed by everyone there. He needs constant security and at this point has almost no privacy.
It depends on your own personal goals of course, but I think there exists a sweet spot for each person depending on what they’re optimizing for. And what that sweet spot is can affect the way you make videos for YouTube. Like if you wanted your videos viewed by 10-50million people, then you know you have to make your videos as broad and generic as possible - that’s why all of MrBeast’s videos are about money. But if you wanted to make a great living just having your videos viewed by 50 - 100,000 people, you could intentionally speak in a more niche way so only loyal followers trickle into your viewership.
One worthwhile read is the article 1,000 True Fans by Kevin Kelly.
YouTube is an infinite game (and so are the best pursuits in life)
An infinite game is something where the goal of the game is to win by continuing to play. Whatever videos you decide to make, always optimize for something that is sustainable and fun. I’ve seen a ton of creators burn out, pivot, or just stop making videos entirely. Imo, the only way to succeed at YouTube from what I’ve learned is 1. constant iteration and 2. a love for making videos.
Of course it doesn’t have to be something you do “infinitely”, but even if you wanted to do YouTube for a short stint, it’s important to think about making videos that you personally find enjoyable and is authentic to yourself.
That’s pretty much it. Let’s get it 🤝