Building a YouTube Channel

[Glispick]

Hey all,

Thank you for being here.

Hope you’re doing well.

Quick introduction
I recently started a YouTube channel and would like to document the journey and the lessons I learn here. Primarily because this forum has been a great source of inspiration to me, and MJ DeMarco’s books have been life changing. So, I want to express a genuine thanks to @MJ DeMarco.


What the channel is about
I currently describe it as “weird videos about weird trends and events”. It is a slightly vague description, on purpose. The main reason for that is that I would prefer not to limit myself to a single niche. Hopefully my video making style will be engaging enough that eventually people will be willing to watch some of my videos, even if they are not in their (the viewers) directly preferred niche.

My style is still developing with every video, but it is going in the direction of mini documentaries where the animated channel character is telling a story, as if he was present for whatever event/trend the video is about. Visual and sound wise I try to be fairly liberal with incorporating the things my brain comes up with at random moments.

Goal
The first milestone is to grow this channel to a monetizable size.
So,

1000 subscribers

4000 watch hours

Fastlane?
I understand that Youtube is not completely fastlane and I hope that my documentation of this journey is fitting for this forum. However, a successful YouTube channel could become a Fastlane entity by also generating income sources that are not under the control of a single entity like YouTube.

I currently have uploaded 6 long form videos and 8 shorts. I will document a bit about the long form videos here. I’ll add the lessons I learned with each video as well.

The first video
This is a mini documentary about crypto currency meme coins. The video is quite different from my later material, as I was still trying to find a style. In the video, I lay out the common formula behind the creation, marketing and crash of crypto meme coins.

The production time on this video was very long. I estimate it to be about 150 hours. But that includes many re-do’s of everything. Rewrites, rerecording, re-edits. I probably made this video 6 times before publishing it. It was slightly frustating, but also very useful as I was lucky enough to learn a lot about editing in those hours. It felt like a big relief to finally upload it, but now in hindsight there is a lot I would change. I will leave it online though as I understood that removing a video completely takes away the view count from your channel, which might hurt my still-small channel.

The video was uploaded on 1st september 2023 and has 444 views and 11 likes.

Lesson
1. Don't be afraid to ask people in relevant communities to watch your videos. Almost all of the views I received came from external sources (eg Reddit). Of course, it's important to be polite and non aggressive about it, but this lesson may be relevant to whoever is similar to me and feels like they might 'bother' others with their creations.

Link

View: https://youtu.be/9wbaXUXb-rs


That was it for this first post. Thanks a lot for reading. I already wrote out the other posts, so they will come up in a few minutes.

 

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[Glispick]

The second video
About the Gloucestershire Cheese Rolling tradition. I got the idea for the video because the videos of the tradition on YT were always very funny to me. The editing style is fairly similar to that of my first video. Production time was a lot shorter, because the editing techniques were similar too. I tried to play around more with music for this video, to set the pacing and mood for the scenes.

It was uploaded on 8th of december 2023 and currently has 254 views and 18 likes.

You may notice that there was a huge gap between my first and second video. Primarily due to a lack of effort on my part. This is an issue I have attempted to fix from the second video onward.

View: https://youtu.be/l5kXX-iygl0

 

[Glispick]

The third video & changing the channel’s concept

This video marked a shift in my channel. It is about a few instances in which Urban Dictionary has been used in legal cases. It was difficult to find footage to fit the narrative of the video, so I decided to try my hand at animations myself. This required learning some more editing techniques, but the 150 hours of work on the first video already taught me the basics lol so this went a bit faster. I have also tried to incorporate a lot more SFX than in the previous two videos, to bring more life to the videos.

The video was uploaded on 22nd december 2023 and currently stands at 1633 views and 78 likes.

I also started to use the face that I use for my channel’s profile picture in the videos.

In the first 24 hours, it seemed like the video bombed. I attributed it to the editing style, thinking it may have been too boring or messy. But then, the video picked up a little bit in the algorithm and strongly outperformed the other two videos. It yielded approx 1500 views in about 48 hours. People were very kind in the comment section, which I really appreciate and which made me think that there might be something to the editing style I had developed for the video.

So, I decided to continue with this style and tried to think of ways to take the channel further. I settled for the style I currently have, where the channel’s character (Glispick) is recalling things that he (?) witnessed.

Lessons
1. Growth on Youtube can be exponential. In my analytics, I can see the impressions suddenly shoot up drastically, then flatline and then shoot up again. It seems that Youtube tries to give the videos at least one chance in both a) browse (the frontpage) and b) recommendations (being recommended under other videos).

2. The exponential growth probably stops when YouTube feels it has exhausted the potential audience and/or is trying to figure out a new potential audience to show your video to. So, choosing a video topic with a large potential audience is (ofcourse) essential to creating a viral video. I reckon that once your channel is established, you can decide what topics become trending, but before that it may be worth it to 'follow the crowd'.

3. Don't be afraid to experiment with new things for your channel. It seems to me like the switch in video style has worked out positively.


Link

View: https://youtu.be/Uz0zQlcN1fg

 

[Glispick]

The fifth video

About an incident in the crypto sphere where Vitalik Buterin dumped his Shiba Inu coins and caused a brief but drastic crash in the dog coin market. The concept is that Glispick got his portfolio destroyed by that instance and is currently stuck working at McDonalds (a meme in the crypto sphere), telling a new hire about how he ended up there.

I tried to improve the animation quality of the opening sequence, compared to the Fitfluencer video. Played around a bit more with audio edits (changing pitch in music etc).

Performance has been lower than the fitfluencer video. Uploaded on 17th of january, currently at 415 views and 19 likes.

Link

View: https://youtu.be/1AWyJREu0_w




The sixth video

Uploaded this one yesterday. Visual and audio wise I like to think it is my best one yet. The concept is that Glispick has discovered that the internet is being overrun by bots and AI, and that he does a cry for help to whatever few human beings may still be online. I will continue to upload videos in a similar style. I aimed to make a video that is relevant to the current hype of AI, thinking that it could maybe increase viewership.

Currently stands at 141 views and 12 likes.

Lessons of video five and six
1. Maybe the idea of niche-ing has some merit to it. I think Youtube will recommend your videos to whoever it thinks watches videos similar to yours, including your own previous videos. So, if your videos are clearly in the same niche (eg all are about Electric Eel Fishing), then it would be easier for Youtube to know who to recommend your next video too (Electric Eel Fishing enthusiasts). Otherwise, it will have to re-learn who the potential audience is for each video.

Link

View: https://youtu.be/gx2zqx8_iGs

 

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[Glispick]

Video four: Best performance yet & rebranding

The concept of the fourth video is that Glispick is an older person at the gym, who adresses the viewer and reminisces about “The good old times” of fitness influencing. This is the first video in which Glispick clearly is the narrator. The reception to the style seemed quite positive, which was honestly very encouraging and I really appreciate anyone taking the time to leave a comment. Made me feel like I had left the desert of desertion for a second there. It became the best performing video, surpassing the Urban Dictionary video.

It took a fairly long time to make, I estimate it to be 50+ hours of work. Primarily because I had to re-write and re-do a lot. Also had to learn a bit about animation techniques, as they are slightly more complex than in the third video.

The video was uploaded on 11th of january and currently stands at 2822 views and 150 likes.

For this video I experimented with a new thumbnail style. After finishing this thumbnail, I thought it could be decently recognizable (but I am curious what you all would think) and decided to use the style for future and past videos. Spent a few hours reworking all of the other thumbnails. With that, I hope to create a recognizable ‘brand’.

Lessons
1. Growth can also become linear. For this video, it got an exponential burst of impressions in the first days, primarily in the browse features. Then, the growth became linear, primarily from suggested video features.
2. Growth is at least partially dependent on how easy you make it for YouTube to find you a potential audience. Eg my Urban Dictionary video was very niche, perhaps too much so, because Youtube has been recommending it under (what I think to be) irrelevant videos. This could be one factor that explains the flatline in growth of that video. For the Fitfluencer video, it was a lot easier for Youtube to find the “correct” videos to recommend my video under. So, the linear growth could continue.
3. I think that you can use external promotion to ‘feed’ Youtube data about who the video is made for by sharing it in relevant communities. The people on those communities will probably have overlapping Youtube viewership behaviors with your intended audience.

Link

View: https://youtu.be/bjuHR5aGALI?si=ta9n4yQfa4izPuAc

 

[Glispick]

Small update 1st of feb 2024.

- Script and concept for new video are completed. Tried to find something this time which seems to be gaining a bit more popularity and fits the tone of the channel
- First version of voice over recorded. Tried to talk a bit more clearly this time than in previous video. One of the comments mentioned that it could do the videos some good and upon rewatching, I can certainly agree. Tbh the voice over is the worst part lol. I'll experiment more with EQ, compression etc in premiere for this one
- Animated one of the scenes. Only took 45 minutes

Hope to get it done within a week. Will update this thread when something noteworthy happens.

 

[SPENCER C]

Nice work man yeah youtube can be a grind for sure but every year gets better and better

 

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[Glispick]

Video seven: Planning and Delaying

Finally released the 7th video. In my last update I wrote that I hoped I'd have this one released within a week, only underestimated the production time by a 100%.

The main issue is that I had to re-record the voice over. For the previous one I shouted too loudly into the mic and it distorted the audio.

Meanwhile, the fitness related video has drastically outperformed all of my other videos. At least twice the amount of views of the second best video, and almost 10x the performance of the rest. I'm going to take that as a form of the market telling me what it wants and will focus on producing more videos on similar topics.

Latest video has a light overlap with the fitness topic. It is about looksmaxxing, the obsession with optimizing one's physical appearance. It goes quite far, all the way to leg lengthening surgeries and facial implants.

Lesson (for now):
Listen to the audience. Youtube's comment system might actually be a great feedback system.

Link

View: https://youtu.be/wqDw3Afpfqo