Keep it Simple, and First Dislikes!

Sep '25 (edited) • Wins! 🏆

My little channel (Path & Principle) is equal parts self-made independence inspiration and ambient contemplation. As both entrepreneur and musician, this is "me".

My first video was posted on 21 August: 15 views and 2 likes.

A week ago, I was going to make a video of a trail around the forest we live in, but ended up getting lost (!!!) and soaking my pants. I navigated my way back with a compass and made a video instead (LOST) about how ridiculous this was. Just me walking on our driveway with the camera and talking, that was my best stats so far: 241 views and 6 likes. 8.1hr watch time of me talking about the woods and being silly. I did a "test" of a thumbnail for this video adding my face in various places to the LOST text. The simplest, just the word LOST over the woods, did the best by far. Lesson learned: keep it simple.

Next, I made a video tribute to my 26-year-old truck, and posted it Friday night. This had a weird bump on Sunday morning and as of this writing has 19K impressions, 1340 views, and 37 watch hours, far better than the entire channel combined. It's part satire and part advice, which is probably getting closer to my real "dad" personality. 37 likes and 3 dislikes (for the flip flops or my voice?), fun.

Again just to see and with nothing to lose, I did a thumbnail test. I had added "TAKE CONTROL" because it made sense to me, then taking Grok's advice, I had one with "$FREE" overlaid on the truck. I added a 3rd option with just me standing by the truck. Again, the one with *no words* has done the best (36.1% vs. 31.7 / 32.2%).

Keep it simple, I guess!

7 comments