First taste of YouTube success after making videos for 10 years

Mar '23 in Other

I have been making YouTube videos for over 10 years, not entirely consistently, maybe averaging 3-4 videos a year. I recently looked back at my old videos and was just appalled at how badly they were made. I was clearly trying the emulate a number of other creators with very little of my own creative input in the videos and they all did really badly which is understandable, they were rubbish. But it was important that I made these first videos even though they were bad so that I learnt how to conceptually make videos and more quality content would eventually come out, which it did. I slowly got better and better. And in 2021 I first started making videos that I was proud of and could look back on and happily share with other people because they were true to me and contained content which helped me deal with things in my own life. Though none of these videos even broke the 10-view mark. Because I didn't understand thumbnails and titles and tags and all that.

Fortunately last year I got a job as a video producer for pretty big online news publications in my country and I was managing the YouTube channel. This meant I had the opportunity to upload 3-4 videos to YouTube every single day, making the thumbnails, doing the titles and the tags and everything. I was even producing a lot of the content myself as the host of a cryptocurrency show. This gave me massive exposure and I was able to really experiment with what made a video get a higher CTR and see what content would get the most exposure. At this time however, I wasn't able to apply what I learned to my own content because it was deemed as a "conflict of interest" for me to produce my own content but I did keep the lessons I learnt. and I got a lot better at making thumbnails. and figuring out what got people to engage with content even when it was incredibly boring.

I left that job to work with the @Andrew Kirby and the synthesizer team briefly at the end of last year where I learnt a lot of valuable lessons which I am incredibly grateful for. In my interview with Andrew, he asked me why I wasn't making my own content. I didn't really have a good answer for him. And I had been thinking about this question ever since. So in February this year, I decided to start making my own content again. So I started making videos which were relevant to me, my life, and the lessons I had learnt along the way. These got a little bit of traction, but nothing spectacular. I then took a look back in my channel at one video that I was particularly proud of but had got something like 8 views. So I literally just reuploaded this video and put more time and attention into the title, thumbnail, description and tags. it started quite slow but the algorithm showed me its grace for the first time in my life and within a day I had a couple of hundred views. So I wrote another video in a similar style, edited and uploaded it and again, a few hundred views in a day. These videos also had tons of positive comments with people saying they were shocked at how few subscribers I had. I've also increased my subs by 4X in the last 2 days.

After trying to build a YouTube channel for so many years it's really great to be having success even though it's so tiny at the moment. And even if the growth entirely stops here (but hopefully it's just the beginning) I am glad that I have at least had an impact on a couple of hundred people and that I never gave up despite the lack of positive feedback for so long.

So I'm encouraging all of you. even though it seems as though it's for nothing to keep going. because eventually there will be some kind of payoff, no matter how big or small.

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