COMMUNITY
I'm a minecraft youtuber with 100k subscribers, averaging 1.5 million views per month (I don't really upload that much nowadays).
I don't really scroll through reddit but figured I'd give people here some advise.
Thumbnail, Titles, Retention
One does not work without the other, Thumbnail & Title hook the viewer, Intro hooks them further in, the rest of the video can't become boring and shouldn't lose its purpose.
Description & Keywords
It doesn't mean a lot these days but still important for youtube to understand what niche you're aiming for. Spamming a bunch of irrelevant tags damages your channel more than it helps.
Understand your audience and what you're aiming for.
A 2 hour poker game with no editing can be watched 90% through by an adult audience. A highly edited poker game with a bunch of cuts can be distasteful to such an audience. Instead of looking at how YouTube works, look at how humans work and their age.
Analyse niches and their popularity
Why complain about getting 100 views when the max audience for that niche is 1000 viewers?
Minecraft was not my go-to game, but I chose to become a youtuber in it because the popularity of the game is huge.
Make videos on topics people find interesting, not what you find interesting.
No one cares about you early on, so make videos on topics they find interesting, later on you can introduce your own relevant topics to said niche, whether those topics are actually unique and interesting is another question.
Youtube is exhausting
I mean yeah it is, the more you grow the worse it gets, you have to stay ahead of thousands of others if you dont want to faceplant. High risk high reward game.
Now here's some info a lot of you wont appreciate. the people really invested into youtube will
Youtube is not a hobby, its a career. The difference between a normal job and youtube is that you have stability with a normal job, Youtube you can be kicked down the ladder very quickly.
"It's not me! YouTube doesn't push out the channel!"
Here comes the part where the most popular youtubers are also one of the smartest out there. First of all, most of it is your fault, and if you don't realise that then, well, just quit already lol. The competition on Youtube is huge and it doesn't have room for people that complain about their issues. Instead take that time and invest it to optimising your content.
You also have to look at this in a much broader picture. For example I'm currently fighting an issue where the niche I am making videos in is losing its popularity. Now I started comparing myself to another channel in my niche which averaged many more views. I figured out that their channel audience was actually mainly consisting of very young kids (12-13). Now my audience is between 15-30 year old, 60% is adult.
Therefor the comparison becomes invalid, cause youtube does not recommend me to such a younger audience (nor do I want that), and who knows how big the kids audience is in that niche.
So now I've opened a second channel which directly focuses towards a more stable niche within Minecraft and has greater potential.
You might ask why not continue on the 100k still popular channel? I am still uploading there but, when I upload a video from a different niche, my viewers will click and watch it for 1/10th of the duration due to its irrelevancy, Now if you get thousands of views on average then this begins to affect your video stats heavily. In result youtube does not push out the video to the new and correct audience at its fullest potential.
So beginning a new channel rather than converting the existing one (which mind you will take tons of videos), is much more beneficial. I already carry so much knowledge from my journey, that growing a new channel will be very easy to do for me.
Also just wanna say that I was on this very same subreddit a year ago, with 200 subscribers and little views.
