My notes for YouTube creators

I’m far from an expert on this, but I’ve been asked what I’m doing because my YT channel is getting steady growth. Here’s what I’ve learned from watching a bunch of videos on “how to win at YouTube”, and from my own testing:

• Thumbnail, Title, Tags seem to be a lot more important than having good content. Coming up with these should take at least as long as making the content. Picking a title and thumbnail and then making the content to go with it is even better – especially for long-form.
• Unless you’re already established, it’s hard to get people to watch long-form videos of gameplay, even if you have epic commentary, music, and everything short of big teddy anime catgirls, or real-life catgirls.
• People seem to be a lot more willing to watch gameplay content if you’re live.
• Shorts seems to be where the growth is, and converting viewers of shorts to long-form is very difficult. The majority of MA viewers seem to have zero attention span, but will watch someone live for hours. A long-form video needs to have a serious hook to draw people in to watch, and keep them watching. The experts contradict each other when it comes to using long-form to make shorts that link back to long-form. It’s 2 separate audiences but there is overlap. The feedback loop might work for some categories, but I don’t think that works well for Mech Arena, especially if you’re starting out, which I am.
• Asking Friends & Family, or paying for views and subs is harmful to your channel. You want people that watch your content to be of a consistent demographic and have similar video interests. 20 knitting grandma fans watching all your content will confuse the algorithm. It will think that your content appeals to knitting, and test pushing it to them. If your video doesn’t get traction with the initial test group, the algorithm will stop pushing your content. This is why I tell my friends and family to NOT watch my content.
• Begging/promoting your channel in MA chat can get you a chat ban for 1-7 days, and will get you very few subs. Doodle Siblings channel (something like that) is a great example of this. They have people cycling through all the chat channels begging people to sub, and they’re seeing zero growth. The kids are nice enough, but their live content has zero appeal to me – they’re at 3k SP, and just playing CPC with no commentary. Their animation videos are kind of cool, and IMHO they should keep that content separate.
• Channels should focus on one thing. Squad shooters is a thing, Action video games is a thing. Those are nowhere near as focused as Mech Arena, and that’s why I’m debating posting any more Star Trek content. I might make a channel just for that content, but most likely I’m posting 1-2 more videos and wrapping up that game on YT.
• All videos should link to another video. Make it easy for people to binge watch your content.
• YT algorithm initially tests your video on a small group of people. If the video does well, the algorithm pushes it out to more people, and repeats the testing. If the video doesn’t do well, it won’t be pushed very hard. After the third test, you should be in the viral stage, which I expect I’ll never get to with Mech Arena videos. I think there just aren’t enough players to draw that much attention.
• You can get the algorithm to re-test your video by making an edit to the title, or ending link.
• If you’re not getting any growth after a months of posting at least 3-4 shorts per week, asking a bigger channel, or a YT coach for suggestions is a good idea. This is true for everything in life. If you’re following the steps that work for everyone else but aren’t seeing improvement, talk to an expert. Be prepared to hear that you just suck. I asked myself that exact question many times on Twitch, and while it’s true, I was also late to the game, and it was incredibly hard to pull people from other channels to mine. Even if my content was objectively better, funnier, more informative, and more practical, getting people to change habits is very difficult.
• Having interesting or unique content is essential for long-term growth.
• People seem to like hearing the content creator talking.
• I think anyone that wants to get into being a content creator needs to check what their motivation is. Odds are very slim you’ll make any money at it. Post-Covid on Twitch, I was putting in 9 hours per week on screen, another 3 hours setting up and taking down my equipment, 3 hours prepping and posting the recipes, 3 hours prepping the food before stream, I’m not including any time promoting, posting on other discord “food porn” sections, etc . 18 hours per week for an average of $100/month. I like to think my time is a bit more valuable than $1.40/ hr.; I was making less than 1/10 of minimum wage. Good thing I wasn’t doing it for the mad stacks of fat cash, or however the cool kids say it.