My YouTube 📺 Journey And Lessons Learnt

How Consistency Is The Single Biggest Factor That Will Embark You To Success

Thanks for enabling me to cross the 10K subscriber milestone. I will reveal a lot of insight from the YouTube in this newsletter - so hold tight and grab popcorn 🍿

So, the journey started in Nov-2020 when I thought while helping my son for his recreational project of YouTube to make a few videos and see how it goes on - it was just a technical test for YouTube that I was doing. For that, I needed to upload multiple videos in order to see the impact and get enough sample set for analysis, this went on for 3-4 months and while all this time I only received 90 views in one single day (at max).

Views from 1st video uploaded in Nov 2020 until end of Feb 2021 (Frequency of video uploads was around 1 video per week at max)

I started enjoying the process and felt that this way I can educate a lot of people in what I believe, we as nation are lacking a lot, that is the domain of PERSONAL FINANCE MANAGEMENT. I became consistent and made sure I make at least 1 video per week for next few months.

From mid April - 2021, I started posting 2 videos a week and remained consistent with the routine yet again!

The chart shows how the increase in the videos frequency enabled surge in views

All this time, my primary shooting device has been an iPhone 11 Pro 📲 and over the time, I upgraded mics, just recently I have purchased a mirrorless camera 📸 which helps me shooting in low light home conditions. The editing has been done on iMovie in the beginning and purchased the app FinalCutPro just over a year ago. The upgrades I have been doing are worth it, although they are not showstopper for any new content creator - Did I meantion I am an Apple fanboy? 😎

Let me show you a bigger picture now, after August 2021, I started pumping 3 videos per week (again consistently, without fail) - not counting any shorts that I uploaded during this time. This again gave a big push to grow the channel further, you can have a look in the chart below for that.

Month on month increase in views since last year

Month on month increase in watch time since last year

A case study from tube buddy (a tool used by many YouTubers for analysis) revealed that most of the time it takes 5 years & 1 to 2 million views on average before reaching 10K subs on YouTube - with that standard, the subscriber growth has been good on my channel, however, I feel the subscriber growth has not kept pace with the growth in views and watch time.

Subscriber growth over the period of last 1 year

The lackluster growth with subscriber growth I feel is because the niche I have picked up - which has a lot of work to be done and the mindset need to be developed. It takes time to create interest in masses what you believe in!

The monetization 💰 was enabled in Sept 2021, and like mentioned by many other YouTubers - the payouts given by google are not that good specially as the views on the channel are not high [I need your support to propagate the videos in your friends circle as much as possible]. Although compared to other niches, the CPM (Cost Per Mile) for personal finance is the highest, however, it still does not justify the time required to make one single video. For that matter, to keep my content clean & without biases, I am thinking to start something similar to Patreon support - which I hope people would understand ☺️.

YouTube has got a lot of data available to be explored once you have enough videos uploaded in order to optimize your content which I am trying to do day in and day out.

One of the key matrix is how long you can keep the viewers watching your video - this has been in an upward direction as you can see in the chart below [To give you perspective, holding 50% of audience retention is considered very good in YouTube terms, specially if you have long form content]

Average view duration

I can talk about YouTube all day long, but I am not sure about the audience if they are ready to read / listen to it - This newsletter is just to thank you 😘 all, specially to the subscribers of newsletter as the growth of newsletter subscription has been great too and the email list has grown to >500 now since Sept 2021.

The ultimate lesson that I learnt from YouTube is about consistency - like YouTube, life also reward for consistent effort. No mater how dumb you look in the beginning, if you keep on working towards your goal and follow the famous rule of 1% incremental improvement on daily basis, the result will be phenomenal.

Besides, I have recently created the short clip channel for Q&A - Please do subscribe to it if you haven’t done already.

Last week’s videos in case you have missed out:

My social media handles:

Youtube (Main channel)
YouTube (Q&A Clips channel)
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KEEP HUSTLING!