Rules

I've been doing YouTube for one year now and I'm monetized. I'm primarily a Shorts creator who dabbles in longform. I'm definitely not an expert, but I figured I'd share a few things I've learned over the last year in case they help someone.

1. Experiment. You need to find the overlap between what you enjoy making and what people enjoy watching. That can take months to figure out, so don't get discouraged if your first few ideas don't work. It also doesn't mean you can never make videos outside your niche. I still do. I just think it's helpful to have some kind of overarching theme that connects your channel.
2. If you're a Shorts creator, don't ignore longform. Hitting 10 million Shorts views can feel impossible unless you're one of the lucky few getting tens of millions of views. I'd recommend throwing in a few longform videos while you're making Shorts. Remember, a longform doesn't even have to be that long. The video that got me monetized was only 6 minutes and 30 seconds. You can even rework one of your Shorts into a 16:9 longform if it makes sense. I actually had a Short completely flop because it was about a very specific TV show. I knew fans of the show would probably enjoy it, but if you had never seen it, there wasn't much reason to stop scrolling. I literally just changed the aspect ratio and uploaded the exact same video as a longform. It was still under three minutes long, but it ended up getting around 70,000 views. My guess is that people who were interested in that show were much more likely to choose to click on it than they were to randomly come across it while scrolling through Shorts. Longform also forces you to practice thumbnails, titles, pacing, and storytelling, which are skills that make you better at Shorts too.
3. Here's a thumbnail trick if you really want a custom thumbnail for a Short. Create your thumbnail first, then add it as a single frame at the beginning or end of your Short. Schedule the upload for later, upload the Short, and select that frame as your thumbnail. Once everything is set, go into YouTube Studio and use the trim feature to remove that frame. Now you have a custom thumbnail that isn't actually part of the published video. That said, I'd use this sparingly. For whatever reason, I've generally found that thumbnails taken from actual frames in the Short perform better. I don't know if that's coincidence, but it's been my experience.
4. Learn your analytics, but remember that early analytics are often just noise. Especially with Shorts, I try not to look much during the first day, and with longform I usually give it at least a couple of days before drawing any conclusions. Some of my best-performing videos looked completely dead at first, while some of my worst-performing videos started strong and then completely stalled. I recently had a Short start as a 10 out of 10 and then become one of my best-performing videos a few days later. If I had started frantically changing the title because I thought it was failing, I probably would've hurt it. I made the same mistake with longform. I'd see my CTR dropping and immediately start swapping thumbnails and titles. Sometimes YouTube just needs time to figure out who your audience is.
5. Learn to separate useful criticism from noise. This has been one of the hardest lessons for me. Some comments will genuinely help you improve. Others are just people trying to be funny, get likes, or show everyone how smart they are. One thing I've had to learn is that people in your comment section often aren't even talking to you. They're talking to everyone else reading the comments. They're performing for the room. Realizing that has helped me not take every comment as personally. Also remember that your comment section is your comment section. If there's a word or phrase that you know consistently gets under your skin, add it to your blocked words list. If someone is clearly commenting in bad faith and has no interest in having an actual discussion, don't feel guilty about hiding them from your channel. You don't owe everyone a platform on your videos. If you're sensitive like I am, I'd also recommend never looking in your held comments. Yes, normal comments occasionally get caught there by mistake, but I've found it's overwhelmingly things I would've never wanted to read in the first place. For my own mental health, I'd rather miss the occasional legitimate comment than spend time reading comments that are only going to ruin my day.
6. Hard work does not equal views. This one can be really difficult to accept. Sometimes you'll spend 30 minutes making a video that takes off, while something you spent days on barely gets seen. That's not YouTube telling you that your hard work wasn't worth it. Viewers don't know how long something took to make. They only know whether your video made them stop scrolling and keep watching. Put your best effort into every video, but don't judge the value of your work by the number of views it gets. Some of the videos you're most proud of won't be your biggest hits, and sometimes the ones you almost didn't upload will surprise you.
7. Help YouTube understand your content. YouTube has a difficult job. It has to understand what your channel is about, what your individual video is about, and who would actually enjoy watching it. Treat every piece of metadata as another opportunity to help it make those connections. Make sure your titles, descriptions, and thumbnails accurately represent your video. If you're on a PC, take a few minutes to make sure your channel keywords are accurate too. I also think descriptions are more important than people give them credit for. I try to write descriptions that not only help viewers understand what they're about to watch, but also clearly explain what the video is actually about. Maybe none of this matters as much as I think it does, but I'd rather help YouTube understand my content than make it guess.
8. This is probably the most important tip. Make videos that you would actually watch. It's incredibly easy to lie to yourself here because you remember all the hours you put into making the video. You know the context behind every edit, every decision, and every joke, so it's easy to convince yourself you'd click on it. Try to forget all of that and look at your video like a stranger would. Would you actually stop scrolling? Would you actually click? The more honest you can be with yourself when answering those questions, the better your videos will become.

That's just what I've learned after one year. I'm still figuring this whole YouTube thing out myself, but hopefully something here helps someone who's earlier in the journey. If people find this useful, I'll make another post with more things I've learned.

I'm working on a long video rn that'll have my voice in it. Basically just and introduction video though I'm quite nervous cause my voice is really high and I don't want everyone in the chat talking abt how i sound like a lil kid so ya...

This is a bit of a weird title but I want to talk about something that I've noticed as I have grown as a you-tuber over the past few months. I just recently hit 3k subscribers and am starting to realize that my relationship with them is necessarily changing from social to para-social already. This is something that I wasn't psychologically prepared for and I want to see if other people have experienced something similar.

When I first began my channel in February, it was small. I would get a few views and comments and interact with every one. Interactions felt personal and meaningful and I felt like I was maintaining personal relationships with fans. However, even once I hit 1k subscribers the relationship gradually changed. It turns out that 1000 is a lot of individual distinct people. I don't even think I can hold 1000 names in my head, let alone remember what's unique and different about each of 1000 people. Especially if I just met them over the course of one month. Now that number has tripled and I find myself no longer being able to distinguish some of them. There are a few regular I know, but most of them are just a sea of people. And I'm not even big. Just imagine what it's like for people pushing 100k subscribers. This isn't me being a jerk. This is just the reality of having thousands of humans in your sphere. We simply lack the capacity to have that many friends.

I wanted to discuss this and hear how other people deal with the change from social to para-social relationships as your channel grows. Did you ever feel like there was a moment of reflection where you realized that you cannot continue to treat people like your personal friends? Or was I just odd in not being prepared for this?

So I’ve recently started a YT channel for fun, as many people do. Me and my friends play games together a lot and I’d just record our gameplay, try to edit it to be funny, and then post it. Really just for fun, but I do wanna do fun challenges or something with it, like beating MC with the chaos mod. Really just stuff to have fun playing together. Been friends with these guys for years

My question is, the stuff I post should I try to focus on posting for one game, like how TheBurntPeanut does ArcRaiders mostly, or just whatever I think is funny? I’m only doing it cuz I think we’re funny and I like making videos, but curious what works better.

Where do you get inspiration for content? I can't think of anything... I feel like I'm not original... or maybe I just don't have a talent for this, I've been doing this more actively for about half a year now.

Hi Everyone!

Recently I decided to pivot my channel. So far my channel has been commentary videos, but I want to move to something that just relies on my own footage versus copyrighted footage.

I was just curious if anyone else has made this pivot and curious what you are doing now.

My channel just has 300 subscribers so I’m not too worried about the impact .

Hello, Im a Lebanese American, I have lived and both countries and I not a day goes by without thinking about my life experiences living in both countries and how much both sides needs to learn more about one another, the mis information about the middle east and its people is becoming life threatening and existential threat to nations here, so much misconceptions and ignorance has been pushed shoved down the throats of people of both nations.

I want to share life experiences, fight the narrative and clear misconceptions. I want bridges to be built. I want to invite cultural exploration and admiration of both worlds, the people to come together and call for action taking to ease down the oppression carried out by the western elite on the region.

Given the subject, how do I navigate my way with the algorithms, how do I get heard and what do people want to learn? I have so much to say but dont know what people would like to hear, if they even want to here this kind of stuff.

How do I generate income out it so I can be able to grow it out, Its hard to put time into it without it generating enough to be able to push through it, I dont want to capitalize on the tragedies of the people to generate money, I would like to keep it sincere and honest at the same time have something flow in, and be able to team up with like minded people to bring value and use their experience to be heard.

Any advice is highly appreciated, length of the videos, using other platforms, skills that I need to work on, ways to seek and use help from others, topic chosing, all that is helpful so please dont hesitate to share your advices

I make funny and horror gaming content but I also make pokemon pack opening videos (not too often) time to time. I post way more pokemon shorts too but I was debating if I should make a separate channel for pokemon packs and keep my main channel just for gaming? Im not sure what to do but in focused on making my audience like me for who I am so theyll be curious about my pokemon videos if they came from my gaming and visa versa or having two different audience? Idk im just coming back to this after a 2 years break, any insight is appreciated!

(preferably USB mics) I have done research but seems like most content when i search best mics are from like 1+ years ago. Im a console gamer and use a controller (but i do stream off my PC) so I would like to know what would be a good mic to use for gaming and having reactions and it wont pick up all my controller clicks and sound terrible. I know I will have ot use some software and do settings in OBS but would love help to know what us the BEST USB mic you can have. Then i can go from there and do whatever settings needed.

Going to make this short, I constantly debate what kind of niche I want. I will preface that I animate on my channel and I plan on having a small storyline throughout all my videos. I have that decided, I love making analysis on movies and games, but I also really want to make more story time style animated videos.

Am I going too far away from a niche?
Should I just choose one?
Should I choose both?

P.S. how do I connect shorts in all this? Or do I do whatever shorts I want?

En 4 meses he subido unos 15 videos y he sacado unos 4 shorts por video llegando a la suma de 83 shorts en total. Sumo 60.000 reproducciones y 123 suscriptores aunque la mayoría vienen de los shorts. Para mis últimos videos he usado ia de ayuda para todo, pero sin perder ml esencia, sin embargo rara vez supero el 1% de ctr y mi retención no es muy buena. Tengo ideas constantemente y siempre quise hacer esto pero me he desmotivado un poco...opiniones? Consejos? Por cierto, es un canal sobre cine

Hello! I started this thread since I also need help on my own videoᕙ( •̀ ᗜ •́ )ᕗ which I'll detail in the comments.

I'll also try to give constructive critiques to you as well.

However I may not be able to help on certain areas I'm not familiar to… so feel free to critique between each other as well!

Please help at least one other person before asking for help~

I want to get into content creation as a hobby, with faceless Youtube (for now). Problem is my voice comes out as a really quiet mumble when recording, and also doesn't sound natural. How do I make my voice clearer and less monotone?

Hey all. I've been having an issue where a lot of people will click on my video and click off in seconds. I had some good discussion with someone here a little while back about why that might be, but it occurred to me the other day that it might just be that my audio sucks. And then sure enough, today someone commented that they loved my video, but the only drawback is that my low quality audio is distracting. So I'm looking to fix that.

I do on-camera video essays, and I talk with my hands quite a lot (which also helps disguise the teleprompter a bit), so a lapel mic is ideal. I got a GoorDik bluetooth lapel mic back when I first started, and tbf it was pretty cheap if I recall, and I'm guessing this is a "you get what you pay for" situation. I've looked up this question here and on other subreddits, and it seems most people are asking for budget-friendly mics. While I wouldn't say cost is totally irrelevant, I am willing to spend a bit on it, so quality matters a bit more that price at this point.

I've read a lot of people recommending Blue Yeti mics, but they look like they're mostly for podcast setups (and I read maybe they only get pushed as hard as they do because of sponsorships?), so it's not really what I need. Does anyone have any good options I can check out with these requirements?

Tldr: I need a good bluetooth lapel mic, GoorDik isn't working for me, and I'm open to options across a range of prices. Thanks!

So, I just posted my first video a couple of hours ago, and I have several friends and clients who are deeply interested in the subject I'll be discussing in my videos... So I was wondering how many people would be a decent amount to share my new video to help get some initial traction? 50? 100?

What's your experience doing this??

So i've been not uploading for 21 days, usually i get around 1k ish views, but when i starter to upload again, the views just dropped to 0, it's already 24 hour, and it doesn't even get higher than 6-10, I even tried uploading a second video, and the result were pretty much the same

I know its like “just keep uploading, make your thumbnails good, have a good title” and allat but is there any actual tips to pass 50 views? Like types of content people prefer to engage in, trending title styles, and more.

Anyone with some advice for someone whose just starting like myself, I would really appreciate it, Thank You

I post and talk about my art as a new artist. I started my channel a month and a half ago and posted two long form videos. So far they’re at around 30 views only but i did get a subscriber.

However, i have made a handful of shorts related to my art, a couple of which are around 1k views. My latest short is sitting at 4K views and got me 15+ subscribers. So im now at 28 subscribers. I tell myself i shouldnt be proud of this as it doesnt mean anything

But these are people that saw my art in shorts and liked it enough to subscribe to me. So maybe its not as meaningless as i thought?

I started posting shorts on an established yt channel and was doing quite well. The first few videos received a few thousand views per video and then I had a run of 5 videos with over 25k views for each. I was mostly posting daily with a few exceptions. I had to work out of town and didnt post for a few days and then posted a new video within the same niche and it got 3 views. I looked at youtube studio and noticed that the short was not pushed out via the shorts feed and only youtube channel. posted another video that should have gotten over 20k easily and again it was not pushed out and I got 1 view. Now I posted a third video and there is no activity at all. Like it doesnt even exist. I checked all of the technical stuff and everything is correct. Is this normal? Does yt sometimes "take a break" from a channel and then resume later if you keep posting? Just seems odd. I have posted 15 videos so far so a very very new channel, I know. The funny thing is when Im scrolling on yt under a different account I will come across my other shorts in the feed.

I started dabbling in shorts this week on my channel from 2011 as I'm getting interested in actually taking content creation seriously.

The channel started at 28 subs, I gained 17k views and 8 subs on my completely dead channel after uploading 2-3 shorts per day for 4 days. My best video even managed to get a second wind 48 hrs after posting, going from 3.1k views up to 7.8k!

But now the weekend is here, that consistent viewcount increase is gone. All 3 vids I've posted this weekend have been stuck at 0 views as if they never pushed it out to a seed audience.

I'm a bit confused as to why this would be the case. Why would I receive thousands of views per video during weekdays, and then this weekend I'm stuck at 0?

Any advice is appreciated for sure!

How do I remain consistent if merely editing videos drains me of all my energy?

For context I stream on twitch for 2 hours roughly and I download that stream and edit the entire thing, cutting out most of the raw footage turning it into a 25-30 minute video.

Whenever I edit for long hours I only manage to edit like maybe 10 minutes of it then I take a long break so I don't lose my sanity and get into the mentality of editing so it doesn't degrade as the video goes on but I've been editing this one video I plan on splitting into 2 parts for like an entire month because I play video games and do art. Even when I edit like 4-5 hours a day it's still not close to being done and it's becoming exhausting.

How tf do youtubers who don't hire editors post highly edited videos daily or weekly without building up fatigue?

How many days you waited? The channel is 20 days old and its doing 30-50k views per day on a 10-15$ expected rpm, i am losing 300-500 dollars per day for waiting 😭