I Posted on YouTube Consistently for 1 Month. This Is What Happened
alexhyett.com
alexhyett.com
I’ve heard the argument that YouTube rewards consistency, but I am anything but consistent with my videos [1](every 1-3 months) and I haven’t noticed any negative consequences.
[1] YouTube.com/stuffmadehere
stuffmadehere is famous shit. Middle schoolers watch it in the classroom because the science teacher plays this. He has millions of subscribers & each show ( I refuse to call it video. Its a proper show. ) is very professionally done. It's so popular, if you were in India & you were speaking in Hindi, you would legit be on TV. Over there people are glued to content because some guy is explaining centrifugal force in hindi with some string & tincan. Meanwhile, look at your production values! Huge respect. Thanks for everything you do.
I still think it's decent advice for new YouTubers, because you only get better at a thing by doing it a lot, and over time. The value of consistency isn't in the algorithmic properties, but instead in developing the skills that lead to quality.
But the language used around this topic is often implying that "the algorithm" will "punish you" if you like, post too often, post too little, post at different times... and I personally believe that that is empirically demonstrated to be not the case, and is also something YouTube (at least lately, I've only been paying close attention for a year or two) has never implied is important. And they've said things that imply that it's totally irrelevant, recommendation wise.
These are all kinda true though?
- If you post too often your notifications get bundled, so now it's "x published two videos" instead of "x published that amazing video",
- if you post too little then people are less likely to recognize your username and thus just not click on it unless the creator really left an impression (this is probably the most dependent on the audience however).
- if you post at differing times you suddenly have to increase your audience significantly as your usual watchers won't be on YouTube at that moment, so you're effectively missing out on the initial upvotes by your fanbase until much later, reducing the chance of the video going into trending.
I mean they're not the only variables and they become pretty much non-issues as the channel grows, but all of these effects can be directly measured in clicks when the audience is still pretty small
I'm pretty happy, as a user that YouTube no longer pushes constancy over quality.
In fact, this sort of behavior you're talking about is one of the reasons why "the algorithm" is a thing. If there's something you'd like to watch, but you've forgotten about it, it's YouTube's job to surface it to you, even if you've forgotten. This is one of the reasons why browse is the default view and not your subscribers feed, for example.
I know "The Algorithm" gets a lot of hate, but surfacing quality-over-quantity content is one place where recommendation algorithms excel over pure chronological feeds.
When I switched Twitter to chronological mode, I had to unfollow several people because they posted all day long. The most valuable Tweets I wanted to see were buried in the noise. The algorithmic feed is far from perfect, but it does a good job of highlighting posts I've missed from people I've interacted with previously. It takes some time to see the algorithm with enough likes and interactions, and it won't work if you never click the like button, but it's actually not half bad once it's up and running.
Reddit is another platform where quantity over quality prevails. If you click through to the post history of people who get content to the front page, it's basically a firehose of posts using recycled content and slightly altered headlines to as many subreddits as they can get away with. Eventually one of them clicks and rises to the top, but by that point the headline is often so mangled into clickbait that it doesn't accurately reflect the content of the article. Redditors don't really read articles, though, so it doesn't matter. Spam away.
I’ve seen this too. It seems like a lot of work and I’m unclear what the reward is. It isn’t like most of that content is pimping some brand of burger or something…
Do you find great content on youtube via YT's recommendations? I practically never have, everything I like I've stumbled upon on other sites where something is discussed and a channel is mentioned, or from someone who's work I like mention someone else. YT's recommendations have always been garbage for me, so I eventually just hid them completely because it's mostly noise.
I'm sure not-your-entire audience is interested in these things. Have you ever considered making a second channel where you go into more detail about the details of the technical problems / solutions you run into? The videos could be a lot less well produced, I'm just desperate for the info.
Thanks for all you do!
You have infinitely more Youtube experience than I do (love your videos, by the way!), but maybe those other categories are in your blindspot, just like they are not in my Youtube suggestions.
I'd expect vloggers, celebrities, podcasters, game streamers, political pundits, etc to benefit more from consistent uploads. More videos = more rolls of the viral dice, and furthermore frequency is required for building up fame, parasocial relationships, or just reliably filling the silence during commute.
Do normal users tend to just subscribe to a smaller number of channels, so they want channels that publish a lot?
In short, thank you for your awesome videos and take your time to keep the quality so high!
Keep up the good work!!
The mistake here is thinking that high quantity / low quality would lead to satisfied customers; not in the long term. When the quality is too low they'll unsub, simple as that.
My problem with YouTube videos in general is they don't cut to the point. They have too much fanfare around the point, stuff which does not interest me. I expect such behavior in advertising, not in content. To me, it lowers the quality of the content because it lowers the signal-to-noise ratio.
Now, there's enough content that the algorithm favors quality more, because YT can more easily keep a user by recommending similar content from a different creator of a higher quality.
.. again, no idea if that's true, but it does feel like it makes sense.
I think the consistency of popping out videos on the regular is about working the algorithm and grinding out content for views, and with those views: ad dollars. I've seen too many channels just turn into churning really awful, boring, long videos with little in the way of direction in the hopes you'll just mindlessly watch it. But I think the math just works out better (marginally) to pump out low-effort, low-value content more often than for example, what you are creating. And like I said: blame the algorithm.
I work with an org that funds and supports a really large community of young makers (mostly young people in their teens, but we also have folks in their mid-twenties and beyond). I'd love to talk to you about how you honed your skills. A lot of them watch your videos and I suspect they would be really interested in reading about how you honed your skills and achieved your currently glorious skillset. (I would be too!)
So I agree that quality is an important factor. While there has to be some weighting to favor the needs of advertisers in play, it's not as strong lately as it has been.
If anyone is giving you any kind of marketing or content distribution advice, and at no point do they mention product-market fit, or content quality, then they are selling you a dream.
If the answer is, "no" then you're never going to be "a YouTuber" (that makes enough money to live from your channel).
I highly recommend doing what I do: Post videos because you want to help people, not entertain them. Also, every now and again I'll post a video just because making videos can be fun but it's fun for me... Whether everyone else has fun with it is mostly irrelevant :)
If I make a few bucks from my tutorial videos about how to make an analog hall effect keyboard that'd be nice but really, I made them so I could point people to the video series to save myself a lot of time explaining things in chat messages. If enough people use those videos to gain that skill maybe we can move the world off of electromechanical switch technology (aka "cave man switches") some day.
I recently started dipping my toes in AI again, even building some tooling for GPU deployments for stable diffusion etc after a friend (less technical) ended up with a GPU mining farm that was burning a $60k hole in his pocket every month when ETH mining dried up.
As a result, I found a curious niche and started making admittedly not very good videos of me attempting to create more approachable AI text to image content for a slightly less technical audience.
I've been pleasantly surprised by how warm, interested and excited my small audience has been.
If anyone would like to check out the channel here's a link - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCttqpACIkQqh83L2cHrY9Gg
I'm working on some internal projects as a part of my channel, a big part are some active developments with the Stable Hoard project.
Edit - goes without saying, many of my early videos are really bad, my speech is hard to follow etc. Ironically since I'm full remote, this has actually helped rehab my speech a bit and give me something technical outside of work to do sort of creative things with. I'd be lying if I didn't intend to turn this into a revenue stream at some point, probably starting with a mailing list.
Also, he's pretty savy with growing his audience. I'm not aware of very many people who translate their videos into (some) other languages, particularly using somewhat-well-known voice actors.
There is a documentary about how actor Bill Murray will occasionally spend a bunch of money on a random stranger that he meets in public.
I see this trend of rich YTers giving away free money as evidence that the creator economy has lowered the barrier to entry to philanthropy, in the same way that the assembly line lowered the barrier to entry to car ownership.
No longer do you have to be a cutthroat oil baron to have enough disposable to make it rain on a stranger every now and then. You can just get YT rich and famous.
Now, I say this having only viewed one of his free money videos. But from what I saw the participants were well treated and appeared to be having fun.
That's an interesting question. Here is my amateur psychoanalyst take on Wonka. This is based on the Gene Wilder version of Wonka. It is the one with which I am most familiar.
Wonka was a shut in with sociopath tendencies. He hates other people because they're infinitely less intelligent than him. They see him as magical because of the things he creates, but to him the inventions are obvious. Other fictional characters with this trait: Rick Sanchez, Elwood Ralson.
He is a creative who wants to quit his job (maybe he got bored, or just got more interested in his Great Glass Elevator). But he doesn't want to close his business, because if he does that then the chocolate world will be taken over by the uncreative people that he hates. He doesn't care about his customers, he just cares about the creative process of chocolate-craft. Also, he loves his employees because they share his love of hard work, and he probably feels like a parent to them since he saved them from the horrors of their homeland.
He wants to find someone to take over his business. Someone who he knows will be capable of the creativity that he is. He hates children a little bit less than adults, so he concocts an elaborate factory tour/job interview because it was the only possible way for him to interview children.
So my answer the question, is Wonka the good guy, is yes. Because he worked hard to ensure that his creative process for chocolate-craft would continue to exist in the world after he was gone. He is an inventor that loved his invention.
Plus any harm that could have possibly be done to his factory guests, could easily be undone by his "magic". Just like Rick Sanchez.
This was fun. Thanks for asking.
How is he using "poor people"? Everyday people are "poor people"? I think that says more about you than him.
Yes, the views fund what he gives away. But until you or I start dedicating our lives to making money to give away, I don't think either of us has a leg to stand on and criticize him [for this specifically].
They also hit on subjects such as people claiming Mr Beast ruins people's lives by giving them gifts for which they can't afford to pay the associated taxes. And he makes it clear how he will buy back items so the person just ends up with cash, to pay the taxes and keep. Or they can keep it or sell it themselves.
You can certainly argue his satire was in bad taste. I'm not trying to gas up Mr Beast or claim that he doesn't engage in attention-seeking behavior. Such as this, look at how we're over here talking about him, spreading his brand.
But, as long as he's using that brand to drive views, to have fun making videos and engage in some sort of neo-grassroots philanthropy I don't see how he's the plague of video content.
At least her videos weren't, "look at minecraft funny game - my friend made a poop sound hehe" or "omg look at kiddy pool filled with ORBEEZ FUN TIME"
Candidly, with a hilariously not successful youtube but a solid career - I find it funny to imagine Mr. Beast "spending hours" coming up with "next level content" which in reality you'd be better off just paying a 7 year old with jolly ranchers to do.
As silly as it is for me to be the guy "defending Mr. Beast" of all people, I don't think you have any idea what he does.
From all I've seen and know about MrBeast, he is an upstanding guy doing great things that help others. I absolutely respect that and believe it is worth of praise.
However, I find the content itself to be absolutely not my cup of tea. Not in a sense that i find it bad or distasteful. There are tons of other "YT philanthropy" influencers that make content that feels either distasteful or exploitative (even if it might not actually be), but his content isn't that. I just struggle to find it interesting enough to watch. I tried a few times, but it simply cannot hold my attention at all.
This isn't MrBeast's fault, as he clearly has a massive audience that enjoys watching his content. It just simply isn't the content for me.
new content creators should try to not be discourage by this. at youtube's scale there will always be viral lowbrow content because that's what the majority of general public wants to consume. if your content is good and consistent the relevant people who follows your area will eventually find it from their algo.
Something that I ended up doing by accident was identifying a niche that a) was low risk (nothing political etc), b) had decent reach, and c) ended up with most of my traffic coming from "browse" and not "search".
Initially, I had no idea traffic coming from "browse" was indicative of content that would likely drive more long-term value outside of "news" videos.
Ironically, videos that feature community drama unfortunately still are my best performing videos.
We're talking about a platform whose first big success was "Charlie bit my finger". There's some useful information there but it's never been Wikipedia.
Since chasing "more" never ends, and every surpassed hurdle results in yet another one in the distance, it can quickly lead to burnout and asking yourself questions like, "why am I even doing this?". Worse, focusing too much on the metrics can cause you to do things that are ultimately counter-productive. For example, making a ton of videos optimized for clicking so that I could get 1M subscribers and monetize with ads is clearly a thing YT would like me to do. But to do that, you lean a little more into click-baity things, and start choosing topics based on their likelihood of being successful from a metrics perspective. And since frequency matters, you maybe cut corners on videos because it often makes more sense to put out more of lower quality than less of high quality if the objective is maximizing metrics. But then what are you left with, and are you proud of it?
If I could do it again, I would spent more time on answering the "what's it for?" question, and then ignore the metrics unless your answer ends up being, "To become the Mr. Beast of X". In my experience, the best benefits have been 1/ the serendipitous view that impresses someone and leads to a real-world opportunity and 2/ pride and reputational benefits in having the best video on a particular topic that then becomes the standard, and adds lots of value to lots of people. Those benefits are realized by taking care and making the best videos you possibly can, not by optimizing the metrics.
> "To become the Mr. Beast of X"
Not knowing Mr Beast this sentence sounds more like a pornhub advice :D
I'm not a huge YouTube user. But I'm not a complete neophyte. I probably only go on about once a week. I've been on the site for... 14 YEARS?!
WHAT THE HELL?!
Anyway. YouTube is well known for keeping people in very, very specific bubbles. Those bubbles are so strong, you will have a very hard time to get out of them even if you don't want to be in them!
Still trying to figure out how to get YouTube to stop suggesting videos of people streaming their crappy Call of Duty sessions. I don't want to watch any game streaming, let alone CoD, and YouTube keeps sending me videos of people acting like they're gods when really they were just lucky this one time, or obscuring what really happened, or straight up cheating. It's maddening. Downvotes do nothing. Editing my history does nothing. I'm stuck in this incredibly stupid bubble.
That you've never run into him on YouTube speaks to how the recommendation system works; given what you've watched, there's not a lot of reason to recommend him to you, so even though he's extremely popular, he's not clogging up your feed.
Practically speaking the engagement-centric approach this post appears to advocate for is likely to fail in the long run, if the goal is to build something lasting and not just a short-term experiment. For example, one of the more successful and lasting computing tutorial Youtubers is TheCherno, basically focusing on C++ and game engines and graphics. Clearly, a lot of effort goes into each post, and even though they're perhaps not as frequent, over time they do very well:
>If you watch some of my earlier videos there are a lot of “um’s” and “ers”...started with writing full scripts
I trained myself to go silent instead of ums/aahs/ers. I then changed how I recorded videos a bit so that I can simply use https://github.com/noisetorch/NoiseTorch to remove all the silent portions.
>Writing full scripts did have the benefit that they could more easily be converted into blog posts.
I'm kinda opposite. I was already consistently blogging and have now started adding videos (mostly for short tip posts, haven't tried for longer posts yet).
As someone struggling with the same affliction, might I ask how you trained for that?
Also, purposefully slowing down can help since you likely talk too fast when nervous anyway.
First-level table of contents:
> Subscriber growth
> Views
> Watch Time
> Impressions, Click-Through Rate and View Duration
> How I am improving my videos
> What’s Next?
Opening paragraphs, paraphrased:
> It takes a long time to grow on YouTube, and I knew this going in but I have been pleasantly surprised with my growth in the first month.
> Before October 2022, I had posted 3 videos, none of which had many views and I had a total of 51 subscribers.
> As of 1st November, I now have 135 subscribers.
One sentence summary: Posting consistently for 1 month increased subscriber count from 51 to 135.
How successful it was was almost directly dependent on my time commitment. These sorts of things almost always have a compounding sort of growth that benefits from lots of attention in a consistent timeframe.
The algorithms are also primed to show users something they already recently searched for or a profile you recently watched.
The odd content will rank well on Google and have maybe ~1-10yrs of extended viewership or traffic. But today's internet rewards newness.
This makes me think a text generating AI would (sadly) be a highly effective tool. I say "sadly" because I think about the front page of google's search results for something and all you see are meaningless blog posts which are written with buzzwords to satisfy SEO.
The clickbait is the result of an evolutionary process. You can't beat it de novo, you can only harness it.
It's one of the reasons it's so infuriating to some of us. "I Clicked This Link And You Won't Believe What Happened Next!" + Shocked Face is so easy it's almost insulting.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_Libs if you don't know this cultural reference.
It's a mystery, people are tortured by mysteries. "How the Contents of this Tiny Green Box Completely Changed My Priorities!"
There were one or more homeless teen spare-changers that loitered around Pioneer Square in Portland, OR in the 90s who would tell people riddles, and charge them for the answers.
(Because titles like this are the exception to the 'as in TFA' rule, and generally are de-Buzzfeedified either by submitter or mod.)
Even Veritasium, an otherwise reputable channel, has jumped this shark.
But I hate it. The change is a tangible downgrade that cheapens the channels who do it. I'm glad for them that they have a larger reach, but I'm no longer a part of that reach because I can't stomach the chintzy thumbnails and titles designed to appeal to first-graders. I voted with my feet on that change.
Maybe that's just me.
if you have to have an arrow pointed to something in your thumbnail. or have to make a shocking face, you do not value me or my time.
there are many other videos to watch. i have ignored many that follow this rather dumb trend. and i still can get to the bottom of my watch later, guys.
It’s no different.
Something something MLK quote something something.
There are, admittedly, rather a lot of them. I look over at my bookshelf and I could show you some myself. Nevertheless, it really is a better heuristic than a lot of people would care to admit.
Part of this is because covers have a lot of intentionality in them. People deliberately imbue them with information. I don't ignore them. Mind you, I might not come to the intended conclusions... to take one clear example, the intentional message being sent by romance book covers and the one I receive are fairly different. Nevertheless, in the end, both I and the publisher are generally satisfied by the transaction, even if they might prefer I buy it anyhow, I'm not in the target audience and they know that.
To continue the analogy, there are plenty of physics textbook manufacturers, and not all of them decide to use sex to sell their textbooks. Choosing to not engage with a blatant marketing tactic and picking another textbook is a perfectly valid action for someone of any age.
Choosing to use what agency I have available to me is hardly childish.
Shameless link here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZqirAnnqaCZ8lT8w7p2P...
I haven't posted it here yet as a "Show HN", because I don't think that I'm far enough along. But I have averaged more than one video a day since I started.
Disclaimer: This is 100% live coding in Vim. You are my rubber duck. I make mistakes. The most recent video will be going up soon, in which I track down a memory leak.
Last night I added "if..then" statements, but that video is not finished editing yet.
I don't have a massive following, and since I don't do the "fast paced, instant gratification" type of videos, I doubt that I'll ever develop a large following. But that's not the point. I wanted to put this out there simply because I thought that it should exist.
Also worth noting: This is not a copy of the "Crafting Interpreters" book by Robert Nystrom, although I think it's a great book!
I don't understand why anyone would watch this at normal speed. I see that live coding is a thing, but .. why?
Also, because it shows how software development actually happens. It shows how to solve syntax errors. How to think through problems. It shows the power of the tools. It demonstrates my ability, and also my lack thereof. It's why I love programming.
If you only want to see the finished product, then fine. There are plenty of products already in existence. But if you want to see how it's made, then you can now see that, too.
That, and I'm amazed at the power of things like Bison, Flex, Doxygen, ICU, Vim, etc., and it's a way to show it off.
It also shows how to approach the organization of a large project, and a few gems with the Makefile (in my opinion).
I know it's not for everyone, but I love stuff like this! I've watched people live code game engines, etc., but I couldn't find anything about coding a programming language. So I'm creating it myself.
James Hague wrote a thing about "coding as performance" 14 years ago that I think about pretty often: https://prog21.dadgum.com/28.html He's talking about cases where getting something crappy running fast is what matters most: "If you can write a program to solve the problem in less time than the tedium of slogging through the manual approach, then you win." I did this yesterday: I was trying to track down a segfault a coworker wanted more information about, and so I threw together a quick Python script (specific to this build of this program) that reformatted GDB's backtrace into something a little more comprehensible. It's dirty and probably nobody else will ever see it, but many people could have learned useful things if they'd had the chance to watch.
It can be entertaining to watch people who are much faster than I am.
That said, I've almost never watched anyone livecoding on a streaming video platform or on YouTube.
I like to watch other people code. I assume that somewhere in the world there's other people like me.
I echo some of the comments here about posting videos about things you want and not trying to play the YouTube game. Every time I have tried I've felt greasy, and it rarely helped.
Even for my non-live stream videos, I almost always do them all in 1 go with no editing. It helps me get good at speaking, is more natural and take a lot less time to finish.
My biggest problem has been motivation and time. I feel like I have a lot of videos I want to discuss, but doing the videos requires a certain energy that I've had trouble firing up lately.
For anyone interested in checking out my channel/vids: https://www.youtube.com/c/DustinBrett
Anyone have any recommendations for such a setup?
But at the same time it's also one where becoming successful often means suffering from crippling burnout, since it's very difficult to keep that schedule up without sacrificing everything else in your life, and forcing yourself to post content when you really didn't have any good ideas left. I know a lot of people that quit altogether because of that, or because of related issues (like getting RSI style hand injuries from working on stuff too much).
Not the case for me. I have two channels. One where I post stuff and another where I watch stuff. The channel that watches stuff subscribes to the channel that post stuff. It almost never show my videos. I have 303 subscribers and 7 views on my last video.
YouTube is broken as heck. At least 10% of my subscribers should be shown my videos.
But for me it feels like you work for youtube. You setup your room for them, Record hours of content for them, They even tell you you need to do it on a weekly basis if not daily...
And all for no pay, Or the priviledge of getting small change and forever fearing being "de-monetized"...
No thanks.
Youtube is comprised of one big ocean and a land with millions of tiny lakes: 1. A homogenous demographic that drives the growth of most major channels 2. A heterogenous demographic of niche hobbies and educational material
Your channel can never go viral if you cater to group 2. Each interest group is tiny. At best, you will get some of group 1 watching your niche channel out of osmosis.
Group 1 is mostly children. Despite what youtube reports, most billion-view videos are kids videos. Most users are children. There is a reason Beluga, pewdiepie, and Mr.Beast are top channels. If you aren't hawking that sort of thing, youtube is not a good market for you to grow in.
The problem is that it doesn't scale. After that first month honeymoon period, the numbers don't grow as fast. After 3 months, they basically stop growing. "Just consistently post" is not a sufficient recipe for "success".
Whether people like it or not, the production values involved in a piece of work have only the loosest correlation to whether it'll do well.
I am sure it will die of quite quickly but I have had 33 people subscribe since posting this an hour ago.
So thank you for everyone that has.
Does YouTube expose that metric? What does it mean?
It is well understood that the YouTube algorithm treats engagement as a significant positive signal to recommend your video to non-subscribers (or even, with enough traction, on the home page).
The exact way these numbers are combined in the algorithm isn't revealed (and I assume is ever changing).
> As you can see I am not there yet by a long shot!
> Generally, something should happen on screen every 4 - 6 seconds. If you are building an entertainment channel then this is more like 1 - 3 seconds.