A Taste of Attention
Recently the Youtube Algorithm has smiled on me, and one of my videos has been suggested to over 2 million people. This converted to 200,000 views and over 10,000 watch hours. These numbers aren’t life changing, but it’s been amazing to get my first taste of attention on the platform.
How I Got Here
I started making Youtube videos in 2014. I’ve never considered it a serious way to make money, but I enjoy sharing the things I love with the world. I like the idea of making some side money to get better video-making equipment and justify putting more effort into videos.
My main content before 2021 was gaming focussed, mostly Quake and Arena FPS videos. I’m very proud of some of these videos, but the most successful release flatlined at 8,000 views. I was extremely happy with this, but I didn’t have enough views to become a Youtube partner or begin to monetize videos. I didn’t view myself as having enough of a fanbase to bother with Patreon or other support platforms.
In mid-2021 I started a series of livestreams programming a Playstation 2 game, and uploading the VODs to Youtube. I knew the content had some appeal, simply due to the novelty. Nobody else had worked on a project like this. The views were ok, with some videos out-performing my average Quake videos for far less effort. The first video in the series continued to grow in views, and coming into the last quarter of this year it comfortably became my best performing video ever. Across my other videos I was seeing increased viewer numbers, and slow but persistent growth.
The Boom
In late November, for no discernible reason, The Algorithm decided my first Playstation 2 video was worth showing to people. Almost overnight I had 100,000 impressions and converted ~10% of those into views. People were clicking on my first video, and many were clicking onto at least one other video. I started getting a noticable uptick in subscribers, and was recieving ~30,000+ views in a 48 hour sliding window for over a week.
Naturally this feels amazing. People are clicking on my content and I’ve had some great engagement with subscriptions and/or comments.
Reflection and Analysis
Most of my impressions and views are coming from one video. This is good, I love that people are finding my series, but unfortunately this was the first programming livestream I had ever done. The video has rough edges, and I don’t present my ideas in the best way. In 6 months of programming streams I’ve learned a lot about what I am doing, so it’s sad to see so much attention going to one of my roughest videos that doesn’t represent my best work.
While I’m excited to say I have had 200,000 views, there is still a lot that could be better about the numbers. The videos getting attention aren’t my best work and they are not generating the engagement and watch time that I want.
My average view time is very low. For videos that are usually an hour or longer I am disappointed by how few people are watching more than a few minutes. I think this is something I need to be aware of in future videos - if anything is rough or awkward at the start of a stream many people will not tolerate it at all and click away from the video. I may need to edit videos and have higher production value to hold my viewer’s attention better.
As my impressions have continued to climb my clickthrough rate has dropped from >10% to ~6%. I don’t know how to interpret this, maybe it is natural to see the clickthrough rate drop as more people are suggested the video. I feel like >10% in my first 6 months may have been a fluke/oddity and was never maintainable without serious work. I’m not concerned about this drop, but I definitely want this number to be higher. I felt that I had done better with thumbnails as time went on, but the data seems to fly in the face of that. I need to experiment more to see if existing videos perform differently with different thumbnails to work out which “style” is ideal.
In the future if I want to maintain my current viwer numbers or grow I need more videos getting attention. New releases since I “blew up” are recieving more views than before, but nowhere near the first video which has been widely recommended. I don’t expect every video to be so widely suggested, but I believe that I can produce more videos with the same kind of appeal in the future.
Ambitions, Monetization
I now qualify to monetize my videos, but because my average view duration is low I worry that putting ads on videos will drive engagement down. I do not think the monetary value of ads with my current viewership is worth sacrificing engagement, especially because I expect the current pattern of views is temporary. While I will be creating a Patreon or other subscription/support option, it isn’t clear what I could expect to earn from this. I think it will be more beneficial for me to invest in community, and giving people who want to support me special privileges to vote on and shape my content.
Overall I think I have hit something exciting that people are interested in. If I continue to grow, and continue to refine the quality of my streams, I will hopefully have new videos which get recommended by The Algorithm. My ambition is to build a community of people interested in programming from around the world to share in my journey to build interesting things. If there are people in that community who want to support me financially that would be excellent, but at this point I am far more interested in community than money.
I need to start a Discord server so that people can chat and form the foundations of a community. It would be good to have somewhere to engage with viewers outside of Youtube comments, and seek feedback on ideas. A Discord server might also be a good place to trial video thumbnails to see if my viewers have a better intuition about what will work than I do.