My last update on my YouTube journey thus far was back in September 2018. So I thought it about time I posted a further progress update.
Important Numbers
If you watch YouTube, then you’ll be familiar with the adverts that play before, during and/or after some of the videos you watch. This happens when a video is ‘monetised’ as YouTube express it. Effectively, the channel gets paid a small amount of money whenever an ad is actually watched beyond a certain point by a viewer.
However, before any channel is allowed to monetise its videos, then there are two important numbers that need to be met:
- The number of Subscribers: 1000
- The amount of Watch Time: 4,000 hours in the previous 12 months
Subscribers speaks for itself as a metric – simply the number of people who are subscribed to your channel. Watch Time, as you might infer from the title, is the amount of time people have spent watching your videos.
So, how am I doing against these two key metrics?
Progress against these numbers
I currently have 247 subscribers and 510 hours of watch time. This represents around 25% of where I would need to be against both metrics in order to be able to monetise my videos. My first video was released on 16th July – so just over 10 months ago.
All in all, on the surface, not so good you might think.
However, once I dig a little deeper into the numbers, then actually I’m quite encouraged by my progress thus far. Not so much in terms of raw numbers – which are still low – but in terms of trajectory.
Many YouTube ‘gurus’ will tell you that YouTube is a long game. Yes, there are examples of people who ‘go viral’ and grow from zero to enormous quite quickly. However, in the majority of cases, it is a much slower process.
Let’s now break down these numbers a little further – starting with Watch Time.
Watch Time
4000 hours = 240,000 minutes. Therefore, people need to view your videos on average for around 658 minutes every day.
Keeping the numbers nice and simple, let’s take the 9 month period from 15 July 2018 to 14 April 2019.
During the first 3 months, my daily views were just 31 minutes per day. This is a mere 5% of what it would take to hit my 4,000 hour target. In other words, I’d need to increase this number twenty fold. By the second 3 months, then I was up to 13% (87 minutes per day) and in the last 3 months that has gone up to 25% (161 per day).
As you can see, every 3 months I have more or less doubled the previous period’s watch time.
Being extremely optimistic, if I can keep more or less doubling my figures every 3 months, then in 6 months I’ll be generating enough minutes per day to make the 4,000 hours possible a few months later.
Subscribers
Now let’s look at Subscribers. During the first 3 month period, I was, on average, getting 0.43 new subscribers per day (although of course this figure is skewed by the initial flurry of friends and family who helped out). By the second 3 months this had risen to 0.72 and in the final 3 months it was at 1.15 new subscribers per day. Again, assuming I’m able to double this rate every 6 months, then 1000 should be achievable in early 2020.
Of course, this is optimistic and progress is almost certainly not going to be linear. I plateaued just recently. However, this was probably because I became ill and missed 4 uploads. Luckily, I’m back on full form and have resumed my regular schedule now. So far things appear to be speeding up again.
YouTube recommending my content
However, what is very interesting is the growth of Watch Time coming from YouTube recommending my content. This is through things like YouTube Search, Suggested Videos (those that appear alongside the one you’re watching as a suggestion to watch next) and other features.
Priming the pump
Before I started to actually do my Tommy’s Piano Corner videos, I created the channel and uploaded a video of myself playing Debussy’s ‘La Fille aux Cheveux de Lin’. This video was posted on 13th March and in the 3 months that followed it got zero views. This shows that just because you post a video, doesn’t mean that YouTube will bring it into the search results when someone searches for ‘Debussy Piano’ for example. I was fairly convinced that initially it is necessary to ‘prime the pump’ so to speak. If YouTube sees that people are watching the videos, then the algorithm is more likely to surface them.
To achieve this, I called on my Facebook friends by posting a link on my personal Facebook timeline and asking them to watch the video. I also had a set of close friends that I would WhatsApp on the release of each video and they would click the link and let it play through. This meant that most of my views came from people clicking on my videos from outside YouTube (either WhatsApp or Facebook) – what YouTube refers to as ‘external’ traffic.
Converted into results
I stopped pestering my WhatsApp friends by mid January as I had started to get the trickle of organic traffic from YouTube that I needed. Now, only 25% or so of my watch time comes from ‘external’ traffic – meaning much more is coming from YouTube and my own subscribers on the platform. The reason this is a good thing is that once YouTube does surface your content organically, aside creating and uploading the video, there is very little extra work to do.
Promotion from other social platforms
However, I’m not saying that external traffic isn’t important. Relying on YouTube to ‘promote’ my videos will probably work in the longer term. I noticed that in the month or so I was pretty inactive on my channel due to my illness, it kept ticking over – even without my uploading any new content. However, to keep my numbers growing, promoting my videos from outside YouTube is equally important.
Good places I have found are Facebook, Twitter and Reddit as you might guess. Facebook has piano-related ‘Groups’ of which I’m an active member, Reddit has a piano ‘Subreddit’ that I contribute to pretty much daily. On Twitter of course you can follow people of similar interests so they are more likely to read your tweets.
Posting strategy
On these platforms, I avoid just continually posting ‘watch my video’ type links. Rather, as people ask questions on topics for which I have already created a video (and it happens often), then I’ll answer the question and at the bottom of my answer link my video. In that way, the odd direct ‘plug’ for one of my things is treated with more patience. To be honest, I was already a member of these before I started the YouTube and always enjoyed contributing. Looking up the video link and pasting it in is just an extra 10 seconds on top of something I was doing anyway.
This is less true on my Tommy’s Piano Corner Facebook Page. I need to work harder on posting independent content here to make it work better. Facebook will purposely not show your posts to even those who have ‘liked’ your page if they too often link to something off the Facebook platform.
I’ll post a further update perhaps when my monthly watch time has double from where it is now.
