That's about 118,000 views to all my videos on the channel.
This is how much I've got the past month on that gaming channel,
That's about 34,000 views.
So when I tell you that this is not good enough, I mean it because I'm living it. I'm not saying it to be mean or cruel or elitist. I'm saying it because it is 100% true.
I'm not allowed to say how much I am making but I can say this: I can't buy a brand new Playstation 3 with the amount I make every month, let alone enough to make this a full time job.
I need to say this because there are some Partners who believe seeing thousands and thousands of views means they are doing well. I hate to burst your bubble, but you are not.
You need to make millions of views every month in order to be successful at Youtube.
Every video on your channel should have, at the bare minimum, 100k views. And even that is scrapping at the bottom of the barrel instead of reaching for the stars, because millions and millions of views per month is not only possible but required in order to be able to do Youtube as a full time job or even build a company where you employ other people.
Now what I do believe is this: with the amount of traffic I am receiving I should be able to build upon this and turn it into millions of views. I just don't understand how to do that yet, because I suck at marketing.
But I do not believe for a second that I am successful at Youtube. I'm not. I will not be successful until I am getting millions of views per month, and I will not be "satisfied" until I have billions. This is because my goal is to build a company, not to sit around and play videogames all day.
PS: You might think my subscriber counts are good, since I gained 532 in the past few months. It's not. If I was doing well I would be receiving hundreds of subscribers every day.
I have said before that AdWords is terrible for Youtube Partners unless they have a big pile of money to blow. I could write a lengthy and detailed post about why, but I'm pretty sure the only thing you need to see is the following screenshot:
"21% effective", my ass. Try 0% effective since that is how many clicks I received; zero.
I received no clicks at all. How the hell can this campaign be interpreted as ANYTHING but completely and utterly INEFFECTIVE?!
But don't just take my word for it. Unlike practically every other Google product, AdWords actually has a customer service number so you can call and talk to a live person about how to use the service. If you tell them you don't have a lot of money to spend they will try to encourage you to spend hundreds of dollars a day at the bare minimum, because you need millions of impressions using AdWords to get any clicks and the competition is now so fierce that you may need to pay a whole dollar (or more) for just one impression.
By encouraging us to pay for clicks from AdWords campaigns you aren't helping us, "Play Big" anymore than iUniverse, PublishAmerica and Author House help people publish and sell their books.
Google, whatever happened to, "Don't Be Evil" ?
I supposed if I had a couple thousand dollars I could experiment with different keywords and bid amounts -- but I don't have the money to play a keyword fishing game on AdWords, casting my ad into different sections of the internet until something bites.
Don't get me wrong, Google has made a lot of products that are extremely useful to me and everyone else reading this blog. After all, they do run Youtube, AdSense, Analytics, Google Sites and Blogger; all of which are important products relative to what we do here.
The problem I have is that when Google advertises AdWords as a good way for Youtube Partners to market videos, they are being dishonest. AdWords is not a valid solution, and the constant advertising of AdWords to Youtube Partners (with Creator blog posts, and even popups on our Youtube account pages) comes across like a car salesman trying to convince a single mom that a brand new Mercedes-Benze is the best vehicle for her to haul her kids to school in. In both situations there are significantly cheaper solutions that provide better results.
The point of this post is to warn Partners who don't have a lot of money to stay the hell away from AdWords, because it will do nothing but waste your money.
I first got into the internet back in 1996, and taught myself HTML to make a variety of really crappy websites, most of which were fan sites (tapping into already existing audiences). Some of them were fairly successful though, and I took part in many ad display network programs to earn myself a few hundred dollars a month. I was 14 when I started doing that, and I got a good grasp of the basics of search engine optimization while doing so.
I ended up pretty much abandoning the scene when I joined the Army at 17, and when I got out I wandered around for years trying to figure out exactly what to do with my life. So by the time I realized I wanted to be a film-maker and focus on video streaming as my method of distribution, pretty much all of the really great domain names were taken.
However, I have managed to secure a few domain names I consider to be pretty good (based on how often the related keywords are searched for on Google)
As you can see by clicking on this screenshot, the keyword "rpg" has low competition but a hell of a lot of global and local monthly searches. This is good for me because my show is called 'The RPG Fanatic'.
What isn't so good is that almost every domain involving 'rpg' is taken because I'm not the only one who can use the Google keyword tool.
Despite this challenge, these are the domains I've acquired over the years,
I was also able to obtain some domains which were selected to capitalize on multiple keyword searches.
For example,
rpgsworld.com (I imagine this is because there was an old very popular webcomic called 'RPG World', but it hasn't updated in years. I haven't yet used this domain for anything)
So I have some good domains that, in theory, are positioned to best capitalize on search traffic.
The problem is I'm unsure how to best use them. I can't just make a network of blogs that have identical content because search engines now penalize content mirroring. And I don't have massive amounts of free time to five or six completely different versions of an article.
I also can't just have the un-used domains redirect to one or two blogs, because search engines don't actually pay any attention to redirect URLs. So the ones currently re-directing to other sites are never going to appear on Google, and that makes them useless for search engine optimizing (I need to do something else with www.rpg.us.com)
I'm open to suggestions. One of the ideas I'm kicking around is making a subreddit but I'm unsure how to best handle that.
Squidoo is a blog publishing format similar to ehow.com, though instead of calling it an article they call it a 'lens'. I think the site was invented by hipsters.
You might wonder what the value is in embedding your videos into blogs.
The answer is quite simple,
Search engines cannot data mine videos for text keywords.
Some don't even pay that much attention to the description section of a Youtube video. Blogs, however, can include a large number of text and sit on nice domains like blogger.com and squidoo.com, which have really high scores with the search engines.
"It shouldn't be too hard," I thought. "I just need to copypasta my episode scripts and embed the video at the top, like I do with all my otherblogs."
Oh how wrong I was.
The folks at Squidoo are not stupid and realized people might try something like this. Within a day after publishing my "lenses" they have an army of mining bots scour the internet looking for cases of plagiarism, which led them to the paragraphs of my blog I had stuck into some of my Youtube videos to fill it with juicy keywords, or my tumblr and blogger posts which I also include snippets of my script along with the embedded video, for the same reason I was making the Squidoo pages.
Squidoo's automated process locked several of my articles after noticing these "plagiarism" cases. While I was able to overturn them all eventually by sending a nice email to the Squidoo team explaining the writing belonged to me, it still took a week or two for the lock on the lens to be lifted. This obviously was slowing things down, so I thought I would try to rewrite some of my scripts, but even that wasn't enough. If I used so much as a sentence that was the same as in my Youtube videos, Squidoo would recognize it and lock my lens.
I ended up focusing on making lenses for older videos which I hadn't posted the scripts anywhere else before, but this also meant I can't post those script into any other blogs either else my lens will get locked down.
It's been a few weeks since I started doing this, and I haven't received that much traffic to my lenses (around 100 visits total since I started doing this last month). So much for that plan.
However, what I find interesting is that the majority of views are coming from Google searches. I've also received some traffic from sites like reddit. I know the Facebook traffic is coming from having plugged some pages on my personal Facebook wall and Fan Pages, but I can't explain the other traffic as anything but the result of other people sharing the lenses.
The Google searches are the really great thing though; there aren't many of them but getting any traffic from Google within a few weeks of making a page is pretty good. I'm actually getting more weekly Google Search traffic to my Squidoo lenses than I've been receiving to my blogger and tumblr blogs, and I've been doing those for years.
Even if the Squidoo farm doesn't lead to massive amounts of traffic, at the very least I can include some links back to my website in the lenses. This does help improve my website's PageRank.
The unfortunate drawback of being a Youtube Partner is that you inherit all of the risks that a conventional television celebrity would inherit without any of the financial advantages those celebrities have.
What "risk" am I talking about?
The chance that you might gain the attention of crazy people whose lives have so little meaning they need to obsess over trivial nonsense, to the point they wholeheartedly believe elaborate fantasies they have invented about themselves and decided to involve you in; otherwise known as 'stalkers'.
I was once click bombed and had my reputation digitally assassinated by a group of stalkers. This was a very traumatic experience for me because they were trying to not just drag my name through the mud but also take away my business' ability to earn revenue on Youtube.
Here is a video I created while I was going through the experience,
I'm telling you this upfront so you know two things; firstly, that I was click bombed and managed to keep my Adsense, and secondly that I understand every emotional thing someone who is being click bombed is going through.
This guide should help you retain your AdSense if you are being click bombed and if you haven't yet, it can still help you by explaining what click bombing is, why people do it and how you can detect it before it is too late.
Understanding the Motivations of Click-Bombers
There are some uneducated folks who will insist Youtube Partners who get click-bombed have done something to "deserve" the harassment. These arguments are incredibly misinformed about the psychology of the mentally unbalanced.
I mean, can you tell me what Jodie Foster did to convince John Hinckley, Jr to shoot President Reagan?
I'll tell you what she did; ABSOLUTELY <CENSORED> NOTHING!
However if you ask John Hinckley, Jr what she did he will weave you a fantastical tale of romance, adventure, and all kinds of other nonsense - all of which only ever existed inside his imagination!
Stalkers are a problem for everyone, but your probability of getting a stalker dramatically increases as awareness of 'you' increases. This is why celebrities get lots of stalkers, and Youtube Partners are no exception. If other people value what you say and you build a following -- even a modest one -- you can be certain that someone is going to demand your full attention simply because they believe if someone like you gives them attention they must be pretty important. Basically they want to leech off your popularity to make themselves feel special.
If you really get to the heart of it, stalkers are not at all interested in what the person they are stalking is doing. It is quite irrelevant to them. The stalker is focused entirely on themselves and what they can get out of the stalking, and that my friends is attention; and the worst is that the attention doesn't necessarily need to come from you.
The attention can come from other people, like angry members of your fanbase, law enforcement officials or even other stalkers with a like-mind.
I should stress the latter, because it is very relevant to what we will talk about here. Before everyone became super connected through the internet, stalkers were isolated from other stalkers. They were loners and the kinds of crazy stupid things they could do were fairly limited.
However, now because of places like Youtube, Facebook, Skype and 4chan, they can form tight-knit stalker communities without needing to leave their bedrooms. They form strong friendships with other stalkers and assist one another in their stalking activities, sharing information and tactics to obtain attention.
This is a significant problem and it's not being well addressed by places like Youtube and Facebook because there is so little information about these subcultures and how they function, even though the truth is they function much like any other kind of internet subculture; only instead of sharing images of funny cats they share people's home addresses and software for clickbombing Youtube Partners.
Harassing you simply becomes an activity shared by the group, fed by the elaborate fantasies they invent about what you have done to deserve their wrath in order to justify their actions. This new breed of internet troll does not necessarily harass people to gain attention from the target, but rather to be praised by the group for how much of a good troll they are.
Of course, feeding the trolls by giving them the attention they crave makes things worse.
So I know about this stuff because I was stalked last year. I had information about myself and my family posted all over the net, including phone numbers. Dozens of videos and blog articles from anonymous trolls were made accusing me of everything from being a child molester to a dishonorably discharged soldier, and none of it was true. They dislike bombed my videos and internet movie database listings. And it required a strong effort to get Youtube and other services they used to remove this material; even to this day some of it still exists.
You might think that when third parties come across their videos, forum posts and comments on my videos, it will be obvious the stalkers are trolling.... but that isn't always the case. Sometimes the trolling appears to be something else entirely and successfully deceives people. Rumors tend to be perpetrated by people who seek to obtain a measure of admiration from the person or group they are leaking information to., and some of these folk are not against fabricating information. Several individuals came out of the woodwork claiming to have some special insight or relationship with me in order to gain praise from the group for having shared the "information"; some of this shared "information" was a mixture of true information (stuff you could find in Google searches) and lies.
For example, my Youtube page listed my location as San Antonio, TX and I had mentioned in videos that I was a disabled Veteran. An individual suddenly appeared who made a series of videos claiming that he knew me from my active duty days and he met me when I was stationed at Fort Sam Houston, which is located in San Antonio, TX.
The truth is that I have never in my entire life been inside Fort Sam Houston; I had only recently moved to San Antonio, TX. Everything this individual said about me was a complete lie, based on what little information he had gathered about me from my Youtube page. But it was enough to convince several people in the stalker community that what he said was true, and they spread his lies in their own videos and blog posts about me. And he gained a lot of praise from his fellow stalkers for his actions.
I spent months trying to do damage control and ensure I also posted wherever they were spreading lies, explaining the truth so that others who stumble across the posts in Google search results for my name don't get the wrong idea. However, it was like chopping heads off a hydra; responding to one forum post simply resulted in several more popping up and soon there was a feeding frenzy as several troll communities banded together to milk whatever attention they might get out of cyber stalking me. Pretty much every blog I own was attacked, including my Facebook fan page which forced me to disable any of my fans from posting to it for a week.
I knew that giving them attention would not make things better, but I felt I had no other choices. Unlike some who are stalked I did not have a large fanbase to drown out the lies. If someone posts an insult on a Madonna video you will find at least a few dozen die-hard Madonna fans quickly respond to defend Madonna and legions more will click the 'Dislike' and 'Spam' buttons on the comment to make it hidden. This is not the case for someone like me who has a very small fanbase for my show.
However, the harassment only quieted down once two things occurred,
1) I started ignoring the trolls completely. I also disabled ratings on my videos so they could no longer dislike bomb them, and made posting comments to my videos and blogs approval only. This deprived them of ways to get attention from others by harassing me, since nobody could see their harassment.
Depriving them of ways to spam my videos infuriated them initially, but they eventually got bored and stopped trying to spam my videos.
2) Their group imploded on itself. This shouldn't surprise anyone; there is no honor among thieves and the same goes for the mentally disturbed psychopaths who get their kicks by harassing people on the internet. Eventually they started turning on one another, using the secrets everyone shared about themselves to harass the weaker members of their group who were now a much easier target than I was.
(If you are wondering why I know so much about this, it is because I was sent a Skype chat log from the stalker group which detailed the whole shebang from their point of view. Like any good soldier, I studied it. After all, if you want to defeat your enemy you must first understand your enemy).
My assessment of the situation is that the stalkers turned to click bombing as a final resort in order to demonstrate to the target and each another that they have power and influence. The click bombings occurred after their months of 'Report this video' flag-bombing and Google forum posts did not result in the loss of my Partner account, and I began completing ignoring them. So they turned to click bombing to "teach me a lesson" and the lesson I was supposed to learn is that they have power over me.
I imagine this is the same motivation for all click bombers; to demonstrate they have power and are important.
When their actions failed to revoke my Partnership they became frustrated at each other and the group fell apart on its own due to the internal conflicts.
My primary occupational specialty in the United States Army was 11B; that's Infantry. I can tell you that the absolute worst situation you could ever find yourself in as foot soldier is one where you cannot go on the offensive and all you can do is hold a position, defending yourself against wave upon wave of attack.
This is because the enemy has all of the advantages; they can attack you whenever they want and from whatever direction they want. They can bolster their forces with reserves, whereas your forces are surrounded. And because you are trying to hold a position the only resources you have are those with you in the position, whereas the enemy can keep supplying their forces with more and more resources.
And this is true in many other things, including publishing content on the internet.
The unfortunate thing about click-bombings is that you cannot "attack" the click bombers, and you cannot "recruit" anyone to help you defend against the click-bombings. You also have very limited means to defend yourself due to lack of information on what they are doing, such as what videos they are targeting. This is because AdSense doesn't tell you what videos earned what clicks, and Analytics is very slow to update this information.
Step 1) Monitor Your AdSense Like a Hawk
All you can do is defend against their attacks and hold your position, but unlike real-life you cannot hear a gunshot or explosion to alert you to the attack happening. Click-bombings are silent attacks and there is only ONE place you can even see that they are taking place.
Your AdSense account.
I will repeat this for emphasis: The ONLY place you can see that a clickbombing is happening is from your AdSense.
Youtube Analytics WILL NOT tell you it is taking place. This is because Analytics does not update in real time and often has a delay of 2-4 days before it has actually made anything resembling a realistic earning statement, let alone an accurate view count. AdSense, on the other hand, is updated in real time.
By the time Analytics finally updates your account may already be shut down.
Everyone who uses AdSense should religiously monitor their AdSense account; and I am not exaggerating this.. You must catch it happening within the first few hours or your AdSense might be shut down by Google's automatic algorithms for detecting invalid click activity.
I check my Adsense several times a day as a force of habit whenever I check my email.
If you are a Partner through another network (like Machinima for example) there is no way for you to know if you are being click bombed and hopefully someone at that service will be looking out for this stuff.
For everyone else who has their own AdSense connected to their Youtube account, this is what a clickbombing in progress looks like when it first begins,
This is a screenshot I took of the first clickbombing attack that happened to me. I caught it within 2 hours of the attack's start (I know this because I had checked my AdSense an earlier, and then on a whim checked it again before going to bed. Plus the screenshot clearly says I last logged in two hours prior). I snapped this screenshot as soon as I recognized what it was.
For those unfamiliar with AdSense I will explain what you are seeing in the photo, and I have circled the only important information to us concerning click bombings (my earnings and other personal information has also been deleted as displaying that would violate the AdSense terms of service agreement).
'Hosted AdSense for Content' is the label AdSense uses for Youtube earnings. I don't know why they don't make it more obvious, but that is what it is.
'Page views' is the number of times an ad was displayed on your Youtube videos.
'Clicks' is the number of times someone clicked on an ad.
'Page CTR' is the click through ratio of your videos. Generally speaking you should never see a Page CTR that is higher than 15%. Anything more than that is incredibly suspicious because the overwhelming majority of people DO NOT click on ads. Whenever you see large numbers of clicks on ads, you are most likely being click bombed (This is something even advertisers should be aware of, so they can realize when they are being ripped off by ad display networks).
You will notice in the above screenshot my Page CTR was about 37%. So you might think to yourself, "Oh, your Page CTR was not that high. It's just 37%. You were just over-reacting."
This is the screenshot I took when I refreshed the page,
The Page CTR is now 68.78%. Still think I was over-reacting? I hope not.
(I actually have the entire Skype log of the group who was doing this click bombing to my channel. It was sent to me a few months later when the group fell apart due to internal drama between the members, and basically they all started turning on one another. The log detailed about six months of harassment and included the organizing and execution of the click bombing attacks, and the dates of the log matched the activity in my records.)
Anyway AdSense eventually started trying to fix the damage, and dropped the earnings. I can't show you how much it was but at certain points it was saying I had earned over a thousand dollars. Had I been paid those earnings the advertisers would have been very upset because they had been ripped off, and that is ultimately what the click bombers do; they try to make it look like the Youtube Partner is having their ads click bombed.
Why would a stalker want to do this? It's because Google assumes the only people who might be benefited from click bombings are the owner of the channel, so they have an algorithm that will disable your AdSense if it detects a large amount of click activity. The account remains disabled until a live person at Google investigates it. The problem is it can take weeks, even months, for anyone to ever respond to you.
Meanwhile you will lose your Youtube Partnership because in order for an account to retain 'Partner' status it MUST be associated with an AdSense account. Even worse, some Partners who have had their Adsense disabled have attempted to make a new AdSense account and connect their account to it, but Google has a policy that says an individual may only have one AdSense account and making additional accounts will result in the termination of all accounts, so eventually those Adsense accounts get detected and closed. Eventually the Youtube Partnership is lost.
Essentially, click bombers use Google's own policies against Youtube Partners they wish to harass by tricking the algorithms into shutting the account down.
This must be done from the AdSense account that is affected. Include as much information as possible. Feel free to even file several dozen emails, to make sure someone sees it!
Additionally, I submitted an email to Youtube Partner support which included screenshots of the invalid click activity and the following message,
"To whom it may concern,
I am being click bombed, as these
screenshots demonstrate. Picture 7 shows that I have attempted to
disable ads on my videos yet ads are still showing and the click bombing
is continuing. I own the Youtube Partner channels jfreedan,
TheRPGFanatic and NinjaGKaiser. As the clicks are independent of views, I
don't know what channel is being attacked.
I hope you will not disable my Partner accounts, as I have done
everything I possibly can do to prevent this aside from deleting my
channels.
Carey Martell
ManagingMember, Martell Brothers Studios, LLC"
I received the following reply,
"Thank you for emailing YouTube Partner Support.
You can find an answer to your question at the following Partner Support
resources.
- Find educational materials and chances to connect with the creator
community at the YouTube Creator Hub: http://www.youtube.com/creators/
- Interact with and get answers to your questions from other Partners and
YouTube experts at the YouTube Partner Forum: http://goo.gl/oeT6
- Search for step-by-step guidance and platform/feature information in the
YouTube Partner Help Center: http://goo.gl/EW893
- Stay up-to-date with known site issues at the YouTube Known Issues Page:http://goo.gl/MRSJ
You can also sign up for our product and program-related email
communications from within your YouTube account by following these
instructions: http://goo.gl/GvTRr.
Thanks,
The YouTube Partner Support Team
This is obviously a worthless form letter that provided me with no useful information, but that is beside the point.
The important thing is that someone at Youtube Partner Support might have forwarded my email to someone else who handles invalid click activity at AdSense.
Even if that didn't happen, I now have a record that I promptly and correctly reported the invalid click activity was occurring to several parties at Google
This is important because if I did have my Partnership shut down I would be able to use this email in efforts to convince someone at Google that I was responsible in monitoring my AdSense click activity and should have it restored. This is a big deal because I have no record of my invalid click activity submissions, because Google does not send you a copy of the report you submit nor any email indication that they received it.
It is not enough to simply do one or two things when defending against something like this. You must use all possible resources at your disposal and take action to help yourself in the worst case scenario, which is having your Partnership revoked.
By emailing Partner Support ahead of time, you make it easier for the decision to be appealed and your Partnership re-instated should that occur.
Step 3) Disable ALL Ads on EVERY Video!
Having said all of this, you need to physically disable ads on every video you have put up. This is because the option to disable ads on all videos on your account does absolutely nothing.
I don't care what the text says. It is broken. It does NOT stop displaying ads on your videos. Ads continue to be displayed and they keep clicking away. After toggling ads off using that box, I waited for TWO HOURS for the ads to stop being displayed and ads CONTINUED until I literally went into each and every video and disabled the ads manually.
You must go into EVERY video you have monetized and uncheck ALL the boxes for ads. If you are like me and have hundreds of videos on all your accounts, this can take over an hour to do and is incredibly tedious.
But it is the ONLY way to make the clickbombings STOP.
Do this to ALL videos you have!
I did not want to shut off my ads. I actually waited several days for AdSense or Youtube Partner support to respond, and in the meantime I left ads on my videos and kept submitting invalid click reports. I never heard anything back from AdSense about this matter. The click-bombings only stopped when I shut off my ads, because the trolls got bored or thought they had won.
I then left ads off my accounts for two weeks to ensure I got off the radar of the stalkers, so they could feel like they "won" and find something else to do.
Unfortunately this means the only way to protect yourself is to lose money. That sucks.
I wish I had better advice to give you, but Youtube has been very unhelpful in assisting Partners with this problem. Sure, my account wasn't disabled but had they communicated with me and re-assured me my account would not be disabled, I would have been a lot less stressful for that entire period of time. I also got little to no assistance from other Partners, as they had no experience with the matter or wanted to chime in about how it must be my fault and I deserve it.
Nobody who is click bombed "deserves it". Click-bombing is a malicious scam that is easily performed by anyone. All it requires is any software designed to enhance your mouse so you spam several clicks with just one mouse click, and use software that makes it appear that you have multiple IP addresses. It requires no actual technical skills to perform.
Someone who has never used a computer could be taught to do it in five minutes, it is that easy.
I could post the method here but I do not want to assist anyone who is seeking to do it. But it is a childishly easy thing to perform and Google should be embarrassed that their ad display network is vulnerable to it and that their own policies designed to protect advertising clients are actually hurting the people who make Youtube profitable -- the Partners.
I am not a psychologist. I feel I should put this disclaimer at the start so folks don't get the wrong impression.
I am not a psychologist but I am interested in the subject. I took a class in it during high school, and I've tried to keep up with journals and whatnot, but lately I haven't had much time with all this Youtube stuff to focus on.
Anyway there is a psychological model written by Noel Burch called, 'Four stages of competence'. It's something that has stuck with me for a long time and I'd like to share it with you, because I think it is very relevant to what I'm going to talk about today.
The individual does not understand or know how to do something and does not necessarily recognize the deficit. They may deny the usefulness of the skill. The individual must recognize their own incompetence, and the value of the new skill, before moving on to the next stage. The length of time an individual spends in this stage depends on the strength of the stimulus to learn.
Conscious incompetence
Though the individual does not understand or know how to do something, he or she does recognize the deficit, as well as the value of a new skill in addressing the deficit. The making of mistakes can be integral to the learning process at this stage.
Conscious competence
The individual understands or knows how to do something. However, demonstrating the skill or knowledge requires concentration. It may be broken down into steps, and there is heavy conscious involvement in executing the new skill.
Unconscious competence
The individual has had so much practice with a skill that it has become "second nature" and can be performed easily. As a result, the skill can be performed while executing another task. The individual may be able to teach it to others, depending upon how and when it was learned.
When I look at this model and think about myself as a marketer of Youtube videos, I think I am in the second stage, Conscious incompetence. I am aware that I suck at marketing, I'm trying to get better and I'm making a lot of mistakes as I try new things out.
I believe that if I keep at it I can eventually advance to the higher stages but only if I'm willing to keep putting myself out there.
Here is the thing though; I think, for our purposes of discussion, #3 and #4 should be switched. Conscious competence should be ranked higher than unconscious competence.
Here is why.
There are many highly successful Youtube Partners who give the same tired advice, usually in some kind of webinar or video blog which is promoted on Youtube Creator space. It usually goes like this.
-Post videos every day on some kind of schedule. (Even though many big Partners are like The Angry Video Game Nerd, who only ever released two videos a month at their most productive period and has often missed a release date. Constantly releasing a stream of content on a steady schedule might be helpful but can't be necessary for success, because not every big Partner does it. )
-Engage with your audience and respond to comments and PMs (which I have always done and while it helps maintain subscribers it doesn't really help you recruit new viewers)
So why do the big Partners give this kind of advice when these things don't actually do much to improve your views?
My thinking is that these Partners are unconsciously competent. They know what they do to maintain their subscribers and build from them, but they don't actually know how to gain a lot of views and subscribers becauseother than make the videos that went viral, they weren't directly part of the marketing process that developed their fanbase.
They are people like HDCYT. If 'Charlie Bit My Finger' had never been posted onto CollegeHumor.com then we probably wouldn't be talking about it right now. It'd be just one more home movie someone randomly posted onto Youtube to share with a relative.
For many big Youtubers, they got super lucky with the related video algorithms, which made it very easy to gain awareness. The honest truth is that regardless of what you made, so long as it was slightly interesting and had relevant keywords in the title and description, it would get promoted on youtube in the Related Videos feed. I experienced this myself with my videos during 2007-2009.
The "quality" of the videos had very little to do with it, and I think still has little to do with it. I think people who tell you to make "quality" videos are incredibly misinformed about what is required to make a video go viral; "quality" is a highly subjective thing.
What isn't subjective is posting a video onto the front page of a website that has 100k+ views a day and telling people to go look at it, or assembling an army of people with vast social network reach to plug videos for you. That stuff works.
The people who become successful on Youtube in recent years are doing so because they are tapping into audiences outside of Youtube, or someone with an already established Youtube audience is pimping them.
But even with a plug from a Youtube superstar you are not guaranteed to get that many views; for example, my interview with egoraptor was pimped on his Youtube feed, his Facebook Fan page and his Twitter and it still only has 17,045 views as of this writing.
egoraptor has about five hundred thousand subscribers, and his videos get over a million views each within a few days of uploading. So what is the problem? Why doesn't my video that he pimped get even a few hundred thousand views?
Well, I don't know for sure, but here is my best guess:
Today I noticed egoraptor favorited a JonTron video......
...and JonTron has egoraptor in his recommended channel list on his feed and front page.
Egoraptor also has JonTron in his recommended channel list, too.
The top Partners who are consciously competent at using Youtube realize networking with other Partners is the best way to expand awareness of their videos. You can't just upload videos into the vast sea of Youtube and hope they float to the top of the charts. You have to market them, and networking with other partners who have audiences similar to the ones you want to attract can be a very effective way to expand.
Here is another thing to consider.
Let's say that I am a big Youtube Partner who makes videogame reviews, but only about roleplaying games (not too much of a stretch, I guess?).
The people who search for my content using Youtube's search bar and who see my videos in Related Video feeds are most likely doing a search relevant to the particular game that I uploaded a review for. For example, I might have a review for Final Fantasy Mystic Quest and people might come across my channel while doing a search for "Final Fantasy Mystic Quest", but if they are searching for something like Minecraft or The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, my videos will never come up because I have no reviews for those games.
That means the overwhelming majority of people who search for videogame related content are never going to see my videos, because they aren't searching for the specific reviews I've uploaded. And just because I put generic keywords like "rpgs" and "video game" into my description and tag area doesn't mean jack! That isn't enough to make my videos appear in generic search results for "rpgs" or "videogames"-- not when millions of millions of other videos are also using those same tags.
There are legions of people who would be interested in my videos but they will never find my videos by doing a search, unless they are specifically looking for one of my videos.
So what do you do if you want to tap into audiences on Youtube who might be interested in your content?
Answer: You network with someone else who has a fanbase similar to the one you want or already have, and you share audiences by helping plug one another.
And not just once, or twice, or merely sticking them into your "recommended channels" sidebar to gather dust.
You need to constantly be liking, favoriting and commenting on their videos so that they get seen in the subscription feeds of users--- and they must do the same thing for you!
After all, many Youtube users are subscribed to hundreds of channels -- many of whom post several vblogs a day. There is A LOT of stuff that goes into your subscription feed that you never see unless you sit on Youtube all day long (and even then....but we'll get to that later).
You also need to expand your plugging efforts outside of Youtube. You have to promote one another on your Twitter and Facebook Fan pages, too.
...you clearly see egoraptor sitting in his recommended channels listing.
It's not a coincidence. It's marketing and it's obviously highly effective.
Here is one thing that some people get short-sighted about: You don't need to only network with big channels.
As an example, I have 2,793 subs on my 'jfreedan' channel, and 1,639 on TheRPGFanatic channel. My friend 8-Bit Eric has 2,513 on his channel. If Eric and I both like, favorite and comment on our mutual friend Wootstick's latest video using our channels, that is potentially 6,945 people who might view Wootstick's video.
Imagine if Eric and I each have 20k subscribers on our channels. That's 40k potential views we could drive to Wootstick just from our own subscriber bases alone.
Now, I must point out that these numbers are the best possible outcome; it's the potential views.
Realistically each plug you do may only get 20%-40% of the potential views obtainable -- which is why you continually like, favorite and comment on each other's videos! Eventually you will get a very high portion of the subscribers of one channel to have gone and seen the videos on everyone else's channel.
This is not a brand new tactic. Way back when the internet was young and "Bert Is Evil" memes were all the rage, we called this forming a 'web ring'. Everyone would embed links into our website leading to other websites who were part of the group, and we often had banner exchanges that rotated each member's banner every time someone loaded the page. Our news pages would have links to something that had been posted to another person's website. Webcomics still promote each other this way, and that is relevant because just like videos, a webcomic primarily consists of content that cannot be crawled by search engines.
The problem is this: when trying to network you come across a lot of people who aren't committed to the cause. They put you into their recommended channel space, do a little bit of promotion, and then forget to do it later on. Sometimes they even watch your videos and don't comment, favorite or like them, because, "I forgot".
They have a million excuses for why they can't keep the promotion up, ranging from, "I don't want to upset my subscribers" to "I am too busy with school".
Then there are the people who don't want to make a Facebook Fan page, even though it's the MOST effective way to ensure your subscribers see your latest videos (the subscriber feed has too much spam and shows only 'highlights' by default, not everything).
Look at that bullshit. Yes, I'm going to curse here. THAT.IS.BULLSHIT!
Most of your Youtube subs are not seeing your content. They are seeing 'highlights', which are determined by some stupid algorithm. I don't know what that stupid algorithm is using as criteria, but I have all three of my Partner channels subscribed to one another and I do not always see my latest videos appear. That should tell you something.
If I didn't have a Facebook Fan Page I would have no views. The very first thing I do is plug my video into my Facebook Fan Page and the first people I see comment on the video are people who belong to my Facebook Fan page. I am hardly an expert here but I think I know enough to say that if you don't have a Facebook Fan page and want to be successful on Youtube, then you are not trying hard enough. There is no excuse to not have one, they are completely free and easy to manage.
However, even Facebook implemented 'highlights' filters to pages, so not even that is sacred anymore. And just like Youtube it does NOT save your settings.
Facebook isn't only limited to your Fan Page though; you can form super secret groups with all the members of your network. If you want a video promoted, post it into the group so all the other members can retweet / favorite / whatever the video. Facebook groups make it EASY to find the content you want others in your network to promote, because trying to keep tabs on everyone's subscription feed on Youtube is an enormous waste of time given how much content is posted these days (and the new 'highlights' filter nonsense).
Another thing to consider is that if you help build up someone who doesn't have a lot of views you are ultimately helping create a new audience for your own work.
Does that sound weird? Let me explain.
Let's suppose I have 500 of my subscribers become followers of Wootstick's channel. Of those 500, about 50 of them actually share all of Wootstick's videos on their Facebook pages. Of those 50 about 10 more people check out Wootstick's page and subscribe. A handful of them actually share some of Wootstick's videos on a big forum like one at The Escapist, bringing Wootstick several hundred more subscribers.
All these new subscribers from The Escapist who came to look at Wootstick's videos probably have never heard of my content before-- but they will as Wootstick plugs my video in his Youtube, Twitter and Facebook feeds.
So there is actually a lot of benefit to people with larger fanbases to help small channels grow. A lot of people just get tunnel vision and want to go the quick and easy route of getting someone like egoraptor to pimp their stuff constantly.
Now you might say to yourself, "You don't have a lot of views. Why are you telling me to do this? How do you know for sure it will work?"
The answer is simple: I don't know for sure it will work. It hasn't so far. I'm simply looking at what the top Youtube Partners are doing and noticing that it is working well for them, since they often get hundreds of thousands of views more than the number of people subscribed to their channels
However, my network is also very small. My new website is the hub for my network and as of this writing the new website has existed for a whopping month. And I have only recruited a few individuals into my network because I'm being selective. I'm recruiting featured contributors who have been making videos for awhile, who have been doing it on a somewhat religious basis, and that I believe will mesh well with the other contributors in the network.
So we haven't had much time to see results yet, but I am confident that view counts will increase for all members in the coming months, so long as everyone is committed to the cause.
What I do know for sure is that this is one strategy I have not tried yet and I think it is going to be the one that is most effective.
Do you have any experience trying this networking thing out on Youtube? Leave a comment and let me know!
And Google Search doesn't display many Youtube videos anymore, instead just a handful of high traffic ones it has deemed "relevant".
If you want your Youtube videos to be discovered by people using search engines you need to embed your videos into blogs and make those blogs filled with content rich keywords.
Here is an example of one of my blogs, my RPG Video Reviews blog on Tumblr. A quick look will show you that I also include a good portion of the video scripts in my blog article so that search engines will pick up on the blog.
Another thing I do is use websites like Squidoo to create a "farm" of articles with my videos embedded into them. Because sites like Squidoo have very high PageRanks, search engines like Google Search will occasionally display your articles and introduce people to your video content in that way.
These two pieces of advice-- networking with other Partners and embedding your videos into blogs-- are the only two things which have brought me any real results. Every other tactic I've tried has not been so successful.
As I've shown in earlier blog posts, I have a low subscriber count but a very high video view count.
I'm actually unsure what the problem is. Currently the jfreedan channel directs people to subscribe to my TheRPGFanatic channel, so one might think the subscriptions would go there but that's not been the case. People still subscribe to the jfreedan channel despite flat out telling people no new videos will be uploaded to this channel.
So the one thing I cannot tell you is how to get lots of subscribers on Youtube.
What I can tell you is how to get more views on Youtube, and why placing all your hopes and dreams on the Related Videos feeds will probably end in disappointment.
However, to fully grasp the complexity of the situation I'm going to talk about a few of my videos.
#1: Evil Ronald. This was the first video I made that went viral. I don't have it on the channel anymore, it got flagged by trolls with false privacy violation reports. Someone claimed their likeness had been used without permission after the video had been up for three years and I had no way to prove I had permission from all parties filmed in the video (fortunately when they tried that on my Cosplayers documentary I was not alarmed because when making that project I had everyone sign release forms, which I have also done for every other video involving other people in it).
When I say it was easy to get views back then, I'm not kidding. Most of these videos no longer exist; when I became a Partner I removed the majority of my gameplay videos because they had no commentary and keeping them on the channel would violate the agreements.
I will also admit the video was attracting negative attention and this contributed to my removal of it. The content of the video involved me going into a McDonalds with an evil Ronald McDonald costume, and accidentally scaring the crap out of a six year old girl, whose father then proceeded to try to fight me inside the restaurant. A lot of people thought it was funny but some people tried to use my prank gone awry as proof I was a horrible person. I received death threats on a weekly basis, and it gave ammo to trolls who sought to get my Partnership revoked.
Some people were also unable to take my videogame journalism work seriously after seeing me accidentally scare a child while wearing a crappy Halloween costume. As popular as it was, the video wasn't helping my current goals.
The video had half a million views when I deleted it. I did reupload it to my channel but it has remained private.
Anyway, the video did not result in a lot of subscribers. This is despite making more comedy-type videos, some of which were successful and some that were ignored. I made a sequel to the Evil Ronald video titled 'Evil Ronald McDonald Birthday Party' that received 16,700 views by the time I made it private (again, to protect my channel against the trolls). I have considered making this one public but the general consensus is that people don't find it as funny as the first one.
So why am I talking about it? The reason is because, if I remember correctly, this video went viral because it was pimped on the Something Awful forums a lot. From there it got shared on Facebook, Myspace and people emailing it around. I have none of the data from this video because I deleted it (I can see how many views it had, but not where the views came from) but the video went viral because people shared it, not because "Evil Ronald McDonald" was a trending topic in 2007.
#2: Ultraman review. During the course of the RPG Fanatic Show I decided to try my hand at a review of tokusatsu shows. The only video like this which I created was a review for the first season of Ultraman.
It actually did surprisingly well and I think the reason is because I submitted it as a video response to another Ultraman related video that had a lot of traffic. That act raised the awareness of the video considerably.
I've included this screenshot of the page so you can fully understand what I'm trying to convey here; just because you get a video to have lots of traffic doesn't automatically mean they will watch your other videos or subscribe to your channel.
The Ultraman review has 93,711 views as of this writing. Three of the other videos you see to the right of it are also my own videos and only one of them has anywhere near the same number of views (and it's not because of this video. I'll explain why in #3).
(Note: From this point on you might see some screenshots that have extra browser bars on the top of them. This is because I made these screenshots using the Print Screen command and pasting into MS Paint, which apparently likes to drop down a few spaces when doing so. I made this blog while sleepy so I didn't notice it until now, and really don't care that much about this to go back and make new screenshots. The information I talk about can be clearly seen. That's all that matters.)
You might think, "Well it has a lot of views but that doesn't mean people are watching more than a few seconds of it. That is why they don't watch any of your other videos."
If you thought that, you would be mistaken.
Compared to all other videos of similar duration on Youtube, it has about an average retention rate. For a five minute long video, that's not too bad.
For whatever reason, my video that people seem to like a lot and share has poor conversion rates. Just because someone enjoyed one of your videos doesn't automatically mean they want to watch your other videos.
#3 Unlosing Ranger Vs Darkdeath Evilman Review. This video got a lot of views because I released it several days before it was actually available for sale in North America-- I received an advance copy of the game for review from Original-Gamer.com, whom I often contribute reviews to. Because this was one of the first Youtube videos about this game it gained a lot of momentum soon after uploading.
As of this writing the video has 52,112 views. It gained the majority of its views within the first month after I released it (somewhere around 35k I believe) and now it tends to get about 1,200 views every month.
Note: Earnings data has been removed since publicly displaying that information would violate my AdSense agreements.
Now if we look at the entire lifespan of the video (10/17/2010 to 5/5/2012) we can see where all the traffic has been coming from.
A large portion of the views are coming from searches inside of Youtube, but almost as many are coming from embedded players -- that is, it is receiving a ton of traffic from external websites like Facebook and member only internet forums which Google can't data-mine. Only around 5,000 views have actually came from the "suggested videos" feed, which is also known as the Related videos feed.
These are the videos where my Ultraman review appeared in the Related Videos feed and people actually decided to click on it.
As you can see almost all of the Related Videos traffic came from my own videos. The videos which don't belong to me are called "Official Z.H.P. Unlosing Ranger Vs Darkdeath Evilma.." , "Blazing Souls Accelate Gameplay 2", and "[JAP] ZHP -All Dengeki Characters- List in Description, READ IT". All of the other videos can be found on my own Youtube channel.
Basically, I received barely any traffic from anyone else's videos. My video is basically isolated from the rest of the Unlosing Ranger related videos on Youtube, and if people don't find it in the search results or see it embedded on another website they basically cannot find it.
This is also worth pointing out: a whopping 146 views came from my own subscription feed. That's right, a little over one hundred of the two thousand subscribers I had back then actually saw my video from their subscription feed. This is not unusual and matters have been made worse given Youtube's recent changes to the subscription feeds that, by default, hide a large number of videos and only show users what Youtube thinks will be "relevant" to them. Youtube calls this content "highlights" but it's really just a fancy name for, "we're hiding videos that don't get a lot of views in a short amount of time".
#4: My Human Torch Special Effect Test. This is one of my most popular videos right now. It is currently at 97,179 views and I guess will eventually hit 100k. I say eventually because since the recent changes to Youtube's algorithms for search and Related Videos feeds, it has lost a dramatic amount of traffic.
As with the Ultraman and Unlosing Ranger videos, you'll notice my other videos appear in the Related Videos feeds but don't have a lot of views either.
( You will notice this video has no annotations. This has been my test video to see if including annotations on videos would increase traffic or not; this video was used as the control, but I ultimately didn't even need it since the annotated videos performed so poorly. If you're curious what I think about Youtube video annotations you can read a prior post of mine. )
Anyway, let's look at some of the Analytics for this video,
In the last 30 days the video received 25 views. I don't even have to bother removing how much money it earned, because it didn't earn jack.
Let's look at how well the video was doing last year during 2011, before the re-design of Youtube's layouts and removal of several subcategories for videos, as well as the overhaul of Youtube search and related videos algorithms,
The video received 10,432 views. That is approximately 869 views per month. Not spectacular but certainly a lot better than 25.
That said, there is a chance the dramatic drop in views is not entirely due to the algorithm changes but because of other factors.
This is the number of views for my Human Torch video during 2010.
25,312 views, for an average of 2,109 views per month.
This is the number of views for the same video during 2009. I didn't have a Youtube Partnership back then so I wasn't able to capitalize on any of these views, and I did absolutely nothing to promote the video either.
21,078 views, for an average of 1,756 views per month.
Let's look at 2008.
32,700 views were earned during this time period. That is roughly 2,725 views per month.
Finally let us look at the very first year the video was uploaded, which was on May 23, 2007.
4,174 views for that first year. That's quite a difference from what it received the next few years, isn't it? So what happened. Let's try to figure this out using Analytics.
2007-2008: I have no Analytic traffic sources data for these years because back then, apparently, Youtube wasn't tracking where video views came from. I guess nobody thought that was important? Anyway that is highly unfortunate because I would liked to have known what factors led to my little known video starting to skyrocket in views.
2009: As you can see in the below image, almost all of the views to this video came from related videos feeds on other user's videos.
I have no idea what "other features" is supposed to be. It just says "Other" and "Homepage" when I click on it, as well as the front page of other user's channels. I guess Youtube was tracking all those locations together back then. Anyway I had 729 views from the Youtube homepage during 2009, so I guess I can say at least one of my videos made it to the front of Youtube?
These are the videos that led traffic to my own video,
Once again the related videos feeds are the primary source of traffic. However the video was also marked as a 'featured video', receiving 7,133 views from that service.
A 'Featured video' is either one of two things; a video someone has paid to promote using Adwords, or a video that has been enabled for monetization so Youtube is promoting it alongside the paid ads so that Youtube makes more money from the video.
If I remember correctly Youtube invited me to take part in the "Individual Video Monetization" program, or whatever the hell it is / was called. This was a program that allowed people to run ads on videos that were getting lots of traffic but without Youtube allowing the person to be a full Partner and monetize all their videos. I believe Youtube used the program to find new potential Partners, since I eventually became a full Partner due to how well my individual monetized videos were doing at the time.
Anyway you will notice I got very little traffic from Youtube search, Google search or external websites. All of my traffic came from Related videos and having my video featured in search results.
Onward to 2011,
Almost identical results to the year before. Related Video and Featured Video feeds are doing all of the heavy lifting for me. Nobody is sharing the video and I'm most certainly not doing anything to promote it.
And now we come to the present year, 2012
As you can clearly see after Youtube made their overhaul of the algorithms for Related videos the traffic was pretty much killed off. My theory is that other larger viewcount videos were also being benefited by the Related Video feeds and I was piggybacking on their Related Video feeds. As a guess, based on the traffic I received I would say my video was about two or three degree separation from hugely popular 1 million+ videos.
Now that Youtube changed their algorithms to heavily favor videos that are getting lots of search and external traffic, my video is dead in the water.
I can't say I'm entirely surprised. It's not that amazing of a video.
Now there are two other factors we should be considering but I am unable to do so. I lack the data.
The first factor is how many other videos similar to my 'Human Torch' were uploaded and used similar titles, description and keywords. Those videos would be competitor videos in the search rankings and Related Videos feeds, and the more competitors there are the more difficult it is for people to find my video.
The other factor is how often did users search Youtube for keywords that would bring up the videos that ultimately led users to my video? There is no tool I can use to obtain that data. Only someone at Google would know.
I won't further bore you with detailed analysis of all my videos. But if I did, you would clearly see that, for videos made after 2010, the videos that got a lot of traffic did so because they were virally shared on services like Facebook, Twitter and embedded onto forums. The Related Videos algorithms occasionally snatched them up and started pimping them on other high traffic videos, but that isn't where most of the traffic came from. I know this because I have the Analytics data to back it up.
As for my videos from the early days of Youtube, they got snatched up by the Related Videos algorithms and piggybacked off the popularity of other videos. This is no longer as easy to do because videos now need to have their own traffic from external websites (like Facebook, Twitter, blogs and forums) to benefit from those services.
So in conclusion there are a couple things we can learn from this:
#1 Just because a person watches a video doesn't necessarily mean they subscribe to a Youtube channel. Thinking about my own Youtube behavior, that sounds about right; I tend to only subscribe to a channel which produces content similar to my own show because I want to stay aware of what others in my field are doing, and for several years I didn't really subscribe to anyone because I wasn't watching videos while logged in.
#2 Viral Videos Don't Always = Lots of Subscribers. My Evil Ronald video had half a million views but I don't have even a fraction of that many subscribers. I'm not the only channel that is like this. Consider "I am your Grandma"; the video has a million views but the channel itself has only 2,649 subscribers.
Even I'm not subscribed to her, or at least I wasn't until I realized I should be.
#3: The Related Video feeds should not be your priority. I know of at least five big-time Youtube Partners who, from the periods between 2008 and 2011, got hundreds of thousands of views to their videos because of the Related Video feed algorithms. As soon as Youtube made changes to these algorithms, those Partners claimed to have lost anywhere from 60% to 80% of their daily view traffic.
This is despite spending hours upon hours using the Google trends and AdWords keyword tools to find new keywords, as well as studying the title, description and keyword tags used in other videos to try to "match" those videos. (It doesn't appear to be that simple anymore. Even if I copy and paste keywords from The Angry Video Game Nerd videos into my own videos, my videos aren't going to appear in his Related Video feeds, at least that I can see. I've tried it out before.)
When a video is heavily promoted by the Related Video feeds on high traffic videos it is largely due to sheer dumb luck. It is not something you can control and it has little to do with the quality of the video. High traffic videos are more likely to display other videos from the person who made the video than they are to show someone else's videos. This has been my experience with videogame related videos and I imagine it is the same for other kinds of content, too.
The lesson to learn here is to promote the hell out of your videos OUTSIDE of Youtube!
It is vitally important that you do this. The videos I post onto reddit and my Facebook Fan page may only receive a few hundred views from these third party sources, but those videos get a lot more traffic from Related Videos feeds than the videos I don't do anything with. That said, trying to get your video into the Related Video feeds of very popular videos is like shooting at a dime in the dark; there is no guaranteed way to get traffic from them.
If you don't have a legion of fans and simply upload videos to Youtube then you are uploading into the aethers. Nobody will ever see your videos, I promise you that. Anyone who tells you differently is lying to you.
Some of the usual suspects are places like Facebook, Twitter, reddit, digg and so forth. The only drawback with these is that, just like on Youtube, it can be hard for people to find your content because there is so much content being shared all the time.
You can also try making your own "video sharing" website focused on the type of content you make; this is my latest and greatest plan for getting my content seen. We re-designed my roleplaying videogame fansite to be a Web 2.0 "submit your own content" style database for RPG related videos and blogs. I came up with the idea to do this primarily because (aside from the Let's Play Archive and ScrewAttack) the majority of gaming websites don't like it when people submit videos about videogames. You tend to get banned from forums for doing so.
I saw an opportunity to make something that would benefit others as much as myself: Build a place for people to submit videos about a particular niche subject where they won't invoke the wrath of the almighty volunteer forum moderator.
Anyway, viral youtube videos can be "one hit wonders" and while they can raise awareness of your work it is an entirely different matter to translate that awareness into loyal subscribers-- and I say loyal because just because people subscribe to your channel doesn't mean they will watch all your videos.
I have absolutely no advice to give you on how to translate viewers into subscribers, so if you were reading this hoping for some magic solution then I apologize. I promise I'll tell you when I find one.
I hope you've still learned something valuable from this article.
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