Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by agentofoblivion 1322 days ago
I would be cautious about going down this road. For context, I have YT channel with >12k subscribers that is also for technical content. When I was similarly early on, I found myself in a similar place, thinking a lot about growth and metrics. I came to realize that I was playing the game that YT wanted me to play, to their benefit.

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.

2 comments

Almost all channels, even the ones technically focused, are now using clickbait thumbnails to the point that I installed a firefox add-on to replace the original thumbnail by a random thumbnail from the video. Not always at the advantage of the youtuber...

> "To become the Mr. Beast of X"

Not knowing Mr Beast this sentence sounds more like a pornhub advice :D

I think Mr. Beast is a billion-dollar brand now, I'm surprised his name hasn't crossed ways with you before.
The announcement that he was the highest-paid YouTuber was literally the first time I had heard of him as a YouTuber. I had occasionally heard reference to his name on some other social media platforms, but never in any context that made me curious enough to find out what was going on.

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.

I've been on YouTube for as long as YouTube has existed, but mostly use it to watch music videos, movie trailers, the video versions of podcasts I listen to, and sometimes a tutorial for DIY stuff I'm trying to do around the house. The only place I have ever even seen the name "Mr. Beast" is on Hacker News, and since I have never read those threads, I have no idea who he is or what he makes videos about.
He is currently the 7th most subscribed to YouTube channel, and the second most subscribed to if you're caring more about individual, personality driven channels than broader ones.

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.

I just saw an article about how he averaged $1 MM a week in profit on his videos last year. He's probably not a billion-dollar brand yet, but he's probably at more than half way there.
Thank you for the warning. Yes it can get pretty addictive checking the numbers all the time. I have no intention of becoming the next Mr Beast so there is no worry there. I have a big list of technical topics I want to cover but there is definitely a worry that no one will watch them. I have been releasing 2 videos each week but I will likely cut this down to 1 once I have grown a bit more. Otherwise, I can definitely see it leading to burnout.