I have worked so hard on my YouTube channel since early 2011. 450 videos, probably around 2 full years of “work hours” in total. But I still don’t make hardly any income at all, and my average views per video is still so low that it basically makes no business sense for me at all to continue making more videos.
Then I find music “composer/producer” YouTube channels like this one, that gets insane amount of views per video. Is this what people want? Memes and silly thumbnails? Is this what I should focus on to grow my YouTube channel?
That channel looks like the dark web to me. Not easy to make it on youtube you have a lot of followers and a huge audience even if they are not all subscribed you definitely have larger amount of people who know of you and probably why you have a huge following in this forum. I think these fast growing channels are not necessarily offering better content than yours but maybe they’re changing and adapting to different needs from viewers, it’s a constantly changing platform where you have to keep surprising and creating some new way of delivering content, so maybe it’s a simple change that’s all it takes, such as a new look in the studio, going on a hunt for gear with you or some other strange ideas that make no sense but work only on youtube.
I think it also is a matter of “market size”. I know from studies that photography/videography is 100x more interested people than making music.
Then you need to slice the “music production pie” into genres/styles. Where of course EDM, Pop, Rock, Hip Hop are 99% of music audience.
That means you are down to 1% of 1% of “interested people” compared to a big niche like “photography/video/cameras”.
The result is that doing videos of composing cinematic music will never get millions of views. Not even Daniel James get more than a few thousand views on his videos.
I think your videos help musicians in long run compared to these experimental types of music topics with fundamental knowledge in theory and technical application, even some of the topics on this forum would make great posts on your channel. Some change in delivery doesn’t hurt for entertainment but I will be a fan and still watching either way cause I consider your page one of the purely educational and time worthy ones.
Thanks Carl, I appreciate it.
I guess I will try to experiment some more to see what types of videos can get more views on the long run. I was thinking about some topics to explore that seems more popular: like Music Theory or Sound Design.
It’s just that after 9 years of working hard, I am sad to still get so few views on almost every video I made. Basically, it is not worth the insane amount of time I put into the production, editing, marketing etc.
So I am totally open to do something completely different, if I can get my videos up to 100.000 views per video instead of less than 1000. I just need to know what!
I appreciate you trying to help me find out how to succeed. I know some people like teaching one-to-one, but I am not one of those people. I’ve tried it in the past, and I don’t like it at all. Probably because I am an introvert, and also because I love sharing things to many people like with courses, videos, this community etc.
Also another aspect is that I ran and failed with 2 businesses before. Failed hard, like being dirt poor for years. And it was so stressful to always “hunt for gigs”. So I promised myself to never “sell my time for money” again. Which is why my focus today is on creating products/content. Which can be anything from: courses, to sound design packs, to videos, to music for licensing etc. Selling “products” rather than “my time”.
That’s the internet… quality content always gets buried under piles of nonsense.
Sorry, no clue how to improve here as I’m also struggling in getting my stuff at least a tiny little bit popular and improving on my 4 - 6 monthly listeners on Spotify
Thank you Chris!
Haha yes the Internet (and YouTube in particular) is hard to gain traction on. Human nature seems to prefer entertainment over education. And drama over seriousness. And so on. Fighting human nature is a loosing battle though, that’s the hard lesson I’ve learned after all these years.
