One Video Is Doing a Third of All the Work on My Channel
I've been experimenting with Meta’s new personal agent AI Muse (I know, I know and for the record this blog post isn’t sponsored either). I know a lot of you probably have reservations about AI, so do I to an extent, which is why I'm being completely transparent instead of pretending I went through all the numbers myself. TBF, I absolutely hate trying to figure out my analytics. So basically I had it pull my YouTube analytics and connect the common threads for me. Everything below is real info from my YouTube Studio this week.
And it found one video is carrying a third of my entire channel. 😅
It's the Voicemod tutorial, "Get Voicemod Working on Your VR Headset," from last November. Last 90 days: 104 of my 311 new subscribers came from that one video. $121.50 of my $340.65 in ad revenue alone. (This also dosen’t include any amazon affiliate commissions, which I’d have to crunch separately…somehow) This video has 643 of my 2,594 watch hours. Ten months old and still compounding while I sleep.
I made this video because I really enjoyed working with the Voicemod team that Twitchcon, I enjoy doing tutorials, and love when I can figure out how to get traditionally “flat gaming” software working on the Quest (especially standalone). I also noticed people kept asking how to get Voicemod working in VR and there wasn't really a good answer anywhere, so I answered it. Simple as that.
The VR section of their booth at Twitchcon was as bit unnecessary IMO, but the team was very nice!
The rest of the numbers for my videos overall tell the same story but from different angles. Search drives 46% of my views, suggested videos drive 2%. My three biggest videos are all tutorials, and the pattern is super simple to replicate: someone types a problem into the search bar, my video fixes it, some of them subscribe. Rocket science!
The kinda crazy part was discovering 97.2% of my watch time comes from people who aren't subscribed to me. Almost everyone watching has never heard of me. Every upload is like an audition for strangers, which means if you're making videos ONLY for your subscribers, you're making videos for about 3% of your viewers. Not to say you should NEVER do inside jokes or be grateful for them, but especially when it comes to tutorials - never assume they have watched any of your previous videos. Either actually guide them to another tutorial with Part A of the steps (I do this with anything having to do with developer mode because I dont want to do another ‘how to turn on developer mode’ in EVERY TUTORIAL), or just go on with your tutorial from square 1 from fresh newbie eyes.
And there's more than one way to win this game. My Quest-to-PC video is my second biggest video and its click-through rate is 5.6%, one of the worst on my channel. Doesn't matter. So many people need that answer that the search volume just drags it along anyway. Compare that to my Discord streaming tutorial: 16.1% click-through, best on the channel, strong views to match. Two completely different reasons they work.
So no, the lesson isn't "go make a Voicemod video." Find the question people actually typing into the search bar, answer it better than the other results (if there are any), then get out of the way while time does the work. It most likely to become viral no, but a lot of the viral videos you saw at one point die off after the big reach because no one is really searching for it anymore (very few exceptions).
Thanks Muse, you won’t catch me spending time making graphs and chats instead of content
Products and tech change though, which is the one kindof annoying caveat with tutorial content. Voicemod just put out the Voicemod Key Pocket, so my big tutorial is going to need a successor soon. I'm making a new video for it, same style. The old one keeps earning while the new one gets built. Build the video once, let it pay for a utility bill, build the next one.
This is part of what I teach inside my creator course, VR Content Lab by the way. Find the searchable problem, answer it better than anyone, let it compound. vrcontentlab.com if you want the full version.
What's the question your audience keeps asking that you still haven't answered on video? That's your next upload. GO MAKE IT!
