The first couple of weeks of this channel has been a little mixed. I didn’t manage to keep up with the content production plans but the engagement was through the roof compared to my other channels.
| Month | Videos Published | Total Posts | Subs | Watch Time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jan | 7 | 7 | 190ish | 350 hours-ish |
| Feb (first week) | 3 | 10 | 260ish | 400 hours-ish |
You can see the start of the case study here and all of the updates here. In this case study, I’m building a channel from scratch in a different way than I would with most faceless YouTube channels. No external traffic or outsourcing, just producing easy videos and (mostly) relying on the algorithm to push it.
The Stats So Far
I’ve had channels get monetization within weeks and others that took the better part of a year. In the first couple of weeks, we reached about 10% of the requirement which isn’t bad considering how easy the content is to produce but it’s not what I was hoping for.
The goal to promote the channel was:
- Consistent content of several videos a week.
- Outreach to established content producers in the niche.
- Commenting on other videos in the niche.
All things I don’t really do for my other channels but I was curious to see what would happen.
Content Production
A 10-minute video in this niche would take no more than 11 minutes to create. 12 minutes if I include the upload time and making a coffee.
I’ve no excuse for not hitting my target on this front except I was busy with other projects and just didn’t make enough time for it. Consistency with a YouTube channel matters more than a niche site in my experience and I really don’t like to publish that slowly on a new channel if I want to see it grow.
I’ve got ahead of the content production now and have a couple of videos scheduled. I’ve been looking through the top-performing videos in the niche to get an idea of what topics work the best.
Outreach
The plan was to pay a few of the more established creators to shout out my channel to get the ball rolling. Problem was, there just wasn’t a whole lot of established content creators in the niche so I reached out to about 15 and didn’t hear a thing back.
Normally I would follow up and reach out to more people but there’s a limited pool to work with and it’s just not a shoutout-friendly niche. The majority of them probably thought it was some kind of scam.
Commenting
This is not something I would normally take the time to do. Gary Vaynerchuk said he used to reply to comments constantly on Twitter when he started Wine Library TV and I get where he’s coming from but damn… the time commitment for the return is pretty harsh.
These were not automated comments or generic stuff like ‘Nice video’ but actually engaged with the content which means it was time-consuming and I couldn’t do a lot of it. Given how easy the video content is to produce and the (potentially) high RPM for the niche – it might be worth doing more of.
Especially when I saw this:
A decent chunk of the views came from the channel page and combined with the engagement I get on those comments – I think at least some of that is people coming in and checking out the channel because of these comments.
It won’t account for all 19.4% but it is something I’m planning on pushing a little harder so we can see what happens there.
Future Scaling
Given how easy the content is to produce, I’m happy enough with the channel growth. It would take a while for ads but most channels don’t get there right away and I’d at least post for another month or two to see if the growth rate picked up.
My one concern is looking at the returning viewers vs new viewers. The returning viewers and retention is higher than I see in any of my other channels so the format works and people engage with the content. However, for whatever reason, YouTube is pushing it to fewer new people.
This (potentially) means growth is going to become too slow for this to be worth chasing further.
That might be because of the lul in content consistency and a lot of channels seem to stagnate for a couple of weeks before the algorithm just picks one video to push for whatever reason. I’ll keep going for a while longer and see if the growth rate picks up.
The current plan is to produce more consistent content by batching it up and scheduling it ahead of time, focusing on the top-performing content in the niche and trying to push the commenting a bit more to see if that attracts more new viewers.
If the channel growth doesn’t pick up over the next couple of weeks I’ll probably not chase it too much further. It’ll eventually get ads but I’m not looking for a long hard slog with this project.