3 Critical Traits All Successful YouTubers Have In Common
I’ve had an account on YouTube since 2006 and I’ve been uploading videos to the platform since 2007.
I’ve seen a lot of iterations of the platform and it’s content creators.
Fun Fact: Do you know what YouTube was originally designed to be?
YouTube was first designed to be an early version of a dating app.
The concept was to have people upload videos about themselves and meet others that way.
The funny thing is, while the version of YouTube known today could not be further from what its creators had intended for it to be, I feel like the concept of people uploading videos of themselves (not for the purposes of dating) took off in the long run.
Some of the top YouTubers are Vloggers.
Why People Want to Start a YouTube Channel
So why do people want to start a YouTube channel in the first place?
When I was in high school uploading videos, no one cared about my content. Be it, that could have had something to do with the quality of the content, but I’ll avoid that topic for now.
Recent studies have shown that over 50% of the Gen-Z generation want to be full-time content creators.
People start YouTube channels for a handful of reasons:
- It’s the cool, sexy thing to do
- It’s a symbol of status
- It makes money!
- It increases your name, and popularity, and helps you build your brand
The list goes on from here but you get the point.
Most of the reasons people want to start a YouTube channel these days are self-fulfilling
More often than not, people want to do it for their personal gain and don’t have the most important part of the process in mind, the viewers.
Newsflash: You can make a video a day for 10 years, but if it’s not what your target audience wants, you’re wasting your time.
This brings me to the first common trait of all successful YouTubers:
They provide value to their viewers
They all provide value to their viewers.
The content they upload is consistent in quality and educates the viewers on topics that both the creator and viewers care about.
This consistent quality is what drives and massive fan basis to continue watching, subscribing, and smashing that like button!
Consistency of content:
Do you know how long Casey Neistat has been uploading videos to YouTube?
Most of us got to know Casey, the New York wanna-be bad boy sometime after he started his daily Vlog in March of 2015.
At the time, he only had 315,000 subscribers.
On March 26, 2015, Casey announced that he would be starting a “proper daily vlog” where he would be recording his daily life and uploading it to YouTube.
This was a completely new concept at that time, even Casey likely had no idea what it would grow into.
Flash forward 18 months, Casey had uploaded a vlog every single day consistently for a total of around 530 vlogs and had grown his subscriber base to more than 5.8 Million.
Less than 5 years later, that subscriber count doubled to more than 12 Million.
Casey Neistat, Graham Stephan, Mr. Beast, and even back to Jenna Marbles, all had this trait in common.
Consistency.
Passion for their work
You will never make it on YouTube if you are anything short of crazy, or at least burning with passion.
Success on YouTube requires being part of the content hampster wheel.
You have to keep pumping out content if you want to grow.
Eventually, larger channels will get to the point where they have a deep enough library of videos where theoretically creators could take a short break and still remain relevant on the platform.
Getting to that point takes time and dedication though.
The algorithm and your viewers will not treat you kindly if you’re infrequent or inconsistent in your uploads.
In order to meet this demanding work schedule, you’ve got to be passionate about your work.
- Marques Brownlee (MKBHD) started his channel in 2008 when he was 14 years old.
- Sarah Dietschy has been uploading consistently since 2011, most people had no idea who she was until 2018
- Casey Neistat uploaded his first video before YouTube even existed, he had to email the video as a ZIP file to all his friends and ask them to forward it to gain views
Conclusion
Like most things worth doing in life, success as a YouTuber is hard.
It takes time, talent, and an amazing amount of dedication.
Even those who seem like they were an overnight success story, in reality, had been creating content for years without success before you had ever heard of them.
Life here on Medium isn’t much different.
For those of you who truly want it, you’ll get there.
As always, thank you for reading and please share those claps👏 and subscribe for more :)
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