My Unintentional YouTube Success

And what I learned along the way

I run a YouTube channel that recently crossed the small-yet-significant milestone of 8,000 subscribers. I won’t be challenging PewDiePie anytime soon, but this number puts me in something like the top 10–20% of all YouTubers by subscriber count, so I’m celebrating it.

The financials of YouTube vary dramatically from YouTuber to YouTuber, but for me, this level of success translates to a sizeable portion of my income. Nowhere near enough to quit everything else and become a full-time YouTuber, but enough that I would struggle if that revenue just vanished overnight.

And none of this was intentional.

How I Got Here

I’m a hobbyist game developer, and a little over three years ago, I decided it might be fun to make a voxel-based game with a destructible world. And, yes, for those who are familiar with the lingo, I’m talking about a Minecraft clone.

I never said it was an original idea.

However, despite how basic the game looks on the surface, Minecraft is quite complicated under the hood, a little too complicated for my part-time game developer brain. So I went looking on YouTube for help… and found none.

After maybe an hour of searching, I concluded that even if the videos were out there, they were so hard to find that it would probably be a better use of my time to just figure it out. And then I thought, “If I’m looking for this content, someone else probably is as well.”

It took me a month to make that first video. I had to figure out what I was doing with the code, I had to figure out how to edit videos, and then I had to do all of the things I’d figured out!

I made two videos on “Making a Game Like Minecraft”, and then some real-life stuff got in the way of the third video, and by the time a few months had passed, it seemed a little pointless to carry on. Nobody was viewing those videos, and they were a lot of work.

Fast Forward Eight Months

I had set up a new YouTube channel for this project rather than using my regular account, so I wasn’t seeing what was going on with that channel in the months that followed. Then, one day, for reasons I can’t remember, I signed into the channel and found a very modest explosion of activity.

Don’t get me wrong, we’re talking about maybe 80 subscribers and a few thousand views — it wasn’t like my videos had gone viral in my absence. The thing that struck me was the comments. There were dozens of comments asking when the next video was coming out.

If I’m honest, I re-started my YouTube project more out of a sense of obligation than any personal goal. As I’d guessed, people wanted this content, and I’d promised it while only delivering a tiny sample.

Fast Forward to Now

It’s been around two years since I started making videos in earnest. My upload schedule is a little erratic at times, but I’ve managed to maintain an average of a little under a video a week across those two years.

I’ve kept my videos firmly within the game development realm, but I’ve branched out of just making “How to Make Minecraft” videos, because I can’t do that forever. Nor do I want to.

What I’ve Learned

As self-indulgent as this story has been, anyone who read this far will probably want a little something to show for it. So, from my personal experience, here are my takeaways from my unlikely (and modest) YouTube success.

Content Really is King

Those first couple of videos were a mess. Awkward pauses, misspoken words, mistakes I didn’t cut out — it was all there. I didn’t start to get traction because I’m a masterful YouTuber, I got traction because I was putting content out that people wanted.

Granted, I was putting content out that people wanted and nobody else was making at the time, which is increasingly hard to do these days. But the fact that people wanted what I was making earned a lot of forgiveness for the amateur way in which I was making it.

Gaining YouTube Subscribers Isn’t That Hard…

…if you’re patient. I just made the content I was making and kept at it, and I have made a consistent average gain of 200 subscribers a month for well over a year now.

When I first started making an effort, I snooped around for similar YouTubers who were in the same boat — game developers with less than 100 subs — on the notion that it could be good to be friendly with them. Two years on, some of those channels are on par with where I am. Some died off and never made it to 1,000 subs, and some have blown up, with one channel in particular recently crossing 100,000 subs.

I’ve just plodded along making my content, but I never made an extra special effort to be a “YouTuber”. Despite this, I’ve consistently gained subscribers. Could I have gained more? Almost certainly, but I would have had to try harder.

If you want to gain a million subscribers in a year, you’re going to need to consult someone else. But if you just want consistent growth, all you need to do is make something good and keep at it.

Schedule Isn’t The Be-All and End-All

Many YouTubers will tell you to set a schedule and stick to it. Put new videos out on the same day every week, or month, or whatever your interval is. YouTube and its viewers love that kind of regularity.

Now, I can’t say that my channel wouldn’t have been more successful if I’d stuck rigidly to an upload schedule, but I can say that my channel didn’t fail because I didn’t.

I Wouldn’t Want Faster Growth

The thing about those channels that I started out with who have since left me for dust is that they invariably had some kind of viral success. The problem with this is it brings in a lot of subscribers that aren’t necessarily interested in your day to day content.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I still have the tiny views-to-subscribers ratio as everyone else (videos typically get view counts of around 10% of your subscriber count), but the viewers I get are engaged. My advertising CPM is higher than average because of that. I have a Discord server based around my silly YouTube channel with almost a thousand members. There are even enough people who find my content valuable to make a Patreon worthwhile.

When it comes to audiences, I’ll take quality over quantity any day.

So, What’s the Point?

In the grand scheme of YouTube, my story is no big deal. And my channel could still end up being abandoned before reaching 10k subs and be just another YouTube failure.

But getting to where I am right now really didn’t take that much work. Beyond making the videos, I mean. There was no secret sauce or special strategy, just me, making videos I was interested in making.

So, I guess the point is, if you have something to say that you think others will be interested in hearing in a YouTube video, why not say it?

I didn’t plug my channel here because that’s not what the post was for, but you can find that and many other stories I’ve written here;