As I stated in the video above, this semester I have been working on my YouTube channel and intended on trying to bring in a new shift in content to see what could come from it and if growth for the channel and my brand would come with that sudden change.
The 3 major goals I wanted to obtain from these videos were to entertain people, grow my audience and start conversation about the topics that I talk about
Although in the video above I focus a lot on the negatives, thankfully there were some positives to goin this Digital Artefact.
The first major win was growth.
It is known by most that consistency is the best way for growth of a channel (https://tubefluence.com/does-youtube-reward-consistency/) and my channel is not known for that, most of the time if you’re lucky there’ll be one upload a month which was still the case during this project. Although I go against what is recommended for healthy growth of a YouTube channel, I was still able to grow the brand.
From the 1st of August 2022 until Today, the channel saw over 4000 views, gained 24 subscribers and over 53,000 impressions even though I only uploaded 3 videos in that time.
In my opinion, these are very impressive stats and reiterates the point I made before about how my biggest struggle are my thumbnails. An overall CTR for that period of time was under 6% is poor, which shows one of two things:
1: The content topic wasn’t appealing to the person at that time and they clicked somewhere else.
2: The thumbnail wasn’t as attractive as others around it and got lost.
Meaning if I was to continue down this project, I would need to study more about thumbnails and what brings people in. A source I have found helpful and I know some friend use is actually a twitter personality who is deep into YouTube and its algorithm, that man being @theJayAlto (https://twitter.com/theJayAlto).
He constantly post threads about how videos do well and what other creators can do to replicate that success and would be a good resource for anyone who’s tryna to grow a YouTube channel.
Another major win for this project are the conversations started in my comment section about the topics I talked about, although the Facebook video was a flop there was still chat from subscribers in the comment section showing that the topic was engaging enough where someone else wanted to match what I was talking about and spit their own opinion out too, which was something I really love hearing from people and glad that this happened.
Again one more win for the project which was the goal of entertaining people, which is super easy to dissect and find out if I did that. By checking the comments.
This was something I knew I wouldn’t struggle with due to already having built up an audience so I knew that if at any moment if I earned someone’s subscription to the channel people were willing to come back for more content and enjoy which overall is the biggest thing I want when it comes to putting out content on the channel
My time management was incredibly poor during this project, which I stated in my pitch was a high possibility but I did not think it was going to be as bad as it was. Even though I made a Gantt chart and tried to stick to it, work and other commitments just kept delaying the project.
Another blunder on my part was that I thought it was going to be easy to quickly transition from from genre of topics to something completely different to what my audience is used to. I’ve seen this happen time and time again with other creators but somehow I thought my content would be different. Even within the gaming community, if you were to switch from one game to another ( even with both video games being known to be more based towards a very similar audience ) can have a major affect on your views and overall engagement on the channel.
So being a smaller creator and thinking that I could do a pivot without some really good marketing like using TikTok or YouTube shorts and constant promotion on my social medias was a really dumb move and something I should’ve known to look out for, rather than just a tweet every so often about when a new video is coming out. I thought going into this that people watched my videos just for me and the topics and other content going on in the video was just secondary but I was somewhat wrong, which I am fine with and means that if there was a chance for me to continue this project I’d have a way more gradual shift in content topics rather than a complete 180Ā° but that would take a lot longer than just the time frame I appointed myself.
Something I should’ve kept by my side as a reminder throughout the project and its beginnings was “The Methodology of Making Things”, it would’ve been a good thing to go back to and maybe I could have altered my choice of topic to be some what closer to the niche audience I have. Maybe I could’ve have worked on another type of video that although is lower in quality (to my standards) but is known to do well in the past such and does well on the YouTube algorithm as well so that I could’ve kept up some relevance and presence within my community, for example another “Tier List” video.
Although this is the end of my journey for BCM and Digital Artefacts I have learnt a good chunk of things through doing these projects, so much so that throughout my time I’ve landed many jobs and created connections with many large creators as I work alongside them (https://jamesmac.myportfolio.com)
Yes i was able to hit the 3 goals I set, which were To Entertain, Start Conversation and Grow but I feel as though there are some things that I could’ve done better
With better time management, more preparation and maybe even opting in to hire thumbnail designers there could’ve well been some grander progress for this project and maybe the impressions I gained in that time could’ve turned into long term subscribers.
James Mackay - Portfolio 