I started in 2017, but began focusing on fishing content in May 2018. I published weekly content and on January 1st 2019 we hit 400 subscribers. Shortly after we began doing weekly livestreams in addition to our weekly videos, and in May of 2019 we hit 1,000 subscribers and entered the partner program. Summer is big for us, and last summer saw us double our watchtime and views. After some advice from a colleague we discontinued our weekly livestream and instead went to a random monthly livestream and in December hit 2,500 subscribers. Winter was dismal, as expected. We were getting a quarter of our regular viewership, but when COVID happened everything obviously picked up. We doubled-down and began posting content twice per week, and we are now seeing a spike in viewership like we have never seen before. We will be hitting 150,000 views this week and at the rate we are going we will top 250,000 by the end of the year, with expectations for 4,000 subscribers.
You know it's good to run down the history of a person's channel. Just shows we all grow at different rates and in different ways.
For me I started in 2014. at the time I was miserable at my day job at the chicken shack. Took me about two years to get my first 1,000 subs. 2017 I made a decision to really learn this art of communicating with motion picture. That's when the
Juggin'! series started: really trying to make every fishing adventure a true documentary film.
I was doing tutorials and following everyone's advice about that, but it hit me that whenever my audience saw that I was on the water in the thumbnail, that's the video they watched. It hit me that my audience didn't want to watch tutorials. They loved the "high quality" content. High quality content projects something about the way produce the product I've invented. That led to more sales.
The difficulty was how do you produce two or three documentary films per week? You don't. Guys like
Matt Guthmiller in his aviation channel only make, what, a couple videos per month? I mean you're literally watching a Travel Channel-level production of him flying around the world in his airplane.
Look at some of these guy crossing the ocean in a sail boat. Same thing. Then I found out about a guy names Andrew St. Pierre White. He is a long time TV personality who build off-road truck then drives them across the world most rugged terrain. He got feed up with TV station and started his own YouTube channel. Took his film class, that helped me as well.
Now I have 7k subs, and the whole thing is growing about the same stinkin' rate as it always has!
It's been a very long slow process. Some of us are moving through spacetime at a slower rate. It takes Pluto a longer time to get around the sun than Mercury. If I produce three videos in a week, I'll get fewer views compared to one one high quality fishing adventure.
To answer the original question. I already had 1k, 4k before they every started the Partner Program. I didn't even apply for almost four years or something. I still didn't turn on the monetization of my videos for like another year or something. There was steady healthy revenue coming off my Web site and Ebay page form the products that I sold.
Once I did monetize the videos, that was just extra money.
