YouTube Question Was YouTube a lot easier in the past?

[Cubey]

Was YouTube a lot easier in the past?

 

[kitchen c/o ammama]

Haha ! Good Question . Really Interested to see answers. I have been on YouTube as a creator the last 1 yr. As far as tools are concerned , things are getting easy but as far as Ads & Monetization are concerned, I heard it has become tuff.

I honestly wanna hear from @Stanley Orchard @Beanie Draws @Damon 's experience on this.

 

[oceansofflame]

Far easier now for content creation. Terribly hard to get views though and the algo is much less forgiving on new creators in my honest opinion.

As they say, in the beginning, it was the creator that attracted people and now it's more the content/topic

 

[Beanie Draws]

It was kind of the wild Wild West. There wasnΓÇÖt as much knowledge about algorithms and SEO, so most focused on clickbait and clickbait titles. It was super hard to find variety in niches you enjoyed (which is half the reason why I started a channel)

The comment system was HORRIBLE. They only introduced ΓÇ£view comments not yet replied toΓÇ¥. I relied on tubebuddyΓÇÖs comment sorting filters for years and YouTube only Brough theirs in around September/October last year. I think thumbnail ctr was brought in fairly recently, so you have no real idea of how your videos were performing.

back then, it was more about views, if you couldnΓÇÖt get views, no one would care, and the only way to get views back then was to do big stunts which is where clickbait ran rampant.

the one thing I DID like in the early days were I believe they were called ΓÇ£annotationsΓÇ¥ so if you messed up something in the video during the upload process, you could leave a nice big note on the full screen to notify users, now those errors are simply there, but the videos are so old theyΓÇÖre hardly noticed.

My first 100 subscribers took about 3 months and 30 videos, so more or less the same as today, and it still took a while to hit 1k, but once I found my niche and target audience, I grew to 5 k, then 10k pretty rapidly.

ΓÇ¥newΓÇ¥ YouTube came in when I was around 15-17k, and once I hit 20k, it definitely become more difficult in the sense of learning the new System, the new algorithm, and burnout was a big issue.

 

[Stanley | Team TB]

Today you have people who can educate you, that wasn't a thing back in the day. So it used to be technically easier, but what difference does that make if you dont know how to do it?

If we all knew then what we know now then yeah, it would be easier. But it isnt impossible now... and today we all have an amazing support structure and information readily available.

 

[kitchen c/o ammama]

It was kind of the wild Wild West. There wasnΓÇÖt as much knowledge about algorithms and SEO, so most focused on clickbait and clickbait titles. It was super hard to find variety in niches you enjoyed (which is half the reason why I started a channel)

The comment system was HORRIBLE. They only introduced ΓÇ£view comments not yet replied toΓÇ¥. I relied on tubebuddyΓÇÖs comment sorting filters for years and YouTube only Brough theirs in around September/October last year. I think thumbnail ctr was brought in fairly recently, so you have no real idea of how your videos were performing.

back then, it was more about views, if you couldnΓÇÖt get views, no one would care, and the only way to get views back then was to do big stunts which is where clickbait ran rampant.

the one thing I DID like in the early days were I believe they were called ΓÇ£annotationsΓÇ¥ so if you messed up something in the video during the upload process, you could leave a nice big note on the full screen to notify users, now those errors are simply there, but the videos are so old theyΓÇÖre hardly noticed.

My first 100 subscribers took about 3 months and 30 videos, so more or less the same as today, and it still took a while to hit 1k, but once I found my niche and target audience, I grew to 5 k, then 10k pretty rapidly.

ΓÇ¥newΓÇ¥ YouTube came in when I was around 15-17k, and once I hit 20k, it definitely become more difficult in the sense of learning the new System, the new algorithm, and burnout was a big issue.

Today you have people who can educate you, that wasn't a thing back in the day. So it used to be technically easier, but what difference does that make if you dont know how to do it?

If we all knew then what we know now then yeah, it would be easier. But it isnt impossible now... and today we all have an amazing support structure and information readily available.

Thank you so much for sharing your experiences and thoughts.