Never thought I would see the day. Man, that took a LOT of work!
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Channel Milestone 5 Million VIEWS! Whew! I am exhausted. LOL!
- Thread starter The Jungle Explorer
- Start date
Never thought I would see the day. Man, that took a LOT of work!
OP
OP
Thanks. I appreciate it. Been losing view here lately and looks like I am going to have to pivot to survive, but it feels good to know that I reach this point.
- 234
- 15
- Subscriber Goal
- 200
OP
OP
OP
OP
For me, this is what it took.
1. Lots of Study.
2. Hard work
3. More study
4. A lot more hard work
5. Patience
6 Persistence
7. Determination
8. More hard work
OP
OP
Up until July of 2001, I might have said this or that has worked for me. But since July of 2001, after six years of measurable success, my channel has been in a downward spiral and nothing I can do can stop it. I have tried everything I know and it continues to crash for no apparent reason. In the words of Martin Luther (from the movie "Luther" 2003), "I have lost all of my former certainty."
The only thing I can say at this point is, "Study like a college student the night before an exam, work like a mule, and hang on with the tenacity of a pit bull".
Let me ask: How do you plan to pivot; what new direction do you plan to go? I'm at that point myself.
OP
OP
I have not fully figured this out yet. All I know is I cannot continue the way I am going; working myself into the ground while watching my channel slowly die in front of me. I am not a vulgar man, but what is going on makes no freaking sense. How can it be that I am gaining subs at breakneck speed while my views tank? How is that? The only thing I can say for certain is that subs are meaningless to me. They do not benefit my channel in any measurable way. I hear everyone talking about subs and how great they are, but for my channel, they have not done one dang thing (I became a YT partner before the 1000 subs/4k hours requirement). I now have over 15k subs and my channel is doing less than it did three years ago when I only had 2K subs. I am a strictly logical person, so it is very frustrating for me to deal with things that do not make logical sense. It is a real problem for me. I am very OCD about it. This does not make sense to me.
So, here is how I plan to pivot.
1. Try to figure out what I am doing wrong on YT and correct it.
2. Investigate switching my energy to a different platform that rewards my work better.
3. Stop YouTube and video production altogether for the time being until things settle down and maybe write a book.
As far as number one goes, I believe I have made two mistakes in the last couple of years on my JE channel that has contributed to what I am seeing. I believe I inadvertently FLIPPED my channel and then I SPLIT my channel. This will take some time to explain, so bear with me.
When I first start getting serious about YT in 2014 (I had been using YT as hosting for videos since 2005), my original focus was Farm Life and DIY. I was basically just filming what ever projects I was doing around my homestead farm. It was a simple crude form of video production. Strap a $50 action camera on my head while I was doing things I was already going to do and make a video out of it. It was fun and easy, and people loved it. Actualy they still love those old poorly produced videos. Some of them are still in my top 10 performers. I had made an agreement with my wife that I would only spend money on equipment that my YT made, so as I started earning, I bought better equipment. The problem was, filming projects around the farm was a sporadic thing and as competition grew on YT I needed to produce more steady content.
Farm projects were too costly to do, just to make a YT video of, and a lot of work, so I had to find something else less expensive to do. I have always been a gun enthusiast and hunter since a child, so I pivoted in the direction of outdoor sports. I started doing guns and ammo reviews to generate a lot fo content. I could go out with ten different boxes of .22 ammo (it was cheap), set up and shoot footage on one day for them all, and release the videos weekly over the next ten weeks. I would occasionally throw in a hunting video (a lot more difficult to produce), and a DIY project. This went very well, and then the Adpocolyps hit, and YT went bug batty nuts and demonetized and restricted every video I had about guns, ammo, and hunting. I even got a strike (for a video that had been out for two years), which caused me to take every gun, ammo or hunting video down. So, I pivted again to fishing videos, which honestly have always been my lowest performing videos, even today. So, I started to do fishing equipment reviews, and they did better, which gave me the idea to do product reviews. So, I started reviewing every outdoor sports related product I already owned just to have content. This led to companies approaching me to do reviews of their products, which I was glad for since it gave me new content for my channel. These product reviews were initially almost exclusively about fishing products, but other companies with non-outdoor sports related products were also begging me to do reviews for their products, so I started taking products that were not really in the genre of my channel (vacuum cleaners, muscle massagers, action cameras, etc). All the time, I was still producing the occasional DIY and Farm related video. I eventually moved away from fishing videos and fishing product reviews because they were simply too costly to make the videos and they just did almost nothing on my channel.
The whole product review thing basically started dominating my channel and my time. The Jungle Explorer channel was not supposed to be about this kind of content and it made my channel name sound even dumber than it already did (the name came from my original Gmail account in 2004, I did not intentionally create a channel with the name Jungle Explorer) so in 2020, I decided to create a new channel just for product reviews, which I did, and it has been a success, but just like my JE channel, it too has seen a dead halt to its views since July of 2021, even though I have released a new video every single week.
I said all that to say this; I believe I "flipped" my channel in the eye of the YT AI and confused the heck out of it. I think YT had my channel pegged as a DIY channel initially, but when I started doing mostly product reviews, it decided my channel was a product review channel. Then when I split product review off to its own channel, the AI had no idea what my channel was anymore.
I just think the AI does not really know what my channel is about because of all the pivots I have made. It has recently come to my attention that the YT AI wants to categorize channels to a very narrow niche. I want my channel to be about ME and what I am doing, but YT wants it to be about one dang thing (am just hypothesizing out loud here). When YT first started (and I was there), the motto was "Broadcast Yourself!" I took that to heart. I am a very versatile person with a lot to offer, but not all of it is focused on one thing. Some people are very singular. They like Baseball but not Basketball. They like fishing, but not hunting. They like computers, but not camping. I on the other hand am probably the most plural and versatile person you will ever meet. I can speak four languages and several dialects. I have lived deep in the Amazon jungle with primitive tribes that taught me extreme survivalism. I am a certified, computer technician and web developer. I am basically a Tarzan crossed with Crocodile Dundee but I could fit in at a geeks convention comfortably. I am a cultural chameleon that can fit in with just about any culture on earth, but I have almost no culture of my own, so I have very few friends in America. Even though I am a natural-born American, I feel like a foreigner in my own country because I was not raised here and did not live here until I was an adult and married with children. I can (and have) sit down with doctors, lawyers, governors, congressmen and have intelligent knowledgable conversations about all of these subjects and be respected by all of them, while on the other hand, I can also can sit around a fire with stone age tribal people and hold an equally engaging conversation with them, and be (and am) respected by all of them.
My point in all of this is that; I am not just one thing, and I think that is hurting me on YT. YT wants channels to be about one thing. I have so much I want to create content about to share with the world that I could have 20 channels all about different subjects, but I simply do not have the time or energy to nurture that many channels, so I have been putting it all on one channel, and the YT AI is spinning around in circles trying to figure out what my channel is about. So, I think my only option is to stop pivoting, and just decide that I will only make one type of content from now on. So my pivot is to stop pivoting. LOL!
I am gonna take my time and do a lot of research into what my subscribers want. If I am going to survive, I need to be able to connect with my subscriber. One of my big problems is that, I have been running multiply YT channels on an internet connection that would make your butt cheeks squeeze lemons. My max upload speed on a clear sunny day when nobody else is online is 0.5 Mbs. My max download speed is 3 Mbs. I live out in the country and this is the best available where I am at. It takes me days to upload a video because I have nine people using the internet on my farm and the only time I can upload is between 1:00am and 9:00am. Thank goodness the YT has the Upload Resume feature. This is also one reason I cannot upload to any other sites like Facebook because they do not have the upload resume function like YT and if any glitch occurs during an upload, I have to start the upload from the beginning. However, all of this is about to change because, after two years of waiting, Starlink just notified me that they are sending my equipment. WHOO HOO!
Once I get my Starlink up and running, I plan on trying to do live streams and connect with my subscribers directly. I need to build a relationship with them and find out what they want. Once I get a good idea of what the majority of my subscribers came to my channel for, I will start to focus exclusively on that for my JE channel. If that does not work, then I am pulling back and leaving YT for a while. I have done all the SEO possible and it does not work. At least not at my stage in the game. I just want to be me, but if I hope to survive on YT have to become what YT wants me to be, and I am not sure I can live with that. Only time will tell. In the meantime, I am actively looking at other platforms, even TikTok.
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