Need Advice Question About Moving to a Brand Channel

[AvGeek_in_AZ]

Hello Youtubers! I have a question about what direction to take. I've had a small personal YT channel for years, never really did much with it but I do have a few videos with thousands of views. I only have 674 subs but have met the watch time requirement for monetization. As you can tell from my username, aviation is my hobby. I have a separate website for it, and a few aviation-related videos within my YT channel. Now, I have an idea for fresh aviation related content I'd like to build...get monetized...and grow it. But I'd like to keep the subject matter separate, ideally to have its own channel for the aviation videos which would be linked to the website. In this way, all of the aviation stuff could grow and would not be mixed in with my car, computer, personal blog type videos, etc.

But I really want to get to the monetization level. I created a 2nd channel - a "brand" channel - but I know that there isn't a way to move some of the videos over. My brand channel has zero subs and videos. I would have to grow it from scratch, right? But my personal channel is more than halfway there and I've grown those subs and watch time over years. What would be a good strategy to move forward? Should I just keep putting everything on the personal channel? I think Youtube allows for moving a personal channel onto a brand channel, so should I move it all over, which would give me 674 subs on the brand, and then re-upload my personal vids to a new personal channel? The thing is, a few of my personal vids have high views (one has 110k! :O) and even some comments but if I upload them to a new channel that will get wiped out, right? Or maybe upload the personal videos to a new channel and hide but not delete them from the brand channel, would that retain all of the original metrics if they're hidden? By hiding them I could leave the "public face" of the aviation brand channel with only relevant videos but would I retain all the past metrics (views, minutes, etc) of the hidden videos?

I'm looking for suggestions on how to move forward using the stats that took me years to build while moving all my current hobby videos together & starting to regularly adding many more.

 

[Stanley | Team TB]

You would need to grow the second channel from scratch, and you can't transplant a video from one channel to another. However, the raw footage is yours and you can make an updated re-edit of a prior video to post to your new channel. It needs to be different enough to stand alone as it's own video, but there is no rule against repurposing existing footage.
In this circumstance I would want to maintain what I was doing on the main channel and maybe just focus my current content on the subject that you are creating this second channel for. This is called 'pivoting' your channel; it's common and you don't need to worry about older, off-topic videos affecting the performance of future content. If you really feel the need to do a second channel go for it; it hurts to have to start over but in some circumstances that is just eh way it goes.