How I Gained 300 Subscribers On Youtube In 30 Days

A month ago, I published a story telling everybody I started a Youtube channel.

I wanted to check in and give you episode 2 here as we kick off March.

Let’s get into the numbers.

Channel Performance Until February 2, 2023

Views: 5,200

Subscribers: 75

Videos Posted: 5

Watch Time: 110 hours

Let’s give everyone an update for this month.

Channel Performance Until March 1, 2023

Views: 22,500

Subscribers: 355

Videos Posted: 10

Watch Time: 1,400 hours

In short, watch time, subscribers, and views exploded. Dope.

The Videos That Helped Me Get 300 New Subscribers

Okay so long story short, I started getting lots of views to a few of my videos — one of them being my Interstellar video.

As of right now, we have over 7,000 views to this video, and it’s accounted for 115 new subscribers and 661 hours of watch time.

Here’s a look at the analytics:

Okay, so as you remember last time I wasn’t super enthused with the click-through rate on this video. At a 1.6% click-through rate, I’m still a bit underwhelmed.

But for some reason it seems to not even matter that much.

This video gets, on average, about 300–400 new views per day.

The other video that’s done very well for me is my essay on on Everything Everywhere All At Once.

I REALLY love how I designed this thumbnail, by the way.

Here’s the analytics for this one:

So we got 6,000+ views on this one so far, and since this movie is about to get a lot of buzz in the news for its inevitable Oscar wins, I think we’re setup nicely to ride that wave.

These two videos have accounted for most of my views, watch time, and subscribers.

One more thing — I watched Ant-Man 3 the other day and decided to make a video breaking down what I liked and didn’t like about the film. That’s resulted in about 1,700 new views for me, and I’m just recently catching a lot of views for it in the last few days.

The thing is, I’m not getting as many subscribers per view for that video. I have a hunch why.

It’s probably because there’s a billion people reviewing movies on Youtube. This video wasn’t well-planned or researched. I basically just turned my camera on and started talking about the movie.

With all that said, it’s given me valuable amounts of watch time (about 150 hours) that’s helping me get closer to smashing the requirements to monetize my channel.

Plus it took me about 4 hours to make that video from shooting to editing to uploading. The film breakdown videos I make normally take me about 15–20 hours per video.

So, it’s nice to get some views for less effort.

The Videos That Were Complete Failures

Oh gosh, are you ready?

Let’s laugh at my pain.

So part of my strategy was to create a few videos highlighting this year’s Oscar Nominees. I figured I might get some views as buzz surrounding these movies came to a fever pitch. I decided to make one on The Banshees Of Inisherin.

This video was troubled from the start. I literally made 19 different thumbnail variations after initial click-through rates were awful.

I went through a half dozen titles as well.

This video was just as detailed and well-made as my other ones, but I just couldn’t quite market it that well. I couldn’t find a way to make what was inside it that compelling in thumbnail form.

So I cut my losses, stopped trying to fix this problem, and took the L.

It’s since garnered about 1,400 views, which is respectable, but it’s not enough for the massive effort I put into this one.

My next video failed even worse.

My friend recommended I do a video on The Dark Knight. I’m a huge Christopher Nolan fan and I wondered what superhero movies, if any, could be worthy of a breakdown.

The Dark Knight seemed to be one of the only ones.

So I covered The Dark Knight.

The click-through rates on this one were atrocious from the start as well. I’m talking like a .6% click-through rate. It was a bloodbath. It hasn’t gotten much better with the thumbnail and title I currently have.

I decided to cut my losses on this one, too, and let it die.

It’s currently sitting at about 150 views, despite being a high-quality video that I spent a lot of time on.

Lessons I Learned In February

Here’s what I learned this month. For creators out there, I think these lessons will be very useful.

• I got to love the videos I’m making— The Dark Knight is a great movie and all, but I always thought it was a little overrated. I always thought that Heath Ledger’s performance was the only good thing about this film, and watching it again in 2023 after YEARS of not seeing it, my original suspicions were confirmed. It’s just not my flick, people, and I shouldn’t have made a video about a movie I didn’t love. I cried watching Interstellar and Everything Everywhere All At Once — I need to cover movies I love more moving forward.
• Present one new idea, not fifty — My video on Everything Everywhere All At Once is all about the colors of that film. It’s specific. The one on Interstellar covers 9 hidden messages you might’ve missed. It’s a mixed bag. I found that people really like deep dives on one singular topic that they’ve never heard about before more than a mixed bag type video. I think, moving forward, I’m going to do less of the “9 hidden messages” type videos and more of the singular thesis type essays.
• You’re gonna make shitty videos, Tom — Failure, amiright? I had my first big failure with my Dark Knight video. That was a little bit of a punch to the gut, honestly. It’s tough to spend a whole week making a video only for it to get pummeled into the ground. But that’s life. That’s creativity. We dust ourselves off and we move on.
• You get more subscribers with quality, not quantity — My 10-minute film analysis videos get more subscribers per view than the quick review I did on Ant-Man 3. Subscribers subscribe when they see quality.
• Don’t stop experimenting — My Ant-Man 3 video was an experiment. I want to do movie reviews on this channel in the future, for sure, so I decided to do a quick test and see how people liked it.
• Invest in yourself — I bought a microphone after somebody told me in the comments section that my audio quality was atrocious. They were right, actually, so I bought a microphone, a metal arm thingy, and a pop filter. Now my videos sound like you’re listening to me talking next to a fire at Christmas or something. It’s dope.
• No more shorts — I stopped making Youtube shorts. I think they’re largely just a waste of time for my channel specifically. 30–40 seconds is not enough time to explain big concepts to people and most of the comments under my shorts are extremely degrading for some reason. I choose big videos.

That’s about it, everyone.

It was a really solid month for my channel (subscribe here if you want), and I was super surprised at how well some of my videos did. The last time I checked in, I had one long-form video that barely had 1,000 views. My channel’s exploded since then and it seems like people really love what I’m posting. For instance, I got these comments recently:

This is what I like to see. People impressed with the quality. That’s how I know I’m going down the right path here.

From 300 subs to 300,000, I guess!

Cheers. Consider subscribing to my Substack Newsletter where I post the written version of these film breakdowns. I think you’ll like it! :)