Watch Me Build A Youtube Channel Step-By-Step In 2023

Last Wednesday I started my new Youtube channel,?Filmalysis.

Let’s run the numbers after my first week:

Views:?5,200

Subscribers:?75

Videos Posted:?5

Watch Time:?110 hours

I want to talk about my progress so far and note things that HAVE and HAVEN’T worked. Let’s go.

Analyzing The Performance Of My First Video

Here’s my first video I posted a week ago.

It’s gotten about 1,000 views so far. Here’s where the traffic came from:

About 750 views of the 1,000 it’s received have come from INSIDE Youtube. I’m a little surprised it got this much traffic so quickly.

Normally it takes a long time for a video to start getting impressions inside Youtube itself — especially when it’s a video from a brand new channel.

Last Thursday I promoted this video in my newsletter. It resulted in about 200 views. A few days after, we started getting some impressions from Youtube.

So far we’ve gotten about 20,600 impressions (seen below).

The click-through rate is NOT what I was expecting.?3% is way too low for me, and on the bottom end of the typical Youtube click-through rate. They say that anything from 2–10% is normal on the platform.

The most viral videos on my other channel always had about a 7–8% click-through rate.

Based on that, 3% click-through is simply not going to lead to virality.

What will lead to virality on Youtube are typically two things:?Click-through rate and average view duration.

If people click on your video a lot and watch a lot of it, then that’s telling Youtube your video is good.

My average view duration is about 27%. That’s still a little low, actually, but it’s been increasing steadily from 20% to 27% over the last week. I’m good with that, and expect it to increase with time as Youtube keeps getting it in front of the right audience.

Today I changed my thumbnail, actually. Typically, low click-through rates happen because of your thumbnail. Here’s a comparison of my old and new thumbnails:

I honestly don’t know which one is better, but we got to test, don’t we?

I noticed other film channels use movie posters in their thumbnails a lot. I decided to move from a screenshot to a movie poster, and I also decided to get a little more detailed in what info the video contains.

I don’t know which one is better, perhaps you can tell me.

So far my click-through rate in the last few hours seems to be increasing from about a 3% to 5%, but it’s still too early to tell.

I’m really proud of this video and believe in the quality and long-term value of it. I need to get the click-through rate up to see that opportunity realized, though, because a 3% click-through rate will kill it.

But, 1,000 views after one week on my first video? I’m happy with that.

Analyzing The Performance Of My 4 Shorts

The past few days, I’ve created four Youtube “shorts.”

These have each taken me about an hour to make and I reposted them on Instagram and Tiktok with varying success.

For instance, one short on Instagram got?131,000 views?in a matter of hours. That same video on TikTok got 800 views.

On Youtube they haven’t gotten much traction either.

There’s a few weird things that typically happen worth noting:

Here’s the view graph for one of my shorts:

Do you see that spike after day 1?

It’s happened on every video I’ve published so far. 24 hours in, we see a spike of about 1,000 views or something.

Then they typically die.

Each of my shorts has about 1,000 views so far, and they haven’t driven a ton of watch time or subscribers for me worth writing home about just yet.

But this is Youtube, where your luck can change on a dime and the algorithm will start dumping views on you out of nowhere.

What’s weird is that these shorts typically get really weird comments from people telling me how delusional I am to — GASP — see hidden messages in well-made movies.

I have a few theories as to why:

1. They’re shorts, and it’s hard for me to give necessary context as to why I think there’s hidden messages in these movies.
2. These shorts are probably being recommended to people who don’t care about movies.

I mean, one of the search terms that recommended my short are “best bidet attachment 2022.”

I mean, sheesh, forgive me for enjoying movies random internet troll.

I haven’t received any similar comments on my long-form video, which leads me to believe it’s the nature of shorts — especially when explaining complex things — that attract trolls.

How I Will Alter My Strategy Moving Forward

For me, I plan to do a few things:

1. Wait
2. Work on my next big video
3. Stop publishing shorts
4. Use movie posters more in my thumbnails

I have enough content here to just wait and see what happens. Maybe a short will get a ton of views out of nowhere. Maybe my Interstellar video essay will start getting more clicks.

My point is, I got enough content posted to wait and see what the algorithm does to help me out.

I’m happy with where I am so far.