Issue 3: Lessons for building a sustainable YouTube Channel
Lessons gleaned from 9 months of pain and polish
In a past skit, Aziz Ansari talked about an experience he had with famously absent singer Frank Ocean. Feeling burnt out, Aziz Ansari asked Frank Ocean how he could go so long just doing his own thing and not making music.
Frank Ocean’s reply was simple:
“You just got to be comfortable making less money, that’s all.”
And that’s a piece of advice that I’ve tried to stay true to in my journey as a content creator. In this issue, I talk a little bit about supporting my channel from a sustainable base.
Sustainability (should) trumps all
Building a Youtube channel is fun, but it also sucks. A lot.
Once you rev up the content engine, there are strong forces — internal and external — that compel you to make content regularly. Content creation gives you this sinister background anxiety that you should be spending all of your free time towards growing the channel. And for many YouTubers, this becomes the main force that drives them to make content and the force that burns out their creative spirit.
This brings me to sustainability. Not sustainability from an environmental perspective, but from the creator’s perspective. How should I, as a small educational channel, approach Youtube?
I think that education is different from other content on YouTube. The purpose is to teach, so anything in your video that does otherwise can be distracting. So it doesn’t fit into the mold of content that I would think to be amenable to our judge-jury-and-executioner, the Youtube algorithm.
But that doesn’t mean that educational channels can’t be successful. Look to inspirations such as Veritasium, 3Brown1Blue, and SmarterEveryDay. People can make it through teaching on Youtube, but it’s not the same type of material you’d see in a university lecture. Their material is often framed in terms of “cool thing you didn’t know about." Which I love, but it doesn’t fit perfectly with my content goals. These are the problems I’m trying to figure out:
How do you make a channel teaching concrete statistical skills? Or for that matter, any form of technical knowledge? Is it possible to make a living off of it?
My belief is that the answer to the above problems can only be to stick it out in the long term. Success in this context means lots of subscribers, sponsors and the ability to live off the channel. Burning yourself out and stopping is the surefire way to actually be forgotten. The driving idea behind this working hypothesis is the elusive unicorn of Youtube: evergreen content.
If you’ve never heard this phrase before, then evergreen content is content that “stays fresh” for viewers, regardless of time. That is, content that people will keep coming back to, and by extension, bring in ad revenue for you.
I’m still very much at the beginning of my journey, not even hitting the year mark yet. But I’ve learned some things, so I hope will be useful to others who wish to make the same leap I did.
My Context
Before I get into the list, I think it’s important to know a little bit about context.
I do content creation part-time. I have to balance my PhD research with content creation.
I work alone, so I’m in charge of the entire video making process.
I dedicate most of my weekend to going out and being with my girlfriend or friends
In short, I have strived for balance between YouTube, my PhD and my relationships.
1) Optimize for consistency of effort
Like I mentioned in Issue 2, I’ve struggled with consistently uploading videos in the past. When I first started the channel, I treated video editing as a sprint. I often edited until 2-3am in the morning, and it absolutely ruined the next day for me. Workouts were terrible, my mind often wasn’t completely present and it made the editing slog even harder if I needed to continue the next day.
I won’t dismiss the fact that, sometimes, you’re going to need to burn some midnight oil. The Youtube’s Partner Program requires you to meet watch time and subscriber counts within a year, so you have to put in the work to get noticed. But, I want to stress that “grinding” should be done as a last resort. The downstream consequences of ”grinding it out” are many, and they should be avoided whenever possible.
One of the maxims I often hear repeated in Youtube advice videos is to be consistent, usually consistency in terms of uploading content. The idea here is that you have to keep yourself in the eyes of the algorithm and increase your chances of one of your videos popping off. But trying to keep up a consistent upload schedule wasn’t tenable as a part-time effort.
After many months of ruining my sleep, I opted for a different definition of “consistency”. Instead of editing for as long as I can, I try to edit for about 2-3 hours a day. This choice has made content creation much more bearable and easier to balance with my other responsibilities.
In order to stay on top of everything, both the YouTube channel and Ph.D work receive dedicated blocks of time. These areas are not allowed to encroach on each other, and I try to be strict about this. If I am not done with a task at the end of a work block, then it must wait for the next day to be worked on. This sacrifices predictability for your viewers, but I think it keeps you in the game for longer.
2) Small refinements
Because I can only dedicate a limited amount of time to YouTube in a day, there’s only so much effort and experimentation that I can implement before the next video. As a result, I always try to implement one small change to improve my video making process. This includes writing, editing or even in making the thumbnail. This change could be made to make your process faster or to make the video better in some way.
For example, there was a point where I realized that I wasn’t keeping track of the style of my videos. I wanted my videos to be stylistically similar, but I would often forget how I did something in a past video. This is especially important if you have video formats that you consistently upload.
To account for this, I created a small Final Cut Pro template that contains almost all of the texts and special effects that I would need for an explainer video.
Every time I start a new explainer, I’ll open this template project so that I have easy access to these styles with a keyboard shortcut. Final Cut Pro has an option for pasting properties of clips, and this has saved me so much time over many videos.
3) Metrics are proxies
In statistics, there’s this idea of a proxy variable. A proxy variable is something that is related to another variable that we actually care about, but is too difficult to measure. The proxy variable is related to this variable of interest, but is easier to measure.
As a sustainable content creator, you must be mindful of what metrics you use to judge your success. When you look at YouTube Studio, you are given a bevy of metrics on your videos: subscribers, watch time, impressions, CPM, RPM, and the list goes on.
These metrics are all proxy variables to the true variables we all want to know: is my channel improving? Are people getting value and useable knowledge from what I wrote?
Before I was in the Partner program, I obsessed over subscriber count. A gained subscriber was a fist pump. A lost subscriber was a punch in the gut. This period of time was not fun. I cannot directly control if someone subscribes to the channel or not, so I knew deep down that I should not be basing my feelings of success of this metric. After I got into the program, it became easier to ignore subscriber count, but I can’t forget how obsessed I was with opening the YouTube Studio app.
Nowadays, I don’t really examine my metrics much. The one metric I keep an eye on is average watch time. I always try to shoot to push this metric up with each new video. If it gets higher, then that’s some evidence that more people stick through with it. But I do keep in mind that there are so many reasons that someone might break off my video before it ends. I try not to think too much about why the metric changed too much, I just try to make the number bigger. I’m happy when it happens, and I’m indifferent when it doesn’t.
Conclusion
The master plan for me is to keep uploading until a wealth of statistical knowledge populates my library. People will continue to get benefit from it, and my hope is that the library will be evergreen since statistical knowledge doesn’t change much. I believe that there’s more weight to having a bigger library of content to learn from; it signals credibility and expertise. As long as I keep uploading, I know that these videos will continue to provide value long past their upload date. That’s my hypothesis, at least.
These are the lessons that I think had the most impact on my ability to sustain content creation. I hope that you can take my advice and mold it to something actionable in your life. I’d love to know if there was something that made your work more sustainable, let me know in the comments.
See you next week.