Thanks for the kind words and for the healthy dose of optimism
I'd be happy with 10k-ish subs and a nice community, our little corner of the Internet.
Well, here we are, a year or so later and I've just (as in yesterday) celebrated the 10,000 subscriber milestone!!!
Thought I'd update this thread and share some of the stuff I've learned over the past 12-13 months as a YouTuber.
1) First of all, YouTube can be very, very supportive
My animations are great but let's be honest, the production value of my filmed videos is not... not yet, at least; I've always been insecure about actually filming myself because while I use my written English a LOT more than I use my native language (emails, blog posts,articles, books, you name it), the same cannot be said about my spoken English. I was kind of afraid I'd disappoint people but YouTube has been awesome; so awesome in fact that at a certain point, I took a close look at the analytics for:
a) my 10 most recent animations
b) my 10 most recent vlogs/filmed videos
It turns out the animations had pretty much the same number of likes as the blogs but... brace yourself... the vlogs had pretty much no dislikes. Which is ridiculous in light of how incompetent I know I am at lighting stuff, video stuff, talking in front of a camera (my accent is getting better but I'm still not satisfied) and there can only be one explanation: the community wants to support what I'm doing and in their quest for authenticity (compared to the talking heads on financial news networks, for example), they're willing to be lenient when it comes to things like production value
2) My audience is ridiculously diverse, from high school and college kids to Bank of England seniors, I kid you not; I've actually just recently (a couple of days ago) exchanged emails with a BOE dude who was very humble/polite and wanted my opinion on one of their new projects
3) The money, unless you're genuinely huge, is not going to be amazing compared to domaining, cryptocurrency investing and so on; if you're not doing it out of passion and instead are chasing money, there are better ways to skin that cat
4) Having your own product helps a LOT; perhaps the biggest positive surprise was the sales of my book's (Wealth Management 2.0) audiobook version... it's a huge advantage that I'll be able to earn additional income by selling products (books) that my audience is actually interested in rather than merch such as shirts, mugs and so on
5) I've recently started having a few very loyal fans, I've even had my first "first" comment on a YouTube video and my first "second" comment... first/second comments are a YouTube thing (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXzUcqQM8qw).
I don't take these people for granted and always do my best to engage with my audience. My rule of thumb is that replying to comments is not just the polite but also the smart thing to do. It remains to be seen how this will change once the comment volume keeps increasing but I'll do my best
6) There's a LOT of work behind the scenes and videos which seem simple to make involve far more blood/sweat/tears than meets the eye. For example, my easiest-to-make videos are the rants I publish on Monday but even with those, I usually spend over an hour just recording myself for a minute or so of footage. Then there's also editing, finding/introducing images, publishing the thing , etc.
7) At the beginning, just like with most projects I guess, it does tend to feel that you're talking to yourself; it takes just as much time writing let's say a script for an animation now when I'm at 10k+ subs as it did when I barely had 10 subscribers and the same way, the same principle will be value at 100k subs compared to 10k; the "am I talking to myself here?" phase is perhaps the hardest
... that's it for now and if you have any questions or are interested in trying something YouTube related yourself, lemme know
