I am taking YouTube seriously (and you should too)

After a long time, I published a video that seems to be taking off

A lot of people think that doing YouTube is easy. It’s not. It took me 8 years before I showed up on video. I started blogging in 2008 and didn’t even put a picture of my face on the About page because I was shy.

I was not very consistent but I published here and there. On average one or two videos a month and not more than that. I was consistently inconsistent. But I never gave up.

A lot of people give up on YouTube too soon. They try publishing some videos, but it doesn’t get much traction and then they complain that the market has become too crowded. Yes, the market has become crowded, but no matter how noisy the social media world is, you can still send signals through it.

Recently I posted a highly detailed analysis on how coaches make more than 1 crore per month in revenue with their coaching business. This has been my best-performing video so far. In a little more than a day, it has more than 3,500 views. This might not look like much, but we are not creating content for the masses in this category. We are creating content for a very specific audience.

I will not be making money through this audience because I run ads on my channel. In fact, I have not even enabled monetization on this video. The revenue will come from high-ticket sales.

Most of the views have come from my own email list audience. However since the video has performed well with my audience, I am starting to see a good amount of views from YouTube’s recommendation engine (Browse Features).

You can see in the above graph, that the yellow and green lines are the traffic from my email list. The views from recommendations (blue line) were about the same as direct email traffic, but then they decoupled.

The traffic from the email list flat-lined because that campaign is over, but through the recommendation engine, I am seeing more sustained traffic.

The average watch time is 8 minutes and 18% of the audience have watched 53 minutes. That’s more than 600 people engaging with me digitally for almost an hour, within the first day of publishing this video.

I am seeing good retention because an insane amount of effort has gone into editing this video. It has animations, stock footage, B-rolls, and some music clips as well.

I might be able to make at least one video like this every week. If the results are better than expected, I might make 2 like this every week. The content cannot always be in-depth like this video, but the long tail will take care of helping me get more views on the channel.

I have already got a silver play button for crossing 100k subscribers. I will be aiming to hit a million subscribers by 2027. Let’s see if the stars align. It might take longer, it might take shorter, but as long as I am alive, I will be inching forward to that goal.

So are you going to start your YouTube journey?

Cheers,
Deepak Kanakaraju