Starting A New YouTube Channel
In a recent post, I mentioned that I’ve started a new YouTube channel. To be honest, I wasn’t sure if I should do this, and I’m still not sure if it’ll go well, but regardless of how it goes I want to cover my reasoning here.
It’s made very deliberately hard to know what exactly YouTube’s algorithm specifically looks for in content, but we all know what it’s goal is. It wants to direct people to the videos they’re most likely to click on and watch through. It wants to keep people on the site as long as possible. And while we may not know what it’s thinking, we can make a pretty good guess at what kind of data it has to work with.
It keeps track of everyone who watches each video, and it keeps track of what other videos each of those viewers have watched. It knows if viewers have come to that video through searching for it, or being recommended it, or clicking a link from some other website. All that and probably quite a lot more are what it has to work with, but at the end of the day it’s just looking for patterns.
If you like watching videos about videogames, YouTube can see the pattern of you clicking on videos marked under the gaming category, and it can see the names of videogames in the tags and titles of the videos you click on, and it can see that you watch the same videos as other people who share the same tendencies. It doesn’t really know what video games are, and it certainly doesn’t know what gaming content is, but it knows the pattern. Your account and accounts like yours will watch videos that fit in this pattern, so it shows them to you.
I say all this to say that I may have shot myself in the foot without realizing it. For the last 6 years, I’ve been posting most of what I make to a single channel called Doobly. If you search for it, (even filtering for just channels) you probably won’t find it. Instead you’ll see a number of channels with similar names and far fewer subscribers.
I think this is because I treated the channels as a general portfolio instead of a coherent brand. There wasn’t much of a pattern to what I made, other than that I was the one making it.
I’d post anything from school projects to animations to funny meme edits to parody video essays. There was no clear theme, and I think that meant YouTube’s algorithm couldn’t figure out who to recommend my videos to.
That’s why I decided to try starting from scratch. Clean slate, new channel, coherent theme. This will be purely art and animation related, and this time I’ll actually be trying to reach people.
For these new videos, I’ve given all of them a recognizable border in the thumbnail to make it clear they come from the same place, and I’m putting all of them under the film & animation category. I’m also making fan animatics of Dimension 20, a D&D series, for 2 reasons: 1 is that I genuinely love it, and I think doing things sincerely is the best way as a rule of thumb. 2 is that I’m ultimately planning to post In Search Of Adventure here, and I have a feeling fans of Dimension 20 would be fans of this as well.
My first D20 animatic got no views for 2 weeks, and then suddenly shot up past 100,000! I have no idea how that happened and I was completely blindsided by it. I’ve just uploaded my next D20 animatic, and I’ll have to wait and see if it gets a response as well. My thinking is that I’ll have to upload content in this vein for a couple of months at least to see if I can consistently start getting over 1,000 views. If I can, I think I can seriously build something out of this. I might even be able to make it my job!
But until then, I’ll just have to wait and see.