Thinking about starting a YouTube channel

[Crumpets]

I enjoy watching long-form video essays on YouTube, I enjoy researching and writing essays (to an extent), and I feel like I have at least a mediocre level of expertise in fields of study that people have built successful YouTube channels on in the past. This wouldn't be a job, just a hobby, and any money made would be incidental and an added bonus.

Does anyone on here operate a YouTube channel that's more than just a personal account and actually makes content for an audience? Any tips to help or horror stories to dissuade me?

[Rand]

My husband started a channel à la Lofi Girl to showcase his digital art. I help him find music and regularly study the channel’s analytics. There are specific steps you must take to ensure people can find your videos. You must understand how the YouTube algorithm works so you know the formula for success. It takes time to grow your audience and even longer to earn revenue. Patience is key…we are almost at 1K subscribers but it has taken us over a year to get there.

[dead0man]

One thing that will make it hard to watch a channel is bad audio and almost every channel starts out with bad audio, so get a good microphone.  If you're going to be a talking head, get good lighting too.

[Meclazine for Israel]

Once you get to 100K subscribers, your earnings will be around USD $10k per million views.

If you can pump out 52 videos a year, and they each get 1M views (then halving every successive year), your rolling income will be around

• 1st year - US $520k
• 2nd year - US $780k
• 3rd year - US $901k

and so on.

Baby Shark Dance

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqZsoesa55w

This video has had 14,522,637,207 views. Based on the analysis above, it has earned around USD $145M for the owner.

So get yourself a couple of singing Eurasian kids, some cheesy underwater graphics and write some god-awful musical score.

Once a video starts, the secret is to avoid people disappearing in the early stages (0-10s). This is why scammy videos say "Watch Until End". The reality is you just need really good content to get people to stay.

If that majority of people stay for more than 30s, the algorithm will promote your video.

A cooking video making pasta for example is a perfect money maker. If you want to know how to do it, you will stay until the end, or at least 75% of the video until you discover how to make the pasta.

[SnowLabrador]

Good luck. I speak from experience - growing a channel is easier said than done.