Hello! Long time no blog!
Growing my YouTube channel has been my main creative endeavor for the past three years. (It hasn’t been three years since I released my first video but I was working on concepts well before that was finished.) I know in my heart that I’ve made some good videos, a few okay videos, and a couple of videos that I wish I had put a little more thought or passion into. After all that, I’m not where I thought I would be at this time in regard to how many subscribers I have (172 as of this writing). Some of that is that I don’t make catchy enough content (click bait) or long enough content (YouTube prioritizes “watch time” over every other metric). I make what I want to make and I don’t play to any algorithms. The thing that has me convinced that one day my channel could take off is that I do put effort into my videos, that I do think of them as art, and I know they’re not totally disposable like many videos out there. If someday I do get a “hit” then people might see that video and then see I have other videos and maybe decide that I’m worth subscribing to.
Knowing that getting my videos in front of people will eventually convince some of them to watch more of my videos and that that will ultimately convince some of them to subscribe to my channel, I’m left thinking about how to get that first video in front of people. (Marketing my videos, much like marketing for anything, is like half of the energy spent on a project.) I post a lot on social media. Reddit and Instagram are pretty good for promoting stuff. Twitter doesn’t seem to work for me. Facebook can be OK, depending on…actually, I don’t know how Facebook works but sometimes it treats me well. I have an email list. YouTube itself shows my video to some people but it can be hit or miss. Some of my comedy videos that take the shape of a commercial get secretly flagged as ads or as links to ads—despite no product actually being sold—and receive a form of shadow banning. I guess I should be flattered that they look enough like real ads to trick a robot but I’m too busy being annoyed at those videos’ low view counts.
The first deal with a devil I took to speed things up was to start “boosting” my videos on Facebook. This means paying Facebook to show posts to people as ads. I felt icky doing it. I felt icky giving Facebook money. I feel icky just being on Facebook most of the time. Unfortunately, it worked, so I kept doing it. I would drop $20 on a video and it would get some views. Good being the enemy of great, I kept doing it. Then, for some reason, the views started drying up. I don’t have an explanation for this other than I think Facebook might have been scamming me the whole time. I think I got a bunch of legitimate views but I also think some of the success was an illusion. I wasn’t gaining many subscribers through those views. Facebook also once rejected a “boosting” because I was addressing people based on personal information pertaining to a medical need. This video was about a fake product—ice cream that ridiculously contained medicine to help a person fall asleep. Again, tricking a robot but only to my own peril. I had to find a better solution.
This brings me to my second and current deal with a devil, Google Ads on YouTube. This might seem like a natural place for me to have started: why boost posts on Facebook when you can promote a video on YouTube itself? Well, firstly, I had worked with boosting posts on Facebook before on non-video projects. Facebook is fairly straightforward and I could do some loose targeting such as looking for people who “like” SNL and “like” Key & Peele. Secondly, people had me scared to use YouTube for promoting my videos. Certain blogs and parts of Reddit would call using Google Ads to grow a YouTube channel heresy. “Do better” is a common refrain, referring to Google Ads as a shortcut. They want people to build their channels “the right way.” It’s a bunch of nonsense but there were allegedly some scary repercussions: people will downvote your video for being an ad; no one will subscribe to a channel they got to from an ad; people will be so mean to you! I didn’t want people to be mean to me! So I did the Facebook “boosts” until I was burned one too many times.
I’m happy to report that Google Ads on YouTube has been working! It’s not the model I want to follow for the long haul and I wish I had more time/energy to put out videos more frequently. I desperately want to be at the point where I put out weekly videos and the algorithm can more naturally treat me better. For now though, I’m way up in views, watch time, and subscribers. I did not get all the “dislikes” that I was warned about. I wrote this blog post because I didn’t know how or where else to talk about this experience. I’m scared of the Redditors.
