My Experience Running a Technology YouTube Channel for One Year

TechSolid is turning one year old tomorrow. I co-founded this YouTube channel with a few friends, and it has been quite the ride.

I’ve managed a lot of YouTube channels in my six years of involvement. But this is the first channel I have managed for a whole year. I am going to share my experiences and what I have learned so far.

The Community

The desire to launch this brand came out of the love for Technology. The Apple Watch was right around the corner, and I wanted to report on it. The first video I uploaded received a healthy amount of traffic within the first week.

The first week was amazing, our first video performed very well, but we had to explore ways to keep the momentum going.

Once we started growing and growing, things really worked out naturally. We started covering a variety of technology related topics with daily uploads. Our views per 24 hours increased, and people actually wanted to make videos and contribute to the project.

We launched our website, which acts as a hub for TechSolid content and news. This is something we hope to continue to work on in 2016, as it needs more activity. We began to explore more ways to bring in more viewers. We tried different series, such as Back to School and Holiday shopping guides, which all performed really well. We started gaining daily subscribers, and we started to form a community. The most intimidating part about YouTube, is the fear that a video that you poured your heart and soul into will not get any views. This wasn't this case for TechSolid, we were fortunate to build a following early, and watch it grow day by day.

A Global Viewership

As I am writing this post, we have a total of 480,243 video views, 1,538 subscribers, with a total amount of 757,948 minutes watched.

This number doesn’t rest easy with me, its insane to think of how far we have come as a community and a team. Every comment we receive, every like (or dislike) leaves a mark, and it influences us on how we can continue to do awesome stuff. The simple fact that our videos have been seen around the world, is insane.

The First Decline

About one month ago, the month of January 2016, we experienced our most severe decline in viewership. Our views per 48 hours were nearly chopped in half. We were still bringing in numbers into the thousands, but it wasn't like it used to be.

We began to look at reasons why this happened. One of the reasons we determined, was the possibility of the “Tech Off season” with few products being released. We also decided to dig REALLY deep into our YouTube SEO strategy and make changes there. We were able to recover our views after analyzing our viewership data and making adjustments, its a good thing we did.

Now to go back in time a little bit to explore our history.

The First Payday

After two months of activity, our first payment came in. It was exciting, we were getting rewarded for the hard work covering news daily. We all loved producing content, but now we had to put our business pants on. What were we going to do with the money?

By our first payment, we had a team of about three people, Jeremy, Myself, and Andrew. We all determined that it was not worth splitting the revenue multiple ways, so we decided to save it to fund other TechSolid ventures. As more and more payments came in, we started to build a decent stockpile of funds for TechSolid. If something came up, we could afford it. If we needed to buy something for the channel or website, we could do it.

We decided to be smart with our money, investing it into Facebook advertising, products, and fund our website.The best part about TechSolid, its completely self funded. The revenue we generate from every video goes back into TechSolid. Startup costs were $0, and TechSolid has paid for itself.

Review Units

After awhile, just producing and uploading, something interesting happened. We got a press inquiry. It was a very small company, but it was exciting cause this was our first press email.

Its neat to receive these, cause this is a company or marketing firm that has watched our content, and decided to send us some of their products. Its something we cannot turn down. We were willing to cover any product that came through our door. Plus, we love supporting small businesses. We have been fortunate to work with a variety of companies both big and small, and its something that we have been getting at least once a week. We aren’t doing this just for the free product, but its really meaningful when a company contacts you wanting us to try it out.

Staff Payday

Around December 2015, Jeremy and I decided to do something that will make the rest of the team very happy, payments.

We decided to take what was inside our account and distribute it among the entire team. To me, this was a very special moment. Our team members are contributing to TechSolid for no monthly pay. We don’t pay ourselves every month, and it created an equal playing field cause we were all volunteering. The fact that we had people working with us, completely free, meant alot to me. We felt like we needed to reward everyone. We have not had another staff payday since then, but we hope to do it soon.

Conclusion

I have always loved the YouTube platform, the idea of creating something and uploading for the world to see has always captivated me. It has surely paid off with TechSolid. I plan to work even harder as we travel through our second year of activity, taking what I have learned and applying it everyday.

To those who have supported the TechSolid project, thank you. I personally can’t wait to see what our next year has for us.