One year as a YouTube creator

7 min readApr 10, 2019

I’ve had my YouTube account for about ten years but never really did anything with it. If I’m honest with myself, I think that I thought that YouTube as a channel was a waste of time and YouTubers time wasters. There was a time when I was particularly snarky about them. That changed around the back end of 2017 when a friend suggested that I read Stream Punks (not sponsored) by Robert Kyncl who is the Chief Business Officer of YouTube. The book is corporate content (in much the same way as “Reality in Advertising” was) and needs to be approached as such but I was struck by the number of YouTube creators I’d never heard of, by their evident dedication to their channels and by the amount of work they appeared to be pouring into their videos.

I realised that I had no right to be snarky amount them nor YouTube because I just didn’t know what I was talking about. I didn’t know what it took to make a video, curate a channel and build an audience. I didn’t know what it meant to be a YouTube creator. So I decided to find out.

I spent a good three months researching: watching videos, discovering YouTube channels (update: I’ve included a list at the end of this post), thinking about tech and pondering on what my channel and the videos we’re going to be about.

Finally, I posted this video on the 11th of April 2018.

My very first proper YouTube film — the sound is terrible.

That was nearly a year ago. Much has changed since then. I’ve posted fourteen videos (which is about 2 hours worth of film). This is what I have learned about YouTube during this year.

YouTube creators deserve respect.

I found it easy to scoff at YouTubers because what they were doing seemed so effortless and easy. What’s going on under the surface, however, is nothing more than hard work and dedication. The outstanding ones have built massive communities around their content: communities that are loyal, vocal, supportive and argumentative. They are building more than a channel — they are building businesses, with staff on payroll and products (merch) as well as generating revenue through YouTube’s advertising programme. They are businesses and as such they deserve our respect. You may not understand what they’re doing: it may be outside of your bubble, age bracket or comfort zone, but that doesn’t mean their work isn’t of any value.

You look at the world differently.

Making videos, or taking photographs for that matter forces you to look at the world differently. I’m continually looking for something interesting to shoot or an interesting location for an on-camera section. You watch film and television differently too because the more film you make, the more you see how things are made, which leads me to…

There’s so much to learn.

Making YouTube videos has made me more curious. I had a vision of how I wanted the films to look and what I wanted them to be, but I quickly realised that I had no or very little idea of how to turn that vision into an actual piece of film. Thankfully there is a community dedicated to helping people learn cinematography and video making. Where are they? On YouTube. The learning part quickly became part of the creative process, and if you watch the fourteen films, you can see how the production values start to improve: focus, colour grading, sound (I could write a book about the mistakes I made with sound) as well as the stories have all improved.

There’s so much tech to buy.

The first piece of advice you’ll receive when starting out as a YouTuber is that you only need a smartphone to start. This is true. But there’s so much gorgeous tech out there. I’ve bought quite a bit and upgraded my computer too. I’ve promised myself to stop, but there’s so much tech to buy.

8 hours painting for a couple of seconds in the film.

My videos are my babies.

I put quite a bit of time and energy into planning the videos. I even flew back to England to finish the third part of a series because, well, because the video needed that to happen (you can watch it end the end of this post). I love every single one. Some more than others but that doesn’t mean the audience feels the same way about them. My favourite, most time consuming and physically challenging video, where I walked the sum total of 4 marathons in one week, is one of the poorest performing videos.

179.4km walked in 1 week.

Some videos I nearly didn’t post because I didn’t think anybody would like them and they have performed quite well.

The analytics are your friend and your enemy.

I’m emotionally connected to the videos I make. They’re important to me. Some work, some don’t, and with the YouTube analytics, you can see, in realtime what’s working and what’s not. It’s brutal. I’m not only talking about the number of views each video gets, which is brutal enough but the actual viewing time on each video. You actually get to see when people stop watching the film. You can often find me shouting at my screen and begging people to watch to the end because that’s where the good bit is. Now, my performance marketing friends would say, “perfect, and now you have sufficient data to optimise your film”. That makes sense but only for YouTube. I’ve started to notice that some YouTube creators films have started to lose the charm that attracted me to their channel in the first place. They’ve started to optimise. This may make business sense, but in terms of film making, it feels disastrous. I’m still trying to find the balance of making the films I want to make and making them work for a YouTube audience.

It’s about building a community and not chasing subscribers.

I’ve set myself the goal of reaching 1000 subscribers by the end of the year. That doesn’t sound like much but it has taken nearly a year and two hours worth of film to reach the 534 subscribers I currently have. I’m insanely proud of that number. It’s tempting to pull out all of the stops and change to videos in an attempt to harvest more subscribers, but I don’t feel comfortable with that. What I have realised is that YouTube really is about building communities. In fact, it feels like the early days of blogging: you would write a post and people would regularly come by to comment on what you’d written. I get quite a lot of feedback on my films from people from all over the world and all over the internet, and I genuinely cherish them all, but it is the comments that are posted directly under the videos that make my heart swell. Age of conversation days again.

I’m on the brink of stopping. Daily.

I get up, get washed and dressed, turn the computer on and look at the numbers that YouTube’s backend is mocking me with. Then I look at all of the other stuff, the actual stuff I’m supposed to be doing, like writing performances, coaching and mentoring and generally running my business and think: it’s time to stop. But then I’ll get an email, or a comment or a tweet from someone telling me that a video helped them with something, or they found it interesting or moving. The community keeps me going, and I’m grateful for it.

You need to be patient.

Some of the bigger, lighthouse channels have been around for ten years. They’ve continuously been uploading, sometimes daily for that entire time and slowly building their audience of ten, eleven, eighty million people. That takes time. There are no real short cuts. You have to put in the hours. You have to be patient. Being patient is tough.

If you want YouTube content get a YouTube creator to make it.

I spend quite a lot of time mentoring young people working in advertising/marketing/communication agencies; in fact, I’ve spent a considerable amount of my professional life working in such places. I know that their clients want to crack the YouTube channel and do something relevant with their brand for a YouTube audience. Take it from me: if you are a client and want to create YouTube content get a YouTube creator to help you and not an agency — unless the agency employees YouTube creators. Why? Because they too have a list of ten things that they have learned in a year creating videos and uploading them to YouTube.

So that’s what I’ve learned. I’ve learned to love YouTube, and I have learned to love the work of some YouTubers. Would I call myself a YouTube creator? Yes, I think I probably would.

I very much hope that you found these thoughts useful.

This is my latest video. As you can see, much has changed.

The third and final part of my “Corporate Artist” series.

You can subscribe to my channel here. But only if you want to.

UPDATE:

Here is a list of the channels I’ve discovered over the last twelve months. In no particular order:

If any of the creators on this list should happen to read this post, thank you for your work and for the inspiration.

Here is a couple of smashing posts from Rob Campbell that also cover YouTube from the perspective of YouTubers: Part 1 and Part 2