Recap on one year running a YouTube game channel

Unpredictable rewards

Jon Jordan
Jul 27, 2017 · 4 min read

It’s been a year since I posted my first video on The Loong View, my YouTube channel about free-to-play mobile games.

Since then, I’ve been busy — 225 videos — which have in turn generated 167,988 views or a watch time total of 5,320 hours.

Of course, these raw stats are practically meaningless in terms of understanding how YouTube works.

Clearly, each of my videos has not, on average, received 747 views.

As we’d expect from any mass market, long tail platform, the majority of videos — around 150 — have received less than 100 views, while six have received over 10,000.

And my most watched video is currently just shy of 43,000 views, or 26 percent of my channel’s total views.

Indeed, those six videos have generated 74 percent of total views.

Down the rabbit hole

Yet, my conclusion over the past year, is even these stats are practically meaningless.

The problem with any platform that offers highly skewed and unpredictable rewards — think web page hits, Facebook comments, Instagram views, one-arm bandit wins — is the operator starts to generate psychological reasons why they are in control of the outcome.

That was certainly my view when the first video broke the 100 views barrier. Over-analysing the situation, the goal became to make ‘more of those videos’.

In terms of The Loong View (or any game channel), this was made simpler as this boils down to making more videos about ‘that game’.

Look at any moderately successful gaming channel or stream, and you’ll find that over time its content typically concentrates down to focus on a couple of games.

So I made a lot of videos about Netmarble’s Soul King.

Thankfully it was a great game I enjoyed playing, but after six months of almost daily play and 10 videos — culminating in using a 6-star maxed-out character to further max-out a maxed-out 6-star character — I had run out of things to say.

Anyhow, by then, I had my first 1,000-view-video. In fact, in the way of unpredictable reward, I got a whole cluster of them across videos about two different games.

And how different Nicki Minaj: The Empire and Battlestar Galactica Squadrons are.

SWOT analysis

To provide a bit more detail on how The Loong View works, it is — as stated — a channel about F2P mobile games.

Given this is also my professional area of expertise, and that I am never going to be a YouTube-style personality, my approach has been to leverage industry smarts and do a lot of videos about mobile games still in soft launch testing.

This creates a short term issue as most people aren’t searching for videos about games that aren’t yet released, but it does give this upstart channel an advantage as it’s generating content about games that aren’t being covered elsewhere.

It also provides the opportunity for a big boost when those soft-launched games finally go live because The Loong View already has a bunch of live videos.

And that was certainly the case with Nicki Minaj: The Empire, when each of the three videos hit 1,000 views in the days following the game’s global launch.

And this was underlined in the case of Fieldrunners Attack, which provided the first 10,000-viewed video.

Originally called Fieldrunners: Hard Hat Heroes during soft launch, I quickly renamed a couple of videos with the game’s new title on the evening of the global launch. But even in that situation I was surprised to see the view counter click over 5 digits.

The situation was similar, too, with Zombie Gunship Survival, which has generated the bulk of The Loong Views’ views — 76 percent — in that with one exception, all of the 10 videos made were created while the game was in soft launch.

Out confirmation bias!

Of course, when writing about your big hits, it’s too easy to set up a successful and streamlined narrative that’s shot through with confirmation bias.

A + B = C

It’s usually not the case.

I’ve followed the same formula — a couple of introductory videos about games in soft launch, followed by some more advanced examples when the game goes live — often with very little impact c.f. Dawn of Titans, Gangstar New Orleans, and The Elder Scrolls: Legends, to name just three.

But, perhaps, what’s been more surprising to me are the games where the initial videos have done relatively well, but about which I can’t summon up any enthusiasm to play, let alone to generate more content about.

And that’s my biggest take-away from the first year of The Loong View — don’t worry about the outcome, focus about the input.

Easy rider

Of course, this is helped as I don’t expect to become even a mid-size YouTube channel, and certainly don’t expect to make any money.

(I guess that’s something you want to know about, though, £81.10 in total earnings to-date).

What I want to do is make videos about the F2P mobile games I find interesting and exciting.

Technically the videos aren’t great, and because of my focus on soft-launched games, many of my most watched videos are about games that have been significantly updated since the video was made, which is both embarrassing (for me) and potentially confusing (for the audience).

But that’s worrying about the outcome, not the input.

However, this isn’t to say I’m just sat here studying my navel.

One year on, I have a new project for The Loong View. Check out my Patreon.

Jon Jordan

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“Strong opinions, weakly held”

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