My YouTube Channel Is Suddenly Blowing Up After I Abandoned It! 😳

I can’t believe what I’m seeing

Image from Author’s YouTube channel

I’ll show you the crazy stats, but first, let me fill in the backstory.

Last month, I decided to dabble with YouTube. And the niche that I choose was rather unconventional.

Over the past few years, there has been a steady increase in the number of movie recap channels on YouTube.

In case you’re wondering, these channels just summarize popular movies using skillful and meticulous editing plus a voice-over to narrate the story.

I noticed that a lot of channels were doing well in this niche. In fact, here are some big names:

• Mystery Recapped — 3.17M subscribers, 1.7B views in total
• Movie Recaps — 1.85M subscribers, 637M views
• N Recaps — 148k subscribers, 54M views

Basically, these channels provide film lovers with the experience of watching a movie without having to give away 2–3 hours of their time.

“Interesting!”, I thought.

Since I was decent at scriptwriting and loved to write, I decided to create a channel and try making a video or two. Who knows, right?

So what did I use in making the videos?

I initially used the built-in text-to-speech voice reader of Microsoft Edge for the voice-over and the built-in Windows editor for video editing. But they both sucked.

The voices were cracking. And it took me forever to edit videos with Windows editor.

So I decided to reach into my pockets and invest in proper tools. In total, I spent $15 that month on voice-over and video editing software.

So how did I make the videos?

I usually watched one or two movies on weekends.

So what I did was, during that time, I would write the major scenes from each movie in a coherent manner and add a bit of flavor to spice things up.

I mean, I could’ve easily used already-written plots from the internet, but I desperately wanted to avoid copyright issues (I still failed, but more on that later).

I admit, having to pause after every scene to write it down ruined the experience a bit. But it was a nice trade-off, as I also loved to write.

I ended up uploading five movie recaps on my channel, and after a week they amassed a total of 50 views. Not inspiring at all.

After the fifth video, I decided to stop posting and focus on more important things. I basically stopped checking the channel for nearly 4 weeks.

Then something crazy happened…

YouTube channel blows up

How I figured it out was quite interesting.

For the past four days, I noticed I was getting an unusual amount of comment notifications from YouTube in my inbox.

So today, I decided to check the channel and see what's popping.

Lo and behold, I saw that one of the videos had exploded to 15,000 views!

Image from author

The other videos are approaching 1,000 views as well.

Upon checking my channel’s analytics in the creator studio, I discovered that the videos started popping off just last week.

Image from author

The average view duration for some of the videos is quite low. That was expected considering how bad the quality of some of the videos was.

Copyright problems

The biggest con of these channels, movie recap channels, is that they’re very prone to copyright infringements.

Out of my five videos, three have copyright claims on them. This means there’s a strong possibility that I won’t be able to earn money from them (if I ever join the partnership program).

One of my videos is also blocked in certain countries. So people from those countries will not be able to view them.

So what now?

This explosion really came as a surprise to me. I had already forgotten about the channel and decided not to renew my subscription payments for the software I used to make the videos.

Given time constraints, it’s unlikely that I’ll go back to making videos consistently. Maybe I’ll make one video per week. I don’t know yet.

What are your thoughts on this?

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