[Journey] Building a fresh YouTube channel from scratch

Hey there BHW!

I recently got an idea for a Youtube channel, or I guess i've had the idea for a long time but i've been just too lazy to start. I've had multiple channels in the past, some of them have made some adsense money, but nothing crazy. Also those channels have died once i've ran out of ideas, and that has been my problem before, but this time I hope it's different, I searched youtube if anyone has done videos the same way in this niche as I have planned, and I found some channels, most of them were completely ass with bad quality and zero effort, but there was one bigger channel that I found that puts some effort into the videos and the channel had like 40k subs and over 10 million total views, which hopefully will become my main competitor soon!

So what is my channel about?

Im not going to tell the exact method that im doing, atleast not yet, but my channel niche is E-sports related, and these videos can keep getting milked as long as the game is alive. I created the channel and uploaded my first video yesterday, over 20 minutes long, last night it got 30 views and around 2 hours of watch time, nothing too crazy but lets give the channel and algorithm some time to warm up. Also I just uploaded my second video that is around 20 minutes long aswell, let's see if it gets any traction. Still at 0 subscribers but I'm not losing hope yet! ;D

My current channel analytics:



Research and improvement.

I noticed that most of these channels that have tried this method are dead and had barely any views. Those channels also had very bad thumbnails and uninteresting titles, so I will try to improve on those parts the most. I create my base thumbnails with Photopea and improve them with ChatGPT. First I make the base image in Photopea and give Chatgpt a promt to turn the image I made into a flashy and interesting youtube thumbnail with the text that I want. So far it has worked great and im happy, looks a lot like an actual graphics designer made those.

I am not the greatest video editor, and the "big channel" that I talked about previously is pretty decent at editing/cutting the videos, but I will try to find a way to get even better. Overall the idea is very simple and the videos don't need a lot of editing but mostly cutting, and thats not a big deal. Recording a video takes roughly around 1 hour and cutting/editing it takes around 30 minutes with my skill. I can easily make thumbnail or two meanwhile my video renders.

Plan for the future.

So, now I have the channel set and ready to upload stuff, all I have to do is to stay consistent and try to upload as much as possible. I would like to upload a video every day, but since the recording and editing takes around 2 hours a day it might not be possible since I have to work and do other stuff aswell, so my current goal is to upload ATLEAST 4 videos weekly.
I have pretty much unlimited video ideas in my head at the moment, and hopefully some of these videos start getting traction. Also I have multiple Youtube shorts ideas aswell, which from my experience can easily pop and get lots of subscribers to the channel.
I plan to monetize the channel with youtube adsense, since these videos have zero copyrighted material, and also I will try to monetize with amazon affiliate by linking the e-sport players gear in the description.

Thank you if you read this far, let's see if this works out!

following

ravikantrathor said:

Solid start - the e-sports niche has real potential for affiliate income especially on gear.

A few things that can speed up growth:
- Shorts are your best friend early on - low effort, high discovery
- Consistency > perfection at this stage, 4 videos/week is a good target
- Thumbnail + title testing matters more than video quality at the beginning

For monetization beyond Adsense, affiliate links on keyboards, headsets, chairs can convert well with e-sports audiences. Following to see how it goes.

Click to expand...

So what do you mean about chaning thumbnail and title? Change the thumbnail and title after one day if video not performs while it still is uploaded? Or reupload same video with different name and thmbnail. Or focus on different strategies for next videos?

Building an esports channel with long form content is a great strategy because high watch time from twenty minute videos tells the algorithm your content is worth promoting to a broader audience. Since you are using AI to enhance your thumbnails you should also focus on A/B testing different variations to find which visual triggers get the best click through rate in your specific gaming niche. To stay consistent with your four videos per week goal you should consider batching your recordings on weekends so that you always have a backlog of content ready to upload even when your schedule gets busy. Using YouTube Shorts as a funnel is an excellent idea but make sure to pin a comment in each short that leads directly to your long form videos to convert those quick views into long term subscribers.

Any updates? Hope you got some early traction

Hey everyone, I've been pretty busy so I forgot to do an update!

Sooo, first week I uploaded 4 long videos, first one got 60 views in a day and then the algorithm stopped showing impressions and nothing came out of it. 3 Other videos didn't even get to 20 views per video.


I also uploaded 3 shorts and those got in total 11k views, which was pretty nice. After that i've uploaded 4 more shorts and none of them has gotten any views.



Youtube algorithm defenitely works in a weird way and it's really hard to figure out what to improve on. I didn't change anything in terms of style or thumbnails or any major thing.
But it's not time to quit ! I can see that there is potential. I got 3 subs from those shorts, I know its not much but it's a start. Only if long videos got some traction, then I would probably gain subs a lot faster.

TLDR; (Gained/total)
Days since last update: 17
Subs gained(total): 3 (3)
Shorts views(total): 11k (11k)
Long Views: ~90 (120)
Shorts/Videos uploaded in total: 7 shorts, 5 long (12)

I'll try to keep you guys updated more often!