Billy's YouTube Channel Sucks

I’ve been an avid YouTube watcher since the early, early days of YouTube. I spent so much time watching comedy content on YouTube and now that I mention it man, YouTube WAS the spot for passionate comedians to branch out into the digital universe. Many of the channels I watched became successful enough to sign contracts with cable companies and went into mainstream media while some still remain on YouTube as successful YouTubers.

Because I watched a lot of YouTube naturally I went into a phase of wanting to create my own videos. This was around late 2000’s and early 2010’s and at this time I had very rudimentary video editing skills thanks to this MacOS software called iMovie. I uploaded videos of myself playing music (ah, the good old days of being able to upload whatever song I wanted to play). Though I watch a ton of skits and comedy (and I “act” a lot in front of my wife) I can’t really get myself to play different characters for a video. Anyway because my videos became sort of boring over time because my guitar skills weren’t improving that much, I wanted to start another YouTube channel: my dad’s.

My dad’s a hypnotherapist in Korea and even before the days of YouTube he released books that had accompanying cassette tapes and CD’s (remember THOSE days?!) and one day I asked him, “dad remember those self-hypnosis audios you used to release with books? Why don’t we do that with YouTube?”. He’s generally the type of person to say yes to things I offer him so without knowing that much about what he was getting into, he said yes. And so around that time we recorded the audio, I made an accompanying video, and uploaded it to my dad’s channel.

This turned out to be a pretty fun father-son activity and we made a bunch of other videos answering a lot of hypnosis/trance and unconscious related questions. But after some time I had to go back to America and he didn’t really have the technical knowledge to continue producing videos on his own, so we just let the channel be and kinda forgot about it.

Until one day my dad gave me a call.

Apparently this one self-hypnosis video became a MASSIVE hit in the Korean YouTube algorithms years after this video got made. This random YouTube channel we forgot about became a multi-thousand subscriber channel with a crazy amount of views and comments (this is ongoing to this day). We monetized that channel and now that we got a taste of this passive income coming from a YouTube channel, we wanted to maximize our profits — and this is where our curse of YouTube began.

So people wanted self hypnosis, especially related to past life regressions because it was 1) entertaining but more importantly, 2) it helped people sleep. Based on the comments, only a minority of the viewers actually experienced their past life but the majority just slept through it because the audio made them really relax. So what did we do? We made many more past life regression videos and we made some dedicated sleep videos to help people relax. What’s the problem here? Well the problem is, there’s only so many ways to create a video with a specific topic.

After about 10 videos my dad started feeling really stressed because he was experiencing writer’s block when it comes to past life regression topics. Ok, we tried relationships, job, family, and we tried multiple methods of regressing like elevators, trails, flying, and we tried different lengths of regression videos because some found the videos too short and some found it too long. Now what should be the new topic? It’s gotta feel fresh because people are starting to say all the videos are more or less the same. How should I try prompting differently? Because a lot of comments are saying my voice, my word choices are distracting.

What started as a writer’s block evolved into a catch-22 situation because the comments and metrics started driving the decision making process. Do another sleep video? That won’t satisfy everyone. Another past life video? That won’t satisfy everyone. Another complicating factor was that ONLY talking about this really specific area of his expertise within his wide expanse of expertise and interest started to feel limiting. So he tried making some other videos about different trance related topics or talking just about himself and the worst thing started happening: people started unsubscribing.

This caused so much stress for my dad because he was in a double, triple, four-way bound of every choice ending up with a potential loss. If only Sir Billy would have known that he would be in the exact same predicament years later when he started his YouTube channel…

When this wasn’t my problem, I thought to myself: “Why doesn’t dad just make videos like I tell him to? Based on my research these topics are good to talk about, who cares if some videos are similar, they’re the ones doing the best, all this time wasting is actually eating up the views that he could be getting”. But when this started becoming my problem, I felt everything my dad was feeling plus one more thing: I knew best practices and algorithms REALLY well.

Before I talk about MY YouTube channel, there’s another YouTube channel I’m involved with that motivates my struggle. I help run my Brazilian jiujitsu academy’s YouTube channel and that opportunity came out of nowhere for me because all I did was just tell my academy staff that “hey, if our YouTube channel made these types of videos and did xyz, I think we’d be doing really great”. After about 3 of these conversations our head instructor (and the hero of my life Jean Jacques Machado) just offered me the opportunity to run the academy page. I took it in a heartbeat and with a crazy amount of archives to go through, I spent months uploading daily videos on that channel.

I watched YouTube for years. I know what videos do well. I know the thumbnail game and I know the editing game. I know how to pace the talking, I know how to structure the video so that the attention span is retained. I know how to place keywords and put cards and everything. As a big data engineer I know the algorithm game too. I put ALL of that knowledge into my academy’s YouTube channel and the channel has made a significant stride in viewership over the past few years I was involved with it.

It was AFTER this phase of my life I started to do MY YouTube channel. And now it was time to do that for ME. I needed to create thumbnails for me. I needed to edit videos for me. I needed to shoot videos for me. I needed to search engine optimize my videos for me. I needed to script my videos for me. I needed to analyze my channel’s performance for me. This was the case for EVERY SINGLE VIDEO I have to make and this completely paralyzed me whenever I thought of making a video for my channel.

I remember desperately explaining this situation to my coach, “Sachiko, It’s not that I don’t want to have a YouTube channel. I desperately do, but the moment I think of turning on the camera I know that there are 20 steps after that and that just drains the life out of me!”. And my coach asked me: “Is your job a life coach or a YouTuber?”. At that moment a layer of windows broke down. “Hmm… A life coach?” “Ok, then why are you trying to be a YouTuber?” “I’m not trying to be a YouTuber but I have to—” “What if you don’t have to make videos the way you know?". And that’s when the entire house of constructs came crashing down.

At that moment I made a promise to myself: no more editing. I’m going to record videos in one take and just upload them. My channel is about 2 years old now, and I have around 440 videos. I went from buying TubeBuddy, editing everything with Premiere Pro, Photoshopping thumbnails, and the whole shabang to create videos looking like this:

… to this:

I average 2 videos a day lately and the best part is, it doesn’t even feel like work. Now, am I the most successful YouTuber? Not by a long shot, I have around 840 subscribers at this time of writing which isn’t even enough by monetization standards. But if I told you you could have 840 subscribers doing nothing, which is what I feel like I’m doing, isn’t that really attractive?

The title of this writing isn’t really a clickbait, but it’s something I hear all the time. Because my videos have 0 SEO, 0 editing, 0 thumbnails, 0 anything that an aspiring YouTuber will want, whenever my videos hit the algorithm (somehow) (actually this just demonstrates that all the SEO’s are nice to haves, not requirements for algorithm) I get emails like this:

And while I don’t take the time to reply to all of these emails, I proudly proclaim: Yes, my YouTube channel sucks and it is by design.