YouTube Metrics - 2 Weeks After Upload & More
Openly sharing metrics and what I'm learning from them about content creation
I have come to believe the biggest mistake I have made in my career is not teaching what I learn.
This year, I’m trying to change that and develop the habit of creating more content. Not only can creating content build an audience, it’s a great way to learn and, particularly for me, scratches an itch which often doesn’t get satisfied during a typical working day.
As I progress on this journey, I will share what I’m doing and how it is going. I’ll talk about what is going well, what isn’t going well and what I’m trying along the way.
Let’s dive right in!
What went well…
Recently, I published a video about Composition over Inheritance.
Here are some high-level stats:
The video was published 12 days ago. So far, it has received 2.2K views, accumulated 113 watch hours and gained 88 new subscribers.
When looking at this graph, we can see the video had a little bit of initial traction. This was almost entirely from sharing on social media and is almost entirely accounted for under “external sources”.
However, there was an inflection point where YouTube started to share and recommend the video:
From the break-down above, it’s clear to see the initial view count was from External sources. After a few days, views started to increase from Browse features and resulted in a couple of bumps. After the first week, the video started to slowly get recommended as a Suggested video.
If you are reading this, you’re probably already aware of my latest video. However, what you may unaware of the interactive/animated blog post which was also created!
I know this may be a surprise because… well, here are the stats:
This was to be expected.
I haven’t told anyone about the post because I’m still experimenting with embedding interactive animations. I didn’t want to promote it while debugging issues.
Even though there has been zero traffic, it has been a huge success. Figuring out how to reuse the animations I create for the video, embed them directly within a webpage and finding a way to make them interactive: huge win!
I’m excited about what I can create with this in the future.
Furthermore, I also figured out how to make high-quality animated GIFs to embed when cross-posting to other websites. Sites like dev.to have restrictions around file size and number of frames for animated GIFs.
Hopefully having a simple system to convert animations into high quality animated GIFs will help to create engaging posts on platforms and allow me to take advantage of their network effects.
What didn’t go well…
I could talk about some of the feedback I received about the video, but I think most of it ultimately boils down to some risks I decided to take and folks misunderstanding the channel is about building mental models on how to think about a topic.
It’s clear I need to continue to improve the packaging of my videos along with the channel as a whole. I have now renamed the channel to “Metaphorically Speaking” and will continue to look for opportunities to convey the purpose of the channel.
Twitter however… has been extremely frustrating!
I have 1.3k followers at the moment however, when I tweet, my reach is abysmal. We’re talking 10s of impressions on my tweets. I have experimented with posting times, engaging and commenting on other posts and posting on a more frequent basis.
My tweets just don’t get impressions - and I don’t know why!
In an attempt to fix this, I invested quite a bit of effort to create a few videos specifically for Twitter. No attempt to redirect people away from Twitter, just a few video tips my audience should be interested in, with the same effort and quality I’d invest when creating a YouTube short.
Didn’t work.
After a few weeks of frustration - I decided to cancel my Premium subscription.
I’m finding myself thinking about ways to improve my reach, but I simply don’t want to invest any of my limited time into doing something Twitter-specific which is not related to the content I’m creating.
Progress
My primary goal at the moment is to reach monetisation for the YouTube channel. Reaching that milestone requires 4,000 watch hours:
Having launched 2 “proper” videos now, I can see I have a LONG way to go. In fact, if my videos continue to perform the same as they are at the moment, I’d be at risk of loosing watch hours older than 365 days.
The Composition over Inheritance video took me 3 months to create. If I continued on this path, I would create 4 videos per year and build up around 400 watch hours.
I have a lot of thoughts I’m exploring about this at the moment.
Subscribers don’t really matter as much as they used to these days on YouTube. The channel currently has 2,841.
I do still hold out some hope that growing the subscriber count will increase the amount of viewers for each video. Therefore, it’ll be a metric I’ll will report on during these write ups.
What’s next?
Ultimately, I’m still experimenting.
I originally hoped to publish the majority of my content here on Substack, for example - but it’s simply not the right platform for me.
Content-wise, I’m looking into a few different topics. I’m fortunate to have 2 articles accepted for publications - these will take up a little time over the next few weeks. I could create additional content on these topics or, as I mentor a few engineers, it may make sense to create content on these topics.
Again, I’m still experimenting with how everything will piece together. Ideas are not a limiting factor at this stage!
From the above, I know I’ll be creating content on the following topics over the next few weeks:
Onion Architecture
Test-Induced Design Damage
Interesting Use Cases for CDNs
If one of these topics will grow into my next long-form video… time will tell!
Until next time! 🫡