How Many People Watched My First YouTube Video?
In this issue, I want to talk about expectations. Long story short:
Your first YouTube video won’t go viral and get you 100,000 subscribers.
Here’s What Happened To My First Video
I spent 3 months making my first YouTube video.
Fear, insecurity, and perfectionism played a big part in that.
After I started the project, I quickly discovered how much I didn’t know: how to film myself, how to work my camera for video, manage lighting, make voiceovers, etc.
There were a lot of firsts for me in that project.
Thankfully, there was a tutorial on YouTube for every such occasion. I suspect that I also watched a lot of videos because doing so felt like I was making progress, but really was just a way to procrastinate.
I figured out that my gear couldn’t give me the video quality I wanted, so I spent a not-insignificant amount of money ordering lights and a microphone and this and that online.
Each time I ordered new stuff, I stopped everything I was doing until it arrived.
I recorded the same stuff over and over again until I thought it was good enough.
Finally, I had a video that I felt was genuinely good. And it was probably the best I could make it with the skills and equipment I had back then.
I remember thinking: “A good video in my niche will get 100,000-300,000 views, but as a new channel, I can’t expect that many. So I’ll be satisfied if my video only gets 50,000 views. That seems quite reasonable.”
Yeah.
It got 3 views in the first 24 hours.
During the first month, it got to 80 views. And as I am writing this more than 2 years later, it has climbed to a staggering 3,497 views.
Only 46,503 views short of 50k!
I think it’s safe to say that it didn’t live up to my expectations. 😜
Fortunately, I kept at it and eventually hit the 50k milestone with my 7th video.
What do the statistics say?
Let’s take a look at the averages.
This is how many videos YouTube channels on average have uploaded to get to their subscriber counts.
These numbers are floating around YouTube and originally came from TubeBuddy based on an analysis of 3,500,000 channels (via Nick Nimmin).
That’s a lot of videos — and work!
Does this mean you need to make 152 videos to get to 1,000 subscribers?
No, it’s an average of all the channels with between 1,000 and 10,000 subscribers, so it will vary wildly.
As far as I know, it takes 50-60 videos on average to hit 1,000 subscribers.
My channel hit 1,000 subscribers in 7 videos, so you can do it a lot faster than 50 videos. But it takes time and effort.
I’m telling you this so you don’t get discouraged and quit if you don’t get 100k subs in your first 5 videos.
It’s perfectly normal for things to go slowly because you need to learn how to make great videos before the views and subscribers start rolling in.
But if you keep going and keep improving, people will start noticing.
Marques Brownlee is the biggest name in tech reviews with 18.9M subscribers.
Here he is thanking his 74 subscribers in his 100th video:
So get started and keep going.
Have a great week! 🙂
Michael