600 Vidoes! - Find out why the channel is dying

0:00This video is the 6th hundredth video on the channel.

0:03I missed this opportunity at 500 videos, so I'm doing it now to basically

0:09Go through the back end of the YouTube channel and just give you an insight.

0:12It's also a really good time to do this because my prognosis of the channel is that it's slowly dying, it's slowly withering away.

0:19And I've made a couple of changes.

0:20I've talked a little bit about that in my

0:22first newsletter that if you if you happen to be a subscriber, we're gonna go through it in a little bit more of a sort of a free form way.

0:29And then maybe in another point in the future I will sort of download the data and you can

0:33Do your own analysis on the channel.

0:36This is the channel homepage.

0:38This is what people rarely see.

0:40Not many people go to this page.

0:41To go there, you click on a sort of channel create and it takes you to their landing page.

0:45This is the

0:46page I get to design on YouTube.

0:48So if you come to my channel via link, this is what you'll see.

0:52You'll see my most watch video because that makes the most sense to put up there.

0:55Other channels that I you know I own if that makes sense

0:59Collaborations, a new feature on YouTube, most recent videos, members.

1:03I have channel members.

1:04I'll talk a bit about that soon.

1:05Member only videos, create a playlist.

1:08um a bunch of other things sketchnotes sketchnotes are so sad I'll come to that in a second because yeah yeah th those those uh those are painful I'll talk a bit about them later but

1:20This is the channel in a nutshell.

1:22And if you go through the tabs, you'll see different video categories, so my most recent videos

1:27shorts um these are these are also very interesting live uh live streams that I've done have not done one in a long time these are hard I'll explain why

1:36Podcasts.

1:36Uh we've got a podcast with RVR basically connected the RSS feed for the podcast, so it appears here.

1:42Courses.

1:43Um this is a new thing.

1:45I don't know why this is

1:46labeled a course but apparently I have a course so we're gonna we're gonna play around with this setting to try and see if we can do a little bit more with it so something super interesting to watch out for

1:57playlists this is great I have so many playlists a lot of these playlists are probably courses in the YouTube sense that's kind of what they're going for so I'll do that posts

2:09A little sort of uh post that I've done here on the channel, sort of landing page, and then membership.

2:15Um, we'll get into that.

2:16Memberships are uh I'm not a member of myself, which makes total sense.

2:21But

2:22Uh yeah, this is a pretty interesting sort of way to kind of look at the channel.

2:28So what do I see when I come to YouTube?

2:31Not this.

2:31This is what other people can see, and you can go see this today

2:34What I see is this page over here.

2:37So YouTube Studio.

2:39You log into YouTube and there is a bug at the moment.

2:41I'm in Google Chrome, so I don't know why this bug exists for this thumbnail, but the thumbnail is a little bit compressed

2:47Needless to say, this is what I see.

2:50This page is designed to let's just say

2:55motivate you.

2:56Although it doesn't motivate me at all.

2:58Because depending on how your metrics are doing, not many of the videos I post unfortunately are more popular than some of the videos I've previously posted.

3:06So this six out of ten here

3:08Um this is this this is gonna be demoralizing when you when you have a video that's ten out of ten.

3:14Basically it's YouTube is saying out of the last ten videos you've uploaded, this is the worst.

3:18That's basically how the metric goes.

3:20And so for each of these

3:22you get an insight into how the current video, the most recent video, is doing compared to the top one.

3:27Now I have to say I come from a place of privilege because I have a

3:30fairly large subscriber count, but these are incredibly low numbers for that subscriber count.

3:35If you've seen the subscriber count on the channel

3:38You'll see it's very high, but I don't have the kind of view counts that maybe other subscribers at that channel sort of size have.

3:44And there is a reason for that.

3:45I'll get into that later in this video.

3:47There's a very good reason.

3:48There's probably a slightly fishy reason why

3:50you know YouTube metrics aren't sort of ideal.

3:53And it relates to the sort of subscriber, but we'll get into it.

3:56So views break sense, these are all specific to the current thing.

3:59And you can go to the analytics, you can see your published videos, latest posts, total number of views

4:04the estimated revenue in the last twenty-eight days.

4:07So in the last twenty eight days I've made 211 pounds.

4:10That is something like

4:12just nearly three hundred dollars, so maybe two hundred and ninety dollars or something like that.

4:16Yeah, which is which is fine.

4:17It's not a good YouTube revenue for again this number of subscribers.

4:21There's some subscribers who uh channels with this kind of number who are easily making um, you know

4:27Maybe let's say ten times that in a given month.

4:29So again we'll talk a bit about that.

4:31Top content, last forty-eight hours.

4:33Um the basic this is what people are watching the last twenty-four hours.

4:36So uh what is Tableau?

4:38It's high up there.

4:38People constantly searching for that.

4:40Two hundred and twenty

4:41Eight views just in the last couple of days, 266 for the crash course, how to build maps and tableau 83.

4:47So we'll go into channel analytics, comments.

4:50you get the drift and then over here on the right hand side you have news creator and stuff like that.

4:54Then you get to the tab.

4:55So on the left hand side you have dashboard, content, analytics, community

5:01uh languages, content detection when someone copies you stuff or something like that, likeness, I can actually start protecting my appearance because of course AI is a big thing, so YouTube has started rolling that out

5:14I only just got access to that, so that's fun.

5:16Earning potential, so I actually got monetized a long time ago.

5:20Uh it looks like um I need to submit tax information according to this.

5:24Um maybe later for this one.

5:26My AdSense information, um, customization.

5:30for uh the channel so how it looks and all the URLs and stuff an audio library these are audio tracks that YouTube

5:37has put up there for you to to to use.

5:39So what what some people do is they download ones that they like and they use them in videos.

5:44If you've watched YouTube channels and you hear music

5:46Chances are a lot of that music has come from here because these have been cleared with something called content ID which listens to your video and tries to identify

5:57music or sounds that are not yours copyrighted.

5:59And the way they do that is that those companies, those music companies, record companies, film companies, movie companies, all of those studios

6:08Send YouTube their raw assets to analyze, and then YouTube's algorithm is able to identify that content in your content.

6:16So if I have a video

6:18from Apple in my video and I don't credit Apple or I'm I make I take too much of a cut let's say more than twenty something seconds

6:25Their content ID system will notify Apple to say, hey, I found your content in this specific place.

6:32This is where content detection comes in.

6:35And they'll tag him.

6:36So that's what that does.

6:37Anyway, that's a whistle stop view.

6:40What you're really here for is I guess the analytics, but very briefly we'll touch on the content.

6:45This is the content view.

6:46You'll see it's just a very simple list

6:48And yeah, all the latest videos are here.

6:50Sometimes I run A-B tests, so these are super interesting.

6:54This is a new feature, so on a specific thumbnail, I'll put like s several titles.

6:59So I see here testing chord, co-work on a data model.

7:02Which Claude Co.

7:03uh where Claude Coa got it wrong, didn't need Tableau for this ish.

7:08So obviously this one performed better and it's performance based on view counts.

7:11So

7:12The watch time, sorry, not view count.

7:14So basically the title and the thumbnail have led people to watch more of the video.

7:20So that's what it indexes on.

7:21And that's what YouTube wants basically.

7:24So that's something.

7:25So for each video you get this view.

7:27So for each video you get the analytics.

7:28So you can see this is the last video I uploaded.

7:31I uploaded it uh what is it now uh n nine days ago.

7:36It's 821 views, 89 hours of watch time, one subscriber, one lonely subscriber subscribed out of 829.

7:45Uh we'll come to the unique numbers in a second.

7:47Six pounds twenty nine of YouTube revenue, which is sort of interesting.

7:51Then you get a breakdown of external subscription direct.

7:54And so what you'll see here, if I just zoom into this

7:57Is that external, this is coming from Google search, this is coming from LinkedIn, this is coming from Twitter, all of those places that aren't YouTube combined only account for 21% of

8:10All the views on this video.

8:12Everything else comes from the YouTube platform itself.

8:15So when I tell people that YouTube is actually the world's second largest search engine, I'm really genuinely being serious because like 80% of

8:24watch traffic on YouTube comes from YouTube nowhere else so sharing your videos on socials sharing videos that has

8:32Next to no impact whatsoever compared to YouTube's own recommendation engine.

8:38Yeah 21.

8:396%

8:39YouTube home, the subscription feed, people who have already subscribed to you, which is why I ask you to subscribe.

8:45And then direct or unknown.

8:46And this is typically when someone has been directly sent the link.

8:49So if I send you something on WhatsApp, that would actually count as external.

8:53But if I send you the link in an email

8:55email that would directly be just someone coming to the video directly so literally pasting the URL and coming from no previous activity.

9:02It's a bit of a strange one for this one.

9:04what must have happened is someone's pasted it somewhere and a lot of a large number of views have come directly from that.

9:11So sometimes I look at these numbers and I know exactly what's going on sometimes inside of Salesforce or something like that because I'll see the metadata

9:17to say hey this this number's higher this percentage is higher than normal and you can kind of see then what I get after a few days is this breakdown of the video so I can see

9:26In the video, what specific bits people were interested in.

9:29So I lose a lot of people watching the beginning of the video.

9:33You can see these little peaks

9:34These little moments when people once sees specific things and they're normally aligned with the timestamp.

9:39So you can see this one aligns with validating the AI analysis as a peak.

9:42So people are like, Okay, great analysis.

9:45Was it actually right?

9:46And then from there on

9:49Once uh you know once we get to 21%, I don't really lose people that much as compared to like the big drop-up at the beginning.

9:57Most people who kind of get to this are kind of watching it.

10:00So the way to read about this is

10:02Look, after 35 minutes, 11% of people are still watching.

10:07So 11% of 821

10:11Are still watching the video, so that's 82 roughly 90 people are still watching after that time, which is why this has a pretty good watch time

10:19Even though the view count's fairly low compared to some of the other videos, if you see it's it's kind of actually in the average range.

10:25Um what we should really go look for

10:28is the average watch time.

10:30So the average watch duration if we go to engagement is six minutes twenty-nine.

10:34So every single video gets this level of analysis and it's it's actually suffocating because

10:41You can't help but get involved like oh you had 664 unique viewers so unique viewers and views that's a difficult one I don't know how they count this it it is easy to

10:52like for me to count as like two views in here.

10:55It's to do with IP addresses is to do with where you come from.

10:58It's to do with things like your

10:59uh internet connection, YouTube has a very good algorithm but the other thing is it it can also do with sessions and sometimes if you've got things like ad blockers YouTube can't really ascertain who you are.

11:10So if you're a logged in user it knows who you are but if you're not

11:14It has to ascertain that number using other signals.

11:16So that's it's a rough number, but it's it's an estimated number.

11:20You yeah, even tells you this is what it thinks is the number.

11:23The revenue, this is based on uh watch time from views that were monetizable.

11:30This is a hard one to explain.

11:32So

11:33YouTube does everything on a per thousand view basis, RPM, revenue per thousand, revenue per mil is the actual term.

11:40And of the 800 and something views, if you go over here, so 821 views

11:46Only 602 were monetizable.

11:48So if you have an ad blocker and you watch my content, you're kind of helping me out here.

11:52But for every thousand views I get on this video, I will earn roughly £6.

11:5970, right?

12:00So

12:00£6.

12:0170 does not equate to the amount of time I spent on this video at all.

12:06But that's not the point.

12:07The point is I made the videos because I love it.

12:09It's a creative outlet.

12:10It's super important.

12:12And then the type of advert that goes on the video is normally the skippable video ads.

12:16So the kind of video ads you can skip, but sometimes it's a display ad, non-skipable ad, 2% bumper ads, unknown.

12:22And these are the ads that people are paying.

12:24So

12:25An advertiser when they come to the channel will pay £25 to put an advert on a thousand views of my channel.

12:36Okay

12:37And from that £25, YouTube takes a cut to run the platform.

12:42Then of the remaining amount, they take a certain percentage of that, and I get the remainder.

12:48So it goes all the way from £25 to £28

12:50per thousand to advertise on this specific video down to six pound seventy on this specific video

12:58Okay, per thousand views.

12:59That's not the actual number, these are just the per thousand.

13:02So that those are the two numbers to sort of compare.

13:04So that will give you some sort of percentage.

13:06So I'm getting roughly twenty-five percent.

13:09of the value that YouTube is finding out there in the world after you've taken uh running costs, hosting costs, everything else

13:17So it's a small share.

13:18It's a bit like publishing.

13:19You don't really get sort of a representative share for the knowledge you're presenting.

13:23The publisher takes a decent chunk for actually having the ability to publish your book and take a risk on you.

13:28So that's sort of what YouTube is doing here.

13:30I will say YouTube is the only platform that has a model this good, which is why a lot of people work on YouTube because it actually pays compared to TikTok or Instagram.

13:39For unfortunately, all the work you do there, unless you're bringing in a million plus views, every single TikTok or whatever, is not paid.

13:47So that's how a

13:50single video works.

13:51Right, we've got an editor.

13:52You can go and edit different parts of a video and play around with it.

13:56Comments, you can see the comments in every video.

13:58And so these are in real time.

14:00It's super interesting.

14:01I love, I love comments.

14:02Oh my god, I waste so much time in here.

14:03I don't waste.

14:04I spend valuable time with my audience in comments.

14:08And I love it.

14:08I love it.

14:09Languages, this is a really interesting one.

14:11Um this one's completely crashed, so I'll show you a different one.

14:15Monetization is ready monetized, copyright, no issues.

14:18YouTube is found and clips.

14:20I can create clips and share them out with people from here.

14:23So every single video gets that level of detail

14:28into it.

14:28If I go to this one, let's go to this one and let's see if we can look at languages.

14:32Yeah, this one's a good one.

14:33So AI has massively blown open the game.

14:38So every single one of my videos

14:40You'll see the languages which are published here.

14:43This is where YouTube is confident that the AI voice translation is very good to good enough that people will watch it.

14:52So Dutch, France, German

14:54Hindi, Indonesia, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, and Ukrainian

15:03This is a large percentage of like the total population.

15:06English covers about most of YouTube, like half of YouTube.

15:09Then all these European countries cover a decent chunk of the rest of YouTube.

15:13Then you have some slightly more challenging languages where the translation doesn't always work.

15:18You can switch this to publish, but what YouTube is

15:23Doing is saying it's giving you the option to push those through because it's not confident about the quality, however, it is translating the description and the title for every video.

15:32So if you look here on the right hand side

15:34All of them are actually native.

15:35So if you are coming to YouTube from another country, you will actually see everything has been translated.

15:41I didn't do that, YouTube did that for me, which massively blows open the audience.

15:45to a particular video.

15:46That however does not change the way the algorithm behaves.

15:49So you might think, oh great, now everyone in all these countries can watch the content.

15:53Not unless the YouTube algorithm

15:55wants them to and that is one dynamic to watch out for.

15:58Okay, cool.

15:59So that's content now analytics.

16:01Oh this is this is where YouTube careers come to live and die.

16:04For the record I don't have a YouTube career

16:06YouTube is a side hustle for me.

16:08It's like a very um it's a very it's something I do when I have time and you'll see that here in the analytics.

16:14And the best view for this is to look at the last year

16:18And this is where you start to really see the story of my channel because it's very telling.

16:23YouTube loves metronomic consistency.

16:26You spend every one day every week on YouTube, it will reward you very, very well

16:32And you can kind of see this um through my posting here.

16:34You can see that like I I post fairly consistently.

16:37I never l really let it go two weeks without posting something.

16:40And some of the videos, um like conference

16:43obviously just big burst of videos makes makes a lot of sense around conference so you'd expect that it's a big hive lots of people searching also lots of people just wanting to see what's going on at conference but then afterwards um it goes back to being normal

16:55And then um it goes quiet.

16:57If you look here you can see that I just stopped posting for a while.

16:59And this is actually because I started to realize something.

17:02I could see already in March of last year that like something wasn't right.

17:06I'll come to that in a second

17:08And so I just stopped because there's no point making content if you don't understand what's going on.

17:12And it was sort of affecting like

17:15average view view numbers by like twenty-thirty percent and that's quite a big percentage so I stopped partly because of that like round here but then

17:23I had a lot of personal challenges um regarding, let's just say making sure your family is well settled into its new routine, new ways of life.

17:32Don't want to go into t into it too much.

17:34But I spent a ton of my time

17:36making sure certain resources were available in the right setting for my son.

17:40And so that took basically all my mental space and time to in order to be able to create content.

17:46So I made content when I could, but even then

17:49I also struggled to really understand what was changing at Tableau in a way that I could easily communicate.

17:54And so I just stopped because I you can even see this video that says we're back.

17:58And it's it's a bit like um it's a bit like what's the word?

18:03like jump start because i I say we're back and then I don't really hit the momentum that I've had before and this this is this has really bugged me.

18:12Um because at this point I started realizing I didn't quite understand Salesforce and what was going on and I really struggled to understand it and also it just wasn't interesting here, even though I'm making the content.

18:23It really wasn't doing anything to the view count and then yeah, we just carry on and you know the dips and troughs of weekdays and weekends

18:30But now, like over Christmas, obviously, hey, listen, if you're watching my channel on the 1st of Jan, like what are you doing?

18:35If you're watching my channel on Christmas Day, please, what are you doing?

18:39But yeah.

18:40Like the channel is well and truly nowhere near where it's been.

18:44If you want to see something funny, if I go to the lifetime of the YouTube channel, this is the title.

18:50So my YouTube channel was mostly non-existent

18:542010 this channel started 2010 I posted some of the earliest content like way way way back

19:02when some of this stuff was not in not here, but you don't really get to see all the stuff further back, it only shows you the last year.

19:09But long story short, we'll go back to some of the early videos.

19:11Some of these were just videos I just didn't do anything about

19:14And then I think I spoke about this in my newsletter.

19:17I decided to make a deal out of something uh during COVID.

19:21And yeah, that's when it just it just blew up.

19:24And uh yeah, the rest is history.

19:27So the best

19:28The best strongest performance on my channel was 2024, like March 2024.

19:34That and I remember that time.

19:36Like that time I was thinking, oh maybe I'll be able to hire an editor in like a year's time if I keep going at this pace and stuff like that.

19:43I had a

19:43these grand plans but hey it didn't happen so five and a half million views four hundred and forty thousand hours that's mad I don't think I've lived that long it's absolutely crazy

19:56242,000 subscribers and you'll see here something really interesting that there is like a start-stop nature to it.

20:04It's almost like

20:05Clockwork, something is happening that is really driving the viewcast, and I'll tell you what this is because I know what it is.

20:12I discovered it was happening here and then I I kind of started to play around with it myself here

20:17And it didn't quite work so well.

20:19So I I uh yeah, I can't explain it, but yeah, we'll get into it.

20:23And then oh my god, I even have negative numbers here.

20:25So there are some days where I was actually losing like I lost forty subscribers in one day.

20:29What would what day was that

20:31Oh my god, 8th of July 2025, I lost 40 subscribers.

20:35That's brutal.

20:36Boah, what did I post on that day?

20:39My word.

20:39Oh.

20:40Wait, I lost them.

20:418th of July, okay.

20:42I gained a ton after, so it wasn't all bad.

20:45Oh, but yeah, God, that's really bad.

20:47I hate days when you lose lots of people because you've definitely done something to annoy people

20:52£31,000 is the total I've earned in the lifetime of the channel.

20:57A lot of people think I make a ton of money on YouTube, and this is a lot of money to a lot of people.

21:04Don't get me wrong

21:06I know this amount of money as a side hustle on top of your income would be life-changing to so many people.

21:15In fact, the majority of people who watch videos on my channel

21:18I'm not gonna sort of pretend that that isn't the case.

21:22However, I will also say that I think if you are able to land a job in this industry

21:28You will see that number and you will know that depending on where you are in the world, to be fair, that number is actually less than you'd be able to earn on a single year's wage, right?

21:40And what I'm trying to do is enable people.

21:42And so you might ask, well what have you like what's where does that money go?

21:46Actually

21:47I make a loss on this YouTube channel, which is a funny thing to to understand, because of course a lot of that has to be taxed in the UK.

21:56The tax is pretty um pretty punitive, which is all fun.

21:59The

22:00Costs around things like insurance, equipment, gear, you know, I look and sound good.

22:05All of that goes back into making the channel better

22:08Um I invest a little bit in things like subscriptions and software.

22:12So I wouldn't say all of that, but about half of that has gone into equipment, lights.

22:17V like my laptop, I've changed my laptop once.

22:20I've upgraded a few things.

22:21I've bought a microphone, like this microphone is like 400 pounds.

22:25So this kind of gear, at least in the past, has been very, very expensive.

22:30Today

22:31I'm talking to you from a webcam.

22:33Yes, if you didn't believe me, this camera that I got literally two days ago is a webcam.

22:38This is where technology is today.

22:40Two months ago the camera that replaced that was in that same position was a three and a half thousand dollar camera plus lens and yeah I've replaced it with a two hundred dollar webcam.

22:52Crazy.

22:52Anyway

22:54All to say, yeah, that money goes places.

22:57And so the way that I actually make the channel profitable is I make courses with LinkedIn.

23:01So the LinkedIn work that I do, that is profitable for the time that I spend on it.

23:06And that allows me to basically underpin the YouTube channel and make sure that I can just keep making videos without really paying attention to this number.

23:14So yep, in the five years that I've had this channel, this is the total number that I've earned, so five years that we've had.

23:20So yeah, five million views, that's the total number.

23:23If you go to content, we look at some of these other pages, but I don't think we get the detail for these pages

23:30Yeah, content won't work in this particular tab.

23:34Subscribers only goes back to a certain point, and you'll see that

23:39Oh no, the subscribers goes back as far as uh really it matters they they stopped collecting a certain way prior to that, so yeah, it only really matters from twenty eighteen to be fair.

23:48You can see

23:49you know that March period 2024 god that's crazy that is crazy like what happened here

23:59What happened here?

24:00What does this number actually say?

24:02Subscribers, monthly audience.

24:05Oh, monthly audience, fine.

24:06So this is like the number of people it thinks were watching my channel, right?

24:12on a monthly basis.

24:13So a hundred and two thousand was l I like quite rightly sort of guessed the peaks.

24:18A hundred and two thousand audience and then boom it just falls.

24:22Uh and this must be a rolling number

24:24Um I never know how sometimes these these numbers work.

24:27But the subscriber count we've seen that.

24:28So the monthly audience is interesting.

24:30So every month, of course, the same person can be in each of those months.

24:34So

24:35This is just basically showing the momentum of the channel and then you see like you can actually see the algorithm at work because you can just see it just falls off a cliff, right?

24:44This would have been conference or something, and then it's just like no boom down and then boom down

24:49And then you come up again, boom, down.

24:50You come up again, boom, down.

24:52Yeah, even if I've been making content here, you can see like it doesn't matter what I'm doing, it's just constantly on the way down.

24:58So anyway

24:59popular with different audiences, you get a little bit of that.

25:02Videos growing, you get some insight.

25:04You can see when most people are posting on the YouTube channel.

25:07Where do people watch?

25:08Most people are watching on desktop, which is a shame for my channel because

25:12the bigger audience is on mobile phones.

25:14If majority of my audience are watching on my computer, that means most of my content isn't actually good enough to be watched on a mobile phone.

25:20So this is basically where shorts come in because if I go to shorts

25:24You'll see that a large percentage of people on mobile are actually in this white slot.

25:28So mobile becomes a larger one.

25:29So if I'm trying if I'm gonna try and grow the channel, I am actually gonna have to start making more shorts than I make normal videos, which makes

25:36Which pains me a little bit because I don't think shorts are a great format.

25:39Videos in general, yeah.

25:41You watch my content, 4K, lovely sound, lovely video.

25:44Yeah, 76.

25:468% prefer it on desktop and mobile phone not so much.

25:49TV some people watch on TV.

25:51I'll watch my own videos on the TV.

25:52It's kind of fun

25:53Tablet, very small percentage.

25:55Lives, uh live stream.

25:57Most people are watching those on their desktop because I'm normally streaming during like a conference or something like that.

26:02Where is my audience?

26:03Mostly in the States, then India

26:05then United Kingdom, then Canada, then Germany.

26:07So India and USA alone are the two biggest parts of my audience.

26:12This takes forever to load.

26:13So yeah, there you go.

26:14There's a better table.

26:15So you can kind of see where the majority of my audience is

26:19Super interesting to drill into these, but you can also see there's huge variances in watch time, right?

26:24So in India people watch my videos a lot less and

26:27The way I kind of think about that is potentially that there are a lot of offshore sort of centres in India and so what can be happening here is they're looking for

26:35tips and tricks more often than maybe an American or Western viewer who's maybe just looking to consume some sort of passive content so they'll leave it up for a little bit longer

26:45That said, those short views are still account for 25.

26:488% of my total view count.

26:50So a quarter of my views go out to India, the other 30% go out to United States.

26:56And then I'd have to probably add up Europe as a whole nother 25%, so United Kingdom, Canada, Germany.

27:02And that makes sense from a population perspective.

27:04Uh and then every other country is just basically not even a single percentage point.

27:09So um yeah, there's a long tail of lots of different types of um

27:13views but um again with the watch time here you can see that America sort of really drags the channel up so that's why a lot of youtubers come from the United States and Canada because

27:24They kind of are just speaking to their home audience and that makes it naturally a really good fit.

27:29Age and gender, this is all sort of guesstimation, it's not actual profile data.

27:33So yes, YouTube

27:34gets you to log in, but where it doesn't know that information, it actually can't use your profile to do this stuff.

27:39So this is actually based on what does it say?

27:42Viewer age is based on the age that users tell us when making their account.

27:46It does not yet reflect users that YouTube estimated to be underage.

27:50Okay.

27:50This is self-reported age based on YouTube accounts and I think there's some statistical work that goes into that spread.

27:56Most of my views are male.

27:58uh decent percentage, thirty percent nearly are female.

28:01And um yeah, unspecified uh well zero percent I guess YouTube must be forcing people to choose a gender.

28:08Um maybe the options doesn't quite sort of reflect what we'd say um

28:13progressive ways of defining gender.

28:15Notifications uh seven seven thousand people have all notifications on so they will actually get the notification.

28:22Wait, no

28:237,000 people have notification for subscriptions on, only three and a half thousand will get the channel notification and on because they've actually got it enabled and they've not silenced it on their phone.

28:33So that's a good metric to know.

28:34So when I make a video

28:36There's a chance that one of these three and a half thousand people will act on it if they have their notifications not silenced.

28:42Okay, so that's um it's a very small number of the total sub count.

28:48So yeah

28:49Um revenue, uh I think we've gone through this.

28:52You can kind of see there is some sort of seasonality to it.

28:55Uh October, why was October big?

28:57I'm not entirely sure.

28:58I'll come back to that later.

29:00My most

29:01earned video so what is tableau nearly five thousand pounds as well single video tableau desktop crash course

29:093000 pounds and this speaks to the problem, right?

29:14So on YouTube there is this tendency for what I would call beginner content.

29:20So

29:20If I do a video on like if I did a course on LODs or I did something on the data model with Kirk for an hour and a half.

29:30Unfortunately, that would not get anywhere near these kinds of views because there's just an abundance of people who are looking to get started with something.

29:39That's sort of the YouTube genre, people who are just starting out

29:42And then once you start out and you know your way, you kind of l rely less on tutorials because you've sort of know your way.

29:47So it is getting to the point where I have to kind of ditch this approach of covering what's new every single time

29:54And every so often do these absolutely behemoth edits that are massive because they're the only thing that work

30:02Uh and it's a really difficult it's a difficult thing to do because I've done it sometimes and it's not really yielded anything.

30:08Tableau for beginners, a comprehensive guide.

30:10Like there's only three hundred and seventy that took me as much time as this desktop crash course

30:13And yeah, it's completely different view count.

30:16So if I spend a week on something, this is a really good way of actually understanding value because

30:22If a lot of people are watching want to watch it, YouTube will put a lot of ads on it.

30:26And if a lot of people pi they put a lot of ads of it and pit a lot of ads on it and people still watch it, that is a good sign of

30:32people want that content.

30:34So I don't want to sit here and focus on the number, but the number is a good way of indexing the kind of content that people want to watch because they're they're kind of sticking through the ads.

30:42Uh it's got some sort of level of stickiness so the ads don't disrupt

30:46Their watch time.

30:46For shorts, um very different ball game, even though this video probably has a gazillion uh maybe ten thousand views, it's only got four pounds sixty nine.

30:55So if you see all those people who are getting rich off shorts

30:58They're making lots and lots of videos with like a million views.

31:01That's how they're making lots of money.

31:03Versus my, you know, short with 10,000 or something like that.

31:06and lives uh live stream well like tableau conference keynote that meant 16 pounds uh 14 pounds so the ads on those must be actually doing something

31:15So yeah.

31:16Interesting way to look at analysis, but um yeah.

31:19Uh watch page ads, these are all the different types of ads here across the shop.

31:22So memberships are interesting.

31:24So um memberships come from people who are very, very ch kind on the channel

31:30And they support me in two levels, and it's actually very, very low.

31:35Okay.

31:36Um, supporter backer, supporter and backer, the two levels.

31:39Actually, it's just easier to go to the channel

31:42and show you this so how would i show you membership levels it's a di this is a difficult one how would i actually show it to you

31:53Oh god.

31:54It it doesn't this this is annoying.

31:57Do I have to go to or would I have to go to memberships, here we go.

32:05Here you go.

32:06I have two types of where are they?

32:11Levels.

32:12Here you go.

32:13Yeah, so 99 pence or one pound.

32:17And three pounds basically.

32:19$2.

32:1999.

32:20It is really hard to change these.

32:21So once you get these approved, it's actually not easy to change them.

32:24You have to basically delete them and start again.

32:27And I don't want to disrupt

32:28what members are already doing.

32:30So I've just left these as is as a way for people to support the channel.

32:34I have not put enough value into them.

32:36I'll put my hands up into that.

32:37And you know if people cancel, that is totally understandable.

32:40I think

32:41Uh people have cancellations from the last 30 days are up 33%.

32:45So but I've also gained as many people as I've cancelled.

32:47So it's basically just flatlining.

32:49You can see it's kind of just stayed the same

32:51um for a for a period of time.

32:53Active members again roughly staying flat.

32:55So just sustaining a certain level of membership.

32:58Forty-four loyal members, I really appreciate you.

33:00This is equivalent to a Patreon or signing up to a newsletter in in the YouTube world.

33:05Uh supers are rare.

33:06I don't really get those I don't livestream enough.

33:08I don't sell anything.

33:10I have no brand connect kind of content.

33:13Audio interest just tells you kind of

33:15what kind of ads people would sort of pay for.

33:18Um have like a media kit.

33:19This is funny.

33:20So it tells like other people about what the channel is good for.

33:25This is kind of like a

33:26a really interesting way of looking at your channel.

33:28It kind of gives you everything in one view, what marketeers actually care for, so they can very quickly understand what they're dealing with and they'll give them a good sample of the kind of videos that people can expect from your channel.

33:39So

33:39Yeah, it's pretty it's a pretty good um thing you can actually download it and do a bunch of stuff giving.

33:44I don't really fundraise a player for education you're earning

33:47from YouTube Player for Education.

33:49Oh okay, so um this is interesting.

33:52So what is going on here?

33:55YouTube Player for Education must be

33:58Maybe for the courses, maybe people have enabled YouTube for education in a very specific setting, and so the revenue coming from that is going there.

34:06A couple of things to cover off

34:08What has been happening with subscriber count?

34:11Why is it that if I go to subscribers, you can see these sudden jumps?

34:16And this is to do with something called promoted videos.

34:21So to see the promoted videos, here you go.

34:24You go to content and you got inspiration.

34:26YouTube actually tries to give you ideas based on

34:29what it knows is happening.

34:30And what I normally see here is all the amazing stuff that other people in the YouTube community are doing that is a bit beyond me.

34:37Um so what it sometimes does is it oh god it's done he's using AI to suggest

34:42Oh god, I hate this.

34:44It's using AI to suggest thumbnails and stuff like that.

34:48To be honest with you, gosh, when I looked at this a month ago, it was really bad.

34:53This is not good, but

34:55It's improving a little bit.

34:57It doesn't look anything like Tableau, but hey, we'll take it.

35:00So you got some sort of ideas of themes.

35:02I've actually saved a few examples.

35:04If you go in here, I've sometimes

35:05Save some of the proper prototypes that it suggested.

35:09And these aren't bad video titles.

35:12Crap thumbnails is a good example of what I think is a crap thumbnail.

35:15It's not really my brand or my voice.

35:17But

35:18I think these are good titles and it it figured that out without sort of me doing something.

35:21So if you want some video ideas, I think these three are banger titles.

35:25If you can make content to speak to these titles, that is how YouTube works

35:28you will get a really good audience, okay?

35:31Promotions.

35:32Here you go.

35:32Here we go.

35:34So

35:36Here we go.

35:38So this is something I played around with.

35:39What I did is I took the YouTube revenue and I put it back into the channel.

35:43And I was trying to see what does this do to view counts and subscriber counts.

35:49So

35:50If you look at this, I basically for about th six months, I just put all my YouTube revenue back into the channel.

35:56So basically promoted

35:58my own videos with my own YouTube revenue.

36:00So like I said it's mostly a loss making enterprise.

36:03So this one is interesting.

36:04So I spent £2,000 paying YouTube to promote

36:10My most watched video, so it's already got a pretty good viewership, and the reason I did that is because I already knew what the baseline for that video was, and I wanted to see if it would do anything bad to that video from a viewership perspective

36:22And whether on the other end of that the video would like still have this sort of beating heart to it, right?

36:28And long story short, it did

36:30But the outcome was only 56,000 subscribers.

36:33So basically what this did is it it showed the video to 20 it's it showed the video 20 million times.

36:40It gave people an option to watch it 20 million times

36:43It only generated three hundred and eighty-seven views, but from the three hundred and eighty-seven views, about if we say that's

36:52One sixth?

36:53No, it's actually that'sn't called four hundred thousand views.

36:57Just maybe like between a seventh to a sixth, like that kind of ratio.

37:02Actually subscribed

37:04And I tried the same with the Tableau Prep video.

37:07Actually got better return on investment for that.

37:09If you look at the ViewCan, it's five times less that number.

37:14But that is um actually no I didn't get better ROI on that.

37:18It should give you a column for ROI.

37:20Um if I'd spent a bit more money on that it probably would have ended up with the same

37:24roughly the same percentage.

37:25So you get the idea.

37:26And then I did like a very small experiment to try and optimize for specific terms.

37:31And I actually started to I think I s under started to understand it a little bit 'cause I did get better ROI on this specific

37:37and one and then I stopped it again.

37:39So a lot of these have stopped.

37:43This was back in 23, 24, and yeah they've ended.

37:46So um you know I'm not really benefiting from them.

37:48But I'm also f

37:50aware that someone else was paying for ads on my videos.

37:55I don't know who, I don't get that detail.

37:57It is not hard.

37:58You basically go on to Google AdSense, you pick your video, you pick your promotions, you choose a video that you want to push and that's it.

38:04You go off it

38:04It doesn't stop you not promoting videos that aren't your own.

38:08You can push basically other content on YouTube and use uh YouTube content to to sort of

38:14push your own names.

38:15Um it will say that YouTube's been promoted and who it's been promoted by, but that's about it.

38:19If you promote yourself, it doesn't do that.

38:20It just gets the video out in front of people.

38:23YouTube is an ad business.

38:24So very interesting mechanic.

38:26I don't think I like it.

38:28Um but that is what sort of caused the really irregular subscriber um movements because these

38:34Um subscribers that kind of came from it were coming from that.

38:38Now I don't know what else was causing that, but I I think there's a correlation between this activity and that.

38:42For example, you might have watched this promotion

38:45Like the video, not subscribed, gone on, done something else, come back, watched another one of my videos, then subscribed.

38:52So that could be the behavior that you're seeing, but it's not entirely sure

38:56Collaborations, these are videos I've made on another channel that I've collaborated with me.

38:59So you can see the view counts and stuff for those.

39:01This is some of these are doing pretty well.

39:03The Tableau Next channel getting some love.

39:05I love it.

39:05And yeah, that's um that's that.

39:08So

39:08I think I've covered virtually everything.

39:11Trends is an interesting one.

39:13Yes, um AI just killed these five day trialist skills.

39:16Yeah, Khadisha's um Kadesha, I think that's right.

39:20Yeah, Kadisha Brian is doing some fat the amount of data creators is just mad.

39:25If I could sort of

39:26uh draw your attention to some channels that just got it right.

39:30I'm gonna just be a fanboy for a minute here and just go to my favorite channel right now.

39:36I've been a fan of Barrow for so so long and you know what in like I

39:41Yeah.

39:42It's about time that th that Barra had the audience that he has.

39:47He is cooking on fire.

39:50He is tough, he's got the professional experience to talk from a place of authority, he knows his stuff, his content is on point.

39:59If you watch his Tableau videos, like the most popular video on here, my god, a 21 hour

40:0521 hour edit 899,000 views in one year.

40:11This is madness.

40:1210 months ago, two and a half million views.

40:14Like he is he is creating

40:17Fire and he just quit his job to do this full time if you didn't know.

40:21So this is all from before he quit his job to do this, and now you can see

40:28The man has content virtually every week and it's also cooking.

40:33Like some of these view counts are things I aspire to get after a year.

40:36He's doing it in nine days.

40:39So

40:40His system is on fire.

40:43He has cracked the data niche on YouTube and he knows his stuff, which is why it's valuable.

40:49and also why he can teach it so well.

40:52Um because he takes that skill and applies his knowledge to it in a v in a genuine

40:59you you can see that he understands the topic inside out.

41:03He's not just teaching it to you.

41:04He's not just repeating something, you're watching it and getting the dopamine hit.

41:08He's actually engaging you and keeping you entertained

41:12in a genre that has to fight with Mr Beast to get a viewership.

41:17Ah, Barra, hats off to you.

41:19And he did it in like ridiculous time.

41:22Oldest video.

41:23Three years old.

41:24Look at that

41:25And he started with Tableau.

41:26He's one of us.

41:27He's one of the data fam.

41:29Then he moved to SQL.

41:30Then he moved to Python and ChatGPT.

41:32And then he moved a bit back to Tableau.

41:35And I love him because

41:37He did something that I wished people did, which is I made a bunch of sketch notes and Barra saw them.

41:45He thought that was a really interesting way of doing it.

41:48He actually read the blog where I showed how to do it and he took it and he pushed it to another level.

41:55If you see his videos today

41:59Sketchnoting is not unique to me by the way.

42:01Sketchnoting is a technique that is widely available on the internet.

42:04I'm not the first to discover it.

42:06Many other people have done it on YouTube.

42:08If you see some of his videos now, it's an integral part to the way he teaches.

42:14It's literally the way he engages people.

42:16If you go to some of these comments, people will say time and time again

42:20the way you have drawn these concepts if we just go to one of these videos and just look at this like these are hat he's like done this on an iPad okay he has drawn this out the attention to detail

42:32that goes into this kind of layout, this way of explaining stuff, it takes time.

42:38This is not easy.

42:39And y you could try and use AI for this, but then it wouldn't look this good.

42:43It would not work this well.

42:45And yeah, he's just taken those techniques, he's set it up, and he's absolutely flying.

42:51So um hats off Barra for truly building off inspiration.

42:55That that

42:55That is what artists are supposed to do.

42:58And and he's generally taken this sort of creative endeavor to to to that level.

43:02So super, super incredible.

43:05I would not be surprised if by the end of this year

43:09Barra is close to a million views and is easily challenging, you know, data data nerds like Alex the Analyst.

43:19in terms of being one of the biggest data creators in the space.

43:22And the reason is because again, he's doing it from a place of authority.

43:27He's been working in the industry for years.

43:29He's bringing that knowledge to this community and the loyalty, the brand loyalty he has built in is incredible.

43:37If I just take like a super popular video, two and a half million views, let's take this one

43:41Just go to these comments, just like just full of hearts and love and people who are thankful, and it just goes on and on.

43:49When you have this impact on people, it is

43:53Wild.

43:54And look, there's a detail here you probably missed.

43:58He's responding to every single one.

44:01It's not just like, oh yeah, like like like no.

44:04He these hearts, you have to manually do them yourself.

44:07So you you can see that he has read, he's engaged, every single one of these when they came in.

44:13he saw them in YouTube Creator CDO and he actually chose to do something about it.

44:16Even I don't do that.

44:18That is the level of fandom that he has with his community.

44:22He is a real leader of his community from a knowledge perspective, from an experience perspective.

44:27And yeah, he's built an incredible following.

44:30So yeah.

44:31Fandom over.

44:34I'll go back to my my uh my channel here that needs uh

44:38A little bit of a jump start of some sort.

44:41So I'm I'm on the operating table and I need to be shocked back into life.

44:44That's where we are with my channel.

44:46So yeah, that is

44:50the YouTube channel in a nutshell.

44:52You probably saw frustrations and and and pain and happiness as well in my face because it's

44:57It's a thing of it's a labor of love and once you have it, it's really weird when people discover I have a YouTube channel.

45:04It's a very strange thing to explain people because

45:08I think to a lot of people it's an incredible achievement, and it is, but at the same time, it's a phase, right?

45:15The work I did to make this happen happened three or four years ago.

45:21Can I put that same energy into it now?

45:24Probably not.

45:25And so when people find my channel today and they go, wow, you have how many subscribers?

45:30I'm like, whoa, yes, I don't have the kind of fandom that Barra has.

45:34I don't have that momentum.

45:35The reason my subscriber count is so high is because I think I have a lot of transient viewers.

45:40So you discover my channel, you learn Tableau, and then three years later, you're probably not watching my channel at all because you've moved on.

45:46You've gone to another job, you've been promoted, you're no longer using Tableau.

45:50And that is the my content.

45:52And because I do lots of here's what's new in Tableau, unfortunately that does punish you.

45:57So if I if I just go to let's say classic view, view the data model in Tableau, 2,000 views.

46:04Yeah.

46:05AI agent and desktop, okay, this is a fairly decent thing, but even 10,000 views for a feature that was released almost a year ago.

46:13That's basically like that video is not doing anything.

46:16And you can go to the analytics and you kind of see this this uh line chart.

46:20Actually, this one's not this one's not too bad.

46:23Okay, this has actually got an okay life.

46:25When you see a straight line like this and it beats the channel average and it just keeps going.

46:31That basically is a sign that YouTube algorithm likes it.

46:34But yeah, 10,000 views, only 42 subscribers, a lot of watch time, not much revenue.

46:39Again, it if you don't see this

46:42number higher for that number of views then it's just not a yeah, I guess I it it's not not sticky because it you know about halfway through forty five percent of people are still watching.

46:51So it is a little bit of a

46:54A strange one.

46:55Let's let's go back.

46:57What's new in Tableau?

46:5825.

46:592, yeah, 4,000 views.

47:01There were times when I did these videos and like I'd get 10,000 views or so.

47:05If I go back

47:06the new tableau deep dive you know back here you know I'd do a video and within within days certain videos would get like really big viewerships so something like that 4000 views 2024.

47:173 what's new in this release

47:19Look at the analytics.

47:20Yeah, this is petered off.

47:21But you see it did all its sort of watch time in the first hundred and sixty days.

47:26That's not happening anymore.

47:27Yeah.

47:28Like it's done from four two four to fo

47:32four seven years basically five hundred views but the first hundred days is when it really did its numbers.

47:41That doesn't happen anymore.

47:42It just does not happen anymore.

47:44I'm not getting that same

47:45And look at this in the first uh in the first um if I go back to view count in the first literally in the first what f first thirty days three thousand yeah

47:58And then four thousand.

48:00Just that doesn't happen anymore.

48:02So it's a hard one to explain, but it is

48:07That way.

48:07And there you go.

48:09Yeah, I'll stop it there.

48:10I've been going on for about an hour.

48:11Hopefully AI can do decent timestamps.

48:14But yeah, this has been a pretty thorough

48:16analysis of the channel.

48:17Curious on your comments.

48:19I guarantee you YouTube won't show you this.

48:21I have to go I have to come up with a really good thumbnail like how much money did I make in my YouTube channel or something like that.

48:26You see those thumbnails from YouTubers and it's it's because that genre gets a ton of views.

48:31for that reason.

48:32Yeah hopefully this completely transparent overview of the channel has helped you see into the into the window of the channel

48:39and understand what's going on.

48:41I didn't cover as much stuff as I thought I would, but I've also spent way too much time.

48:44So this is a great place to end.

48:46Thanks for watching.

48:47I'll see you in the next one.