1 Million Subscribers -- You can do it, too (Patreon)

[This is a transcript with links. Some of you may remember that this video should have run a few weeks ago. It turned out that a paragraph had gone lost somewhere in the production and it took some time to fix the issue But finally, here we go!]

Oh dear, we’ve made it to 1 million subscribers. This is so crazy. Thank you all for making this happen. It’s been a life-changing experience. The biggest change has been that people no longer ask me what entanglement is, but what’s the secret to my YouTube success.

It makes sense because the two have much in common. No one really understands quantum mechanics and no one really understands YouTube either. Same thing, really! And I’ve never hesitated to talk about things I don’t understand. So how do you grow a YouTube channel? That’s what we’ll talk about today.

Before I start, let me say that as with any business idea, there’s always luck involved. Sometimes the best plans don’t work out, and sometimes the worst plans do work out. But I think you can skew the odds somewhat in your favour.

There are many reasons for setting up a YouTube channel, and first of all, ask yourself what you want to do with it. Maybe you want to make money, maybe you want to connect with others, maybe you want to help people, or draw attention to something, and maybe that something is yourself. Especially for science communicators, a major goal is to convey information. But it’s almost always a combination of many goals.  

Problem is, these goals are partly incompatible, and you’ll have to decide for yourself what’s the right balance. For science communication, the biggest tension is that between popularity and information density. The more details you add, the fewer people you’ll reach. There’s no “right” way to do it, but there are different ways, and you’ll have to choose one.

I recommend you think about your goals before you do anything else, because you don’t want to end up three years from now burned out and trapped in what you think is a pointless endeavour. If that’s what you wanted, you could as well stay in your current job.

The next thing is to make an assessment of your skills and interests. What are you good at, what not, and what new skills you are willing to learn, because the type of video that you can produce will depend on that.

Science communication channels in particular fall broadly speaking into three categories. There’s the podcasty-interview type. There’s the talking head type, like this one, and then there’s the cinematic, story-telling type where people travel around and visit places. The first one is very low effort in terms of soft- and hardware, the latter very high effort, and the talking heads are somewhere in the middle. I am leaving out institutional accounts because those are really about public relations and if you need advice on public relations, I’m not the right person to ask.

Now, I’ve never been interested in filmmaking and I never got the hang of interviewing people. I’m good at research and that’s pretty much it. So for me it wasn’t a difficult choice. But maybe for you another option is the right one.

If you know your way around with animations or graphics design, you might want to integrate these skills. If you enjoy talking to other people, maybe interviews are the way to go. If you speak 20 languages fluently and can climb up walls blindfolded with your hands tied to the back, by all means make use of those skills.

Yes, I know you just want me to tell you what’s my big secret. But I’m afraid there isn’t one, really. I think it’s quite simple, people watch this channel because it’s useful for them. I collect information on scientific topics that’s hard to find in this condensed form elsewhere. And watching our videos saves our viewers time. It’s a straightforward trade, we get your attention, you get our information. And maybe we even make you laugh every once in a while.

But there are many other reasons people watch YouTube besides scientific information. Could be entertainment, relaxation, inspiration, advice, education, or many other things. But whatever you want to do with your YouTube channel, you have to find a reason why people would want to watch it, and then deliver.

Once you’ve figured out what you have to offer, decide who your target group will be, both in terms of demographics, such as age or nationality, but also in terms of background knowledge.

The target group of this channel are people who are interested in science. I don’t normally do advice videos, which is why I’m a little worried about this one to be honest. I’d recommend you don’t do what I’m just doing.Pick one theme and stick with it, at least for some while. Not like you need to stick with it for the rest of your life, but long enough so that people know you for something, like people know me as the German physicist who has an issue with big particle colliders.

When you’ve kind of figured out what want to do, try to find a descriptive name for your channel. You might say “MrBeast” isn’t exactly descriptive, and I hear you, but there’s exceptions to every rule and he’s certainly exceptional in many regards. But generally, if you’re new, people will want to know what they’re subscribing to, and you need to tell them.

Examples of awesome channel names are “The Lockpicking Lawyer”. Tells you exactly what you get. Or ElectroBOOM. Or, a little closer to home, The Science Asylum. They’re all great names that capture the essence of the channel.

If you don’t want to put it right into the title, add a tagline with more information. You can put this into the channel header and in the about section. Our tagline is “As simple as possible but not any simpler.” Arvin Ash has “Complex Questions – Explained Simply” which is really good. Dr Becky is kind of vague as a channel name, but her tagline “your friendly neighbourhood astrophysicist” makes up for that beautifully.

Don’t worry about channel logos and headers and all that, you can hire a freelance designer to make those. I did mine myself, but honestly, I think I shouldn’t have. In any case, as you can see it didn’t matter all that much.

I’ve seen a lot of advice pages saying you need to have a channel trailer but personally I’ve found those to be rather useless and I’ve also noticed that most creators now use the trailer spot to feature a video instead.

You’ll then have to think about the time commitment you’re willing to make, and the risk you’re willing to take.

A lot of people look at the number of views a video gets and take this as a measure of success, but that’s only one side of the equation. The other side is the work the creator put into getting this result. If you’re the creator, you need to look at this other side of the equation too.

If your videos are high cost or high effort but the turnout is low, that’ll in the long run become unsustainable, financially or psychologically or both. If your videos are low cost and low effort, it’s not such a big issue if the turnout is sometimes low.

I started with low cost, low effort videos and have gradually increased both cost and effort to a level where I found it stopped making sense to spend more money on the video production. For me, it’s always been more about the content than about the visual appeal. I know that this greenscreen setup is visually extremely boring, but so am I, so at least we’re in it together, my wall and me.

This is a basement room by the way, you can’t see it, but there’s a cross-trainer here, and a treadmill there. Hang on, I’ll show you. So now you know how the sausages are made. Oh and this is the desk for my science news, has an IKEA blanket over it to reduce echo.

The are many different ways to produce a video, but estimating the time it’ll take you is important for you to develop a strategy for growing your channel.

Another aspect of time commitment is the frequency at which you publish videos. I have seen a lot of advice saying you need to upload regularly. But I think it’s more important that people who watch your channel know what to expect. If they expect a video a week and that’s what you do that’s good. If they expect a video every other month or so and that’s what you do, that’s also good. If they expect a video a week but you only have one every other month, that’s not so good.

There’s no hard rules for this but if you want to keep your audience engaged and interested you’ll have to post more or less regularly. Guessing by what I see on other channels, I’d say at least every other month.

Ok, let’s then talk about how to get the most out of your videos.

First, invest into audio equipment before you invest into video equipment. If a video looks mediocre, people will be disappointed. If they can’t understand you, they’ll leave and not come back. So make sure you are easy to understand. I’ll not go into details because you find those elsewhere, but it’s correct, so just make sure you do it.

Second, do some research on the topic before you plan a video. If you have a topic on which there are like a dozen videos with millions of views, it’ll be very hard to compete with that, so not a great idea. If you have a topic on which all videos have very few views, that means few people are interested in it, so not a great idea either.

One thing you can do is take a completely new topic. If it works, it’ll work extremely well. But if it doesn’t work, it’ll fail spectacularly. So, high risk, high payoff.

If you’re risk adverse, pick a topic that has attracted some attention previously but not hugely so, and then find something new to say about it, or find a better way to say it. Such a video will likely be recommended to people who have watched other videos on the topic, and yours is then pretty much guaranteed to go reasonably well. That’s what I do when I talk about quantum mechanics or cosmology, it’s never a huge viral hit, but it’s content that performs reliably because people always want to learn more about it.

I’d recommend that you do a mixture of both high risk and low risk content, but it’s really a matter of personal preference. Either way, always keep in mind that you need to give the viewer a reason to watch. Ask yourself “Why should someone watch this video?” If you can’t find a good answer, you need to rethink. For this video, for example, the answer is pretty obvious: You should watch it, because it will help you reach your goals. For a lot of science communication it’s normally that viewers will learn this or that new thing.

Third, make sure that your great idea comes across in the title and thumbnail of the video. There’s a lot of talk among YouTubers about how super important the thumbnail is, but personally I’ve found the title to be more important. You see, this is the thumbnail of my most popular video. It’s basically violating any possible rule you’ve heard of. These are two other examples. They’re pretty boring honestly. But they work. So I’d say think more about the title than about the thumbnail.

The title should tell viewers right away what they’ll get out of the video, so don’t try to be clever, most of the time clever is just confusing. Just tell it how it is. And yes there are AI apps that will help you with that. Then use the thumbnail to illustrate the title.

You clicked on a video about how to get more subscribers, and I certainly don’t want to question your motivations, but is this really what you want?

Let me explain. I follow several channels that have more than a million subscribers, but their videos rarely reach 100 thousand views. I’ve seen this for example on a lot on channels that teach English pronunciation. Like this one, 2 Million subscribers, uploads regularly, averages about 30k views or so, though it has the occasional viral hit. Same thing with this channel. More than a million subscribers, averages about 20k views per video, plus the occasional big hit.

They’re both lovely channels, so I’m not sure what’s going on there, I am guessing maybe people subscribe thinking “I should do something about my pronunciation” but then never look at it. That’s very relatable actually.

Now, in general, the number of subscribers is strongly correlated with the average views, and I don’t want to tell you what your life goals should be, but personally I don’t think subscriber counts are meaningful in and of themselves. Some topics attract very dedicated subscribers. Others, not so much. And a smaller number of dedicated subscribers might be worth more than a large number of disengaged ones, and I mean worth not just in financial terms but also in terms of your satisfaction, not to mention sanity.

Okay maybe I have convinced you that you should really try to attract more views rather than subscribers, but again I’d like to ask, is this really what you want? I think we focus on the number of subscribers and views because that’s numbers we have easily available, but there are other goals than that.  

Let me give you an example. There’s a lovely channel called Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal. He talks with his guest about philosophy and topics in the foundations of physics, and it’s usually in a lot of detail. It’s not a recipe that will become a viral hit. But I think his channel is a real asset for the people who are interested in those topics. It’s a value that you can’t measure in the number of views. Curt told me, if you show up on his channel with a comment saying “Sabine sent me”, he promises to reply, so if you have any questions about Theories of Everything, that’s your chance.

That said, maximizing views makes sense to get the most out of what you’re doing. But don’t lose your other goals out of sight.

In summary. I believe the most important ingredient to a successful YouTube channel is that it’s useful to your audience. There are many different ways to do that. Maybe you provide distraction, or inspiration, entertainment, information, or a platform for discussion. But your audience should get something out of it, and that’s what you need to think about. Whatever you do, don’t forget that nobody really understands YouTube.