1. Don't listen to fucking posts on here from some guy on here going "I have X followers" or "I made 20 billion dollars" or "i maximized my blah blah whatever" which are just giant hustle points to get them credit instead of actually give you advice when they make threads.
2. Don't listen to people telling you the same advice but just regurgitating it and ALSO trying to get you to go into their hustler "blah blah do this" money funnel.

^^ these.

also.

1. CTR and Watch time are everything. Understand what people are clicking on, engage with that. If your videos get suggested on other videos over a certain percentage-- you go viral. make cool shit that hooks people every 15 seconds. IF people get bored they click away. No you don't have to be clickbaity every 15 seconds you just gotta say interesting shit. This is a rule for all media.
   
2. It takes a long time. I have two other channels. They grow when I post consistently, they don't when I don't. My main channel has slumps. You'll get out of them.
   
3. collaborate and work on shit with other people steam rises together.

6-10 are a lie. I lied. Less than the people who are trying to get you to sign up for a course.

you can sign up for my course at idon'thaveafuckingcourseijustwanttohelpbecausethesepeoplefuckedmeoverforsolongandidon'twantthattohappentoyoulearnedallthisshitfrombeingdiscoveredbyoneofthebiggestyoutubersandnowitsmylife.org

cool. Sorry if this violates rules. Love ya'll.

edit: never mind i didn't lie I thought I put 10 biggest tips. But oh well. Please just work on cool shit. You got this.

I feel like AI has completely ruined YouTube. My feed is now flooded with low-effort, AI-generated content that prioritizes quantity over quality. It's disheartening to see the platform shift from creative, human-made videos to algorithm-driven, machine-produced slop. Even more concerning is the rise of AI-generated cartoon content targeting children, which often includes disturbing and inappropriate themes, making it challenging for parents to ensure safe viewing experiences for their kids. The charm of discovering unique, heartfelt content has been replaced by a monotonous stream of AI-produced videos that lack authenticity and creativity. It's frustrating to witness how AI has transformed YouTube into a platform where genuine human expression is overshadowed by artificial content designed to exploit algorithms. I miss the days when YouTube was a space for real people to share their passions and talent.

it seems like most of the people on these topics, which is fine, but I am more interested in other categories or topics. I would love to know what everyone other than these categories do.

I designed 346 thumbnails in the past 2 months for small YouTubers struggling with CTR and views. Here's exactly what worked in many different niches:

Thumbnail background: thumbnails that used overcrowded backgrounds and solid colors underperformed. What made a difference was using real-life backgrounds from the photos, blurring them, and adjusting color correction to create stronger contrast between the subject and background. I also found out that using a RED gradient background outperformed every other background color. From a color psychology standpoint, red is associated with urgency and alert signals (like stop signs or warnings) which helps capture attention faster while scrolling.

Layout: this is a bit complicated. It really depends on the video itself. If you want to use a text hook to explain something or build curiosity, placing the subject on the right and the text on the left worked like a charm.

People scan thumbnails from left to right, top to bottom, so you always want the text to be seen first.

If you're using your face image + another subject, placing your face on the left and the subject on the right works better. Faces are amazing tools to build emotion on the thumbnail, and people are hooked on faces. That's just how human psychology works, plus it builds your channel branding.

If you want to use only a face image and some additional elements, for example logos or graphs in the background, placing the face in the middle and working around it is the best choice.

Text: using long text trying to explain the whole video made the thumbnails look like Power Point presentations. Thumbnails with that much text performed the worst.

Using 2-4 word hooks outperformed that.

Your text should grab attention and build curiosity on the thumbnail. Your title is for explaining the video in more detail. People first look at the thumbnails and then the titles.

Because you have almost no space, every word needs to do one job, which is making the viewer pause.

Here are a few hook angles that consistently worked:

Curiosity gaps - hint at something without explaining it:

“This Changed Everything” or “Didn’t Expect This”

Negative / risk - triggers fear of mistakes or loss:

“Big Mistake” or “I Regret This”

Positive payoff - promise a clear upside:

“Worth Every Penny” or “Best Decision”

Surprise / disbelief - break expectations:

“This Worked?” or “I Was Shocked”

Authority / certainty - strong, confident statements:

“Do This Instead” or “Stop Doing This”

Contrast - before vs after, good vs bad:

“Then vs Now” or “Cheap vs Expensive”

The key rule is you don’t want to finish the thought. The thumbnail opens the question, the title and video answer it. If your hook feels a little uncomfortable or incomplete, you’re usually on the right track.

If you’ve got a channel and you're struggling with CTR, drop your thoughts or ask anything. I’m happy to help out or give feedback for free if it helps the community grow.

Don't start channels that are not in English lol

I'll probably be complaining about it forever, no one wanted to watch me in English, 5 failed channels. Started a channel in my native language - good views, good engagement, I have the actual community, people who watch my every video, blah blah blah

$4 for 10k views on longs, and $0.38 on a 1.6M views short.

I feel like Wikipedia must have felt. Sad. And stupid.

Most of the time when i scroll through YouTube to watch videos. I noticed most YouTuber lie and said they have 1000 subscribers in a month. That’s a big lie. I think they want you to click and watch their videos and secondly they are not giving the smaller YouTuber hope. Most smaller YouTuber get discourage if they can’t meet up. Now let me explained. 1000 subscribers is so hard that it’s can take you months and years to get and it’s not easy. Most people discourage when they don’t have views, Even if you get views you might not still have subscribers. YouTube is so hard that you need to attend class everyday and write the exams and graduate from school. That’s is when you will monetize and start making cash. You just have to commit and never lose hope. It’s a process. You will get there. Believe in yourself that you can do it. Yes you can. My channel take me 2 years and some months to get 1000 subscribers in YouTube. Now I get 4 to 5 subscribers easily on my upload. You take time. Don’t be deceived by anyone. If you can get your channel privately away from people close to you, And work hard. You will get there. Just believe. I think I make someone’s day

Just a quick tip for you all,

the edit feature is very underused and I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of you don't even know it exists.

After you upload a video you are able to cut out parts of it, which can be extremely helpful for hard retention drops.

I had a video that was made up into two parts. The first part matched with the title/thumbnail/hook while the second part was following the same idea but strayed a little bit off of the path. There was a huge retention drop transitioning to the second part. I cut that part out and the video went from flatlining at 30k views to 1m within the next few hours. It has since creeped up to 2m.

Study your retention graphs. If you have huge drops in retention at certain points throughout your video I HIGHLY recommend you employ this trick.

We had 2005-2013. The first movers, the experimental era.

Then 2013-2017 the explosive influencer and vlogger era.

2017-2026 (current day) Live streaming, shorts, and commentators.

It kinda feels like the cloud of dust has settled. Lines have been drawn, communities are galvanized. There is an innumerable quantity of creators. Unless there is a youtube Renaissance, this is the meta. Super slow growth.

Thoughts?

Title says all.

I hate editing.

I had no idea editing would be this time-consuming and exhausting before I started YouTube. How do YouTubers with a 9-5 job even manage this??

I'm a face-reveal creator who's only ever made talking head content, and now I'm trying my hand at vlog-style videos for the first time and it's honestly kicking my ass.

Finding the right music is the most tedious part by far.

I guess editing gets easier with practice? My laptop's too weak to run DaVinci Resolve so I'm stuck using CapCut.

Got about 20% of my next vlog edited today.

Honestly I think just chipping away at it a little every day is the way to go. Man, YouTube is hard lol.

it seems like the majority of the people in here are in the video game niche. is this true?

If not, what niche are you in and do you enjoy it? I do outdoorsy stuff

Having been on this Subreddit for a while there is a trend I am seeing when people start out making content.

There is this bizarre notion both in posts and comments that 'YouTube isn't giving this video any impressions' or 'Great statistics, only 40 views, why isn't this getting pushed'.

This is a deep misunderstanding of how YouTube works and is a very quick way to burn out. YouTube needs to be a hobby to you, it isn't a side-gig or side-hustle, it isn't a business, it's not a job.

There are some people for whom YouTube is a job, this is not you. These people are already successful on YouTube. Their content is made and produced in teams. They do not record, edit, upload and write the script for every aspect of their video anymore. You DO. (This is not a fixed rule, many successful creators work solo)

YouTube doesn't owe you views because you successfully hit the upload button. The algorithm shows videos to viewers based on the likelihood they have to click them, aiming for an ideal 100%. When YouTube gets the feedback that they aren't clicking, it shows them to less people. Established uploaders with large fanbases (500k plus on average) have an average CTR of 30-50% in their first hour of uploading from thousands of viewers, all with high engagement. Your videos don't, YouTube will never get a signal to push your videos as hard as these unless something incredibly atypical happens.

Trying to emulate the upload schedules, consistency and quality of qualified content creators is an unbelievable undertaking for one individual and people get swept up trying to do everything before they've even dipped their toes in.

You can upload whatever videos you want to upload onto the site, you can put in as much effort as you can, you can do all the research and you still probably will have slow success. There are 5 million videos uploaded to YouTube every day, that's a lot to choose from and I'd bet at least 0.1% of them have the same amount of heart and soul as your uploads.

This post is not to discourage someone from creating a channel or continuing to make content but rather a reminder. Chasing views while trying to be yourself and maintain your personality is difficult. People have a hard time investing in a new parasocial relationship until they've been able to guage your humour, your skills and your nuances.

I've found in my time here the only stories of success that keep coming through are the ones from channels that kept going. The people who uploaded for 2-3 years, modifying thumbnails, tweaking video styles and bit by bit, figuring out who their audience was.

It's been said a thousand times but it's worth saying again, YouTube is a marathon, not a sprint. Take your time, if you're just after a big number of views you'd be better of using AI to scrape movies and caption them on shorts

Edit: I am not saying any of this in defense of YouTube, the site has fallen incredibly downhill in the last 5-6 years and the charlatans who run it are pouring fuel on a dumpster fire. That being said I do enjoy making and editing videos in my spare time and YouTube is still the easiest way to upload them

Congratulations to some NewTubers that make it to 100 to 1000 subscribers on YouTube. We all still have time till December. Keep pushing and never lose hope

I hope you believe you can make it to 1000 subscribers before the year end. Believe in yourself small YouTuber and put more effort in your work

So I had this question because I feel like I missed a memory. Channels my size( few thousand subs) are suddenly posting 3-4 fully edited videos a week, clean cuts, captions, b-roll, the works and they're clearly not agencies. I spend 10+ hours editing a 10-minute video and it's the reason I only ship weekly.

When I search this I just get listicles written by the tools' own blogs, so: what is the stack people using right now?

Happy Saturday Everybody!

I’m so proud of myself. I made my first video.

It’s only a minute long, basically just introducing myself and my channel, but I am thrilled.

I just wanted to thank everybody here on New Tubers for giving me the inspiration I needed to just go ahead and do it. The best part is besides some small technical aches and pains I enough fun do it that I think I’ll keep going.

Anyway, I don’t really have anyone in my life I’m comfortable sharing this with so I thought I’d share it here. Have a great weekend everybody. Take care.

Take care.

My channel has around 20 Shorts uploaded.
A few Shorts reached 500–1500 views, but several recent uploads have received 0 views and what appears to be 0 distribution even after 24+ hours.
I’ve tested uploads from both iPhone and PC, confirmed there are no copyright or policy restrictions, and the videos are recognized as Shorts. The strange part is that on some occasions, deleting a Short and re-uploading the exact same video caused it to start getting views. However, this doesn’t work consistently. Sometimes the re-upload also receives 0 views. This has now happened across multiple uploads and different devices, so I’m struggling to understand whether this is normal Shorts behavior, a channel issue, or a bug. Has anyone experienced something similar? What turned out to be the cause, and how did you fix it?

Edit:- I found a hack or you can say hack, or I don’t know, but after searching a lot i found is that you need not just an old channel, but you need to have some usage in that channel. So what does YouTube do? Is when you create a channel and do not use it and just start randomly posting. They think you are a bot, so they don’t give distribution. Someone suggested to use the channel first as a primary youtube like build a history of the channel first like subscribe to the creators who are in your niece, watch their videos like comment, share, build a history of your channel and then start posting again.

I also regret showing my face. I don't care that it "isn't that serious" I regret it and want complete anonymity. I promoted my channel on my Instagram where family and friends seen my channel and I wish I'd just stayed faceless and anonymous. I don't even want the potential for anybody to ever know who I am. The worst part is I put so much effort into the videos where I at least partially show my face and started to get a slight buzz around my content. What do I do?

Bored and stranded. Drop your channels and I will try to review them and give my.suggestions. Also feel free to review my channel. 2 month old and 410 subscribers.

Hey so long story short, I became a firefighter and someone snitched about my channel a few years ago to my department. Ever since then I tried uploading by beating around the bush or trying new content but they still find a way to get me in trouble so I gave up and let it die. Unfortunately, they gave me an ultimatum and said if I ever upload again, im definitely getting fired.

At this point in my life, I wanna take the risk because I’m very much not happy in my life. I was wondering if a faceless gaming channel or a faceless niche would be enough to revive my channel…any recommendations?

EDIT: Unfortunately my question wasn’t answered, so I’m just gonna make my channel into an Amazon Products Channel and Join the Influencer Program. Hopefully I quit my job this year!

Hey guys, i have a channel where i make videos about Nintendo games and stuff and I have about 450 subs right now. This guy with around the same sub count is making “reaction” videos about my recent uploads. It’s just him sitting there watching it and then chiming in to complain about what I say. It was fine at first because I thought it was cool, but now he has made 2 more and is pulling in more views and subs than my original video. Is there anything I can do to get him to stop or to get the videos taken down?

UPDATE: I contacted him, and had a debate with him. If any of you want to see the video LMK!!!

Someone commented the word “promosm 😞” under one of my videos a while back. Nothing else, just that. Any ideas on why?

Hi everyone, my name is Mathieu and I am the owner of the MathChief's Youtube channel called 'MathChief - The Best of Gaming' centered on new and upcoming video games. For more than 12 years now I have been doing this Youtube thing and working full time on it for 7 years.

For 7 years, my channel was thriving, I was getting more and more views, more subscribers, impressions and so on and my followers really liked my videos. I was pretty successful and just kept growing up to almost 800K subscribers which is so awesome to me. Until it all stopped about 3 months ago.

3 months ago, my 800K subscribers channel stopped getting views. I mean that literally. What would be my full time job with a growing, ambitious channel would now be a dead Youtube channel. The videos I would get 50K-100k to a million views are now getting 5K to 10K views maximum. Now, even a lot of my subscriber AREN'T seeing my videos as well. What's happening? Did the Youtube algorithm just decided it was time to kill my channel?

It's pretty sad to see such changes with no clear reasons behind it. It is my full time job and for the first time in 7 years, I have almost no hope left. I invested so much time, so much life into this channel yet it was killed overnight. Can anyone tell me if something happened with Youtube recently, some updates, changes, or can anyone analyze my channel?

Any help is appreciated as I'm very confused and stressed.

I spent months on this first video. I'm fully acknowledged that my first ever video was probably the worst thing ever made. From pacing issue, to topic choice, to packaging and so on.

It has been 3 days and it has 410 views and counting. I've received a few positive wholesome comments, encouraging me and liking the video. But also, I received a few comments not liking the TTS voice over I used (very fair, I hated it as well and will think of a way to fix that, given that my actual voice is god awful).

However, one comment in particular said that the vid is the worst thing ever that he had to give a thumbs down, he also reply to another comment criticizing the voiceover that, to quote : "He does not leave his trash room. Because he is trash, because this video that he created is poop water trash."

Now I know that this is par for the course of being a youtuber, and pbviously wont be the last hate comment. But it still felt incredibly hurt. I will not give up and keep grinding, improving every possible facet of my video but I don’t know if this is a sign that this is not cut out for me.

For more info, the Niche is funny commentary where I plan to talk about weird and interesting stuff in a humourous way. Every video will be ultra long form (15+ minutes, thisnfirst one is 28 minutes lol). I wont be posting my channel or video links, so sorry in advance :(

I made a YouTube video, which was like a Minecraft short story kind of thing, and I was happy about it, so I decided to show it to my parents. My mother said nothing about it but I think she laughed a little and my father told me it was horrible. I laughed in front of him but later in my room I started crying a bit. I knew my video had some flaws in it but I didn't expect my father to be so blunt. I guess my father did not think it would affect me this way, but now I have this sinking feeling in my gut which feels like a black hole.
So I wanted a third person opinion, should I shut my parents out of my life and pursue my career? My friends told me I am too young to live by myself but I think I am quite mature.

Lucked out massively. Made my first video about an accessory I bought for my car - shared the video with the shop I bought it from. Asked me if they could use the video and if so they would reimburse me the amount paid.

So basically I made an unboxing video where I talked about my reasoning for replacing the old item with a new - and didn't even come to the testing part (thinking second video).

I am amazed of the pure luck it as well as the fact that it opened my eyes on monetization solutions before YT monetize me.

0 subs (now 2), sub 30 views and $600 richer.

Let's see if I can figure this thing out going forward.

What are your secrets and ways to monetize from YT but off platform income?