I posted a video about a week ago with the first thumbnail below. It ended up not doing well at all, I was worried that the video I had worked hours and hours on wasn’t interesting enough for any given viewer to click on. However, usually before I post videos I create 2-3 thumbnails to have and this definitely saved my video. The second thumbnail, although it still can be improved, increased the CTR by almost 5% and the views went from around 200 to 2.7k. I decided to share this because I think a lot of people, me included, get so wrapped up in creating this “masterpiece” of content with long hours of work just to see it flop. If you believe in a piece of content you posted, like truly believe you gave it everything you had, don’t give up on it after it doesn’t do well right away. Change the title, change the thumbnail, post a short and link the video to it and most importantly prepare for one thumbnail to not be received well early on in the process and make multiple thumbnails!

Hello again skoolmates 🫡 I'm on the hunt for someone who can edit my streams into clips and youtube videos. Does anyone have anyone they'd like to recommend? Or sites they've used to hire editors in the past? I have a clear vision and reference for what I'm going for, so I'm hoping I can hand off my stream recordings and it to someone without stressing about it. I'm finding that editing these myself is zero fun and too time-consuming for me 😅

What challenges did you face that you wish you had known about before you started?

Hi all, I was wondering if you had any experience with doing adwords to try and get more followers. There is a video option that does this and I tried with one of my videos, I ended up getting over 200 new followers on youtube. I assume they are real, because it all went through google, there wasnt a watch time more than 30 seconds, and you do not make income from views from ads. I was wondering if anyone had any experience with this, or any thoughts.

Yesterday I made the decision that I am starting a brand new channel. This is a VERY (very) long post but I hope it's provides insight into my thought process and my strategy behind starting from 0. For those of you that don't know, my name is CupppaJoe and I am a Full-Time Call of Duty content creator who has almost 400,000 subscribers (350,000 on my main Call of Duty channel and 50,000 on my 2nd Call of Duty channel). Why am I making a new channel? To expand beyond the Call of Duty space. I started playing Call of Duty (again) 4 years ago and before that I didn't play video games from 2013-2020. Growing up I only played Call of Duty and sports games like Madden and MLB which means there are HUNDREDS of games that I haven't played. - Assassin's Creed - Red Dead Redemption - Halo - Fortnite - The Last of US - Old Call of Duty's - Destiny - Minecraft You name it...I probably haven't played it. What is my WHY? Think back to the first time you played a certain game. You weren't 100% sure what you were doing, just sort of figuring it out. It was fun, it was challenging and at the end when you beat it, you had a certain feeling, whether good or bad. If you go back and play it today, you can NEVER replicate that first time play through experience. But I can... Where do I begin? - First thing, is there a market for this? Quick YouTube search of "First Time Playthroughs" immediately shows that there is. - Then, even before diving too far into what games I want to play, etc. I created the channel. Now you might say "well duh" but for me, that puts it in motion. We now have a channel with zero content. Name - CupppaJoe Plays. Keeping it simple. - Next I came up an initial list of games which was about 25-30. - Let's talk about Style and Tone: my mindset throughout every game/video is going to be "I literally have no idea what I'm doing" because I don't. And I want that to come through the camera. It's something I'm going to remind myself of before I start recording and throughout the video. I want you to feel that NEW experience even though you might've played the game. - Then, I announced it on my main YouTube channel (through a Community Post) and in my Discord. I absolutely wanted to leverage my current audience to gain some initial traction which has given me around 300 subscribers in the first 24 hours. - Finally, and this is ongoing, I want to consume other First Time Playthrough content. I want to see what other people are doing. What are they doing videos on? What games do well? What games didn't do well? How long is the video? How edited is the video? I'm looking for patterns and things that can help guide me to more views.