Hey everyone. I'm Max Dalton, and in this video I'll walk through how my channel
performed in 2020. This will include an overview of views and other stats,
money, strategies, and what videos blew up and my thoughts around why.
I'll include a table of contents with shortcut timestamps in the description
if there's a particular area you want to jump to. The primary purpose of doing this isn't to
brag about my channel's performance, but rather to share my journey with the hope of helping others.
First, a little background. I've been making YouTube videos consistently since March of 2017.
My goal early on was to do a better job of moving the eHow model into the video format than eHow,
creating short videos that answered specific popular technology questions that I could
see people were searching for. I felt like the problem eHow had in moving its content to YouTube
was effectively having contractors do the work and paying them to produce higher quality content,
which results in higher costs. I'm assuming those higher costs for eHow became a problem on YouTube
when they discovered they either weren't breaking even or weren't seeing enough revenue after
paying contractors and internal staff who supported their videos to make it worth it.
I reduced my risk by creating content solo and consciously choosing lower quality content with
the goal of creating more content; casting a wider net, if you will. My bet was that
people searching for very specific answers wouldn't require a flashy, overproduced video.
If those assumptions proved true, that would give me a better return on my investment of time,
which at low effort was roughly two hours per video. If you want the details about
my channel's historical performance through 2019 I'll put a link in the description and
you should also see an info card that links to that video somewhere on the screen as well.
So let's get into 2020, starting with stats associated with views and overall reach.
In 2020 I added 233 videos to my channel, bringing the total number
of videos I've published to roughly 900. At a high-level the channel saw 29.6 million views
and 650,000 hours of watch time in 2020, both of which were significant improvements over 2019,
as you can see in the graphic on the screen. As you can see in this chart my channel was
cooling off in the start of 2020, but then experienced massive spikes in March and May.
At the risk of getting this video demonetized I'll just call the driver for the spike that occurred
in March as a global crisis I think we can all understand. With everyone staying inside more
people consumed content on YouTube. But the jump in May was much more interesting. This is solely
attributable to a video I did about how to delete a subscribed calendar on your iPhone or iPad,
a video that I created in February of 2020. Based on comments on this video it looks like malicious
individuals were tricking people into clicking a link that added a calendar to their Apple device
that then presented ads in the form of a calendar reminder. But they must have had some good in
their hearts because they gave them a link to my video that showed them how to remove it.
Over a six-month stretch this video saw nearly 15,000 views a day, and you can see
the corresponding rise and dip in my yearly chart as well. Outside of that I published a
few videos helping parents do things in Fortnite like cancel a Fortnite Crew subscription or add a
VBucks gift card that did well, and I also took advantage of Sony's overhaul of its interface in
the new PlayStation 5 that showed PS5 gamers how to navigate it that have done very well.
Watch time also got a bump from the global crisis and malicious individuals in 2020,
seeing a roughly 30% year-over-year increase from 425,000 hours to 650,000 hours. If you remove
these events, however, I believe watch time in 2019 and 2020 would have been fairly comparable.
The other metric that piggybacks off of views and watch time is the average view duration
associated with each video, which did continue its long, slow downward trend to 1:19 in 2020
from 1:23 in 2019. For context, the average view duration on my channel was 1:28 in 2018.
While this is a little discouraging, I'm not going to reach too much into it, yet.
Subscribers also grew nicely in 2020, increasing by roughly 67% year over year
by 50,000 and finishing at around 90,000 in total. As you can see, in normal times since 2019
my channel generally picks up an average of 80 new subscribers per day. But, again, this was
momentarily accelerated over that 8-month stretch in 2020 by the global crisis and the malicious
individuals who pumped my video about how to remove a subscribed iPhone or iPad calendar.
As you can see this also regressed to the recent mean of netting roughly 80 new subs per day
in the latter part of the year, and I've continued to see that into 2021.
Now let's get into what people are probably the most curious about:
the money. For historical context, the channel pulled in revenue of $14,665 in 2018 and
$63,638 in 2019. In 2020, that number more than doubled to $130,342. As you can see my CPM
increased to $8 last year, and went up slightly in 2020. RPM would have stayed the same
but increased in 2020 as a result of channel memberships. It's worth noting that revenue
didn't drop off as steeply in October as the increased traffic resulting from the global crisis
and bad actors driving traffic to that single video subsided. It largely held steady, and has
even continued to do so even in 2021, which is encouraging. I think this is largely attributable
to the way the global crisis experienced in 2020 has accelerated the shift in moving ads
from traditional legacy media platforms like TV, radio, magazines and newspapers to online
platforms like YouTube and Facebook. To be clear this shift was already underway, but the global
crisis accelerated it, and I think that can be seen on a small scale in my 2020 revenue story.
My high-level takeway from looking at this data is that my YouTube channel has achieved maturity.
This is as a result of an assumption that each video would be relevant for roughly
three years. Now that I've been creating content on YouTube for almost four years
I'm assuming I'm very close to my earnings ceiling within my current format, which, as a reminder,
puts an emphasis on speed over quality with a goal of volume. For what it's worth my goal is
to maintain current view and revenue levels as long as I can and I'm currently not planning
any major adjustments to my style. When the format I'm operating in falls out of favor,
which it inevitably will, I'll simply tip my cap and be on my way.
As a final note, in mid-2020 I started putting all of my YouTube content on my MaxDalton.how website
as an alternative way for people to discover my content. Every post includes a full transcript
of what I say in the video, along with accompany images and an embedded video
for people who would prefer to consume that content in that fashion. While that site has
only been up for 8 months it's currently getting roughly 1,500 views per day, getting a meaningful
amount of revenue from AdSense in its own right, and driving roughly 6,000 views per month to my
YouTube videos. I'd encourage anyone interested in creating content to also put that content
on their own website as this creates additional avenues for content discovery and revenue streams.
So what do I hope people get out of this?
I see a lot of people who want to do YouTube but who get discouraged and give up too early
before their content even has time to find an audience. You have to have a plan and recognize
that this is a long game. Beyond that it's just hard work and consistency. Nothing more.
Let me know if this video helped you out in the comments below. If you liked what you saw here,
click the video links on the right side of the screen to check out another video, or click the
logo on the left side of the screen to check out my website to see more great videos like this one.