- Small YouTube channels really only have one question
when you break it all down.
How do I grow my channel
to potentially millions of subscribers
and millions of views with every video I make?
Well, normally we would sit here
and give you our take on that,
but today, let's talk to somebody who's done it already.
With over 3.5 million subscribers,
Spiffing Brit seems to have cracked the code
and in one of the most competitive spaces on all of YouTube.
We assume having a British accent and witty humor helps,
but there's always a bit more to it than that.
So on your behalf, we've asked him every detail
when it comes to succeeding on YouTube.
From thumbnails to strategies,
Spiffing Brit pretty much debunked a lot of common advice
we hear all the time for growing a YouTube channel,
and he even made us question some of the things
we tell small channels all the time.
Take this exchange for example.
One thing we are constantly telling YouTube creators
is focus, you gotta focus.
YouTube only gets more complicated, right?
There's, like, more and more and more things to focus on.
I just wanna ask you, Spiff,
what does focus mean on YouTube, especially these days?
- [Spiff] Focus on YouTube these days is very different
to where we were, like, say, five years ago,
where you could just upload,
say, Part 27 of a Minecraft Let's Play.
You had no one to compete with,
you had a very basic algorithm pushing you,
and there was only one platform, and it was YouTube.
Whereas now you're being told,
well, if you upload a video on YouTube,
you've gotta cut it down into a short for, say, TikTok,
you've gotta post about it on Twitter,
you've then gotta probably go live on Twitch afterwards.
And, at the same time, when it comes to making content,
your content now has to be more polished,
it's apparently gotta be edited,
it's apparently gotta be really long or really short,
and it's gotta fit into these keen niches
that we've apparently grouped everyone into.
It's gotta have an established format,
and you've gotta focus on what everyone else is doing
in order to work out what you're going to do.
And the problem when you focus that hard
that you kind of miss the grand strategy,
the grand plan that you might have to be a creator,
so there's no point worrying about, okay,
is the thumbnail the best thumbnail
that's ever existed on a video?
- What?
All we ever hear about is focus on thumbnails
and spend hours and hours studying them,
test over and over again.
But here's the thing.
- [Spiff] Instead, it should be,
can I get everything on this video
to a slightly above-average quality?
Because if you're doing that,
then focusing on actually making content that has a market,
then everything's just gonna work out.
You don't have to be the next MrBeast.
You just have to be slightly better
than the average human being.
Honestly, we have got some deliberately terrible thumbnails
on the channel.
I have thumbnails
which are literally just black and white text.
However, it's brilliant
if you know a video's going to hit the Trending page
or hit a search like area
because it just sticks out like a sore thumb.
You just wanna stop scrolling and go, "Okay, what is this?
Is this something that interests me?"
And it's about stopping that scroll that matters
with these weird juxtaposing thumbnails.
I think it's partly why MrBeast
deliberately has those weird,
uncanny valley-like smile faces.
They're not natural, they're not normal,
and because they're not normal,
they make you want to stop.
- Where do you think creators fall over most,
which means that the video itself
doesn't produce a good result at the end of it?
- [Spiff] I think quite often
creators are focused so heavily
on copying other people's content,
and then they copy it so hard,
you don't actually look at the wider market,
and creators don't realize that what they've done
is they've basically made a subpar copy
or a slightly better copy of someone else's work.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
You can do that.
Everyone is taking each other's ideas on YouTube.
Nothing is original.
The only issue is if two thumbnails
are being shown for the same game,
and both videos are fine,
you've suddenly split an audience of, say, 100 people
between these two videos getting 50 each.
And if one of those creators is an established creator
with, say, a million subscribers,
and you're just a brand new creator,
it doesn't matter if your video is actually better.
Maybe it's got better retention,
maybe it's got, you know, better interaction,
better engagement.
It could just be a perfect video.
It doesn't really matter if that's the case.
You've already made the issue of focusing on something
that is just a copy of someone else's work.
And ultimately, you've split an audience, basically.
You've split a market.
And there's no point trying to compete
with other people in this market 'cause it's so big.
You can compete when you're, you know, later into the game
when you've been doing YouTube for years
and you know how to one-up other people.
But when you're starting out,
don't try and swing for the biggest guy
who you love watching.
Instead, just try and find a, like, pond
that nobody else has ever touched,
and just make that your pond,
and then you're gonna become famous for it.
- How do you find that pond?
- [Spiff] I use vidIQ SEO tools
because you have this fun little thing on the backend
whereby it shows me trends,
but it also shows me
kind of like the relative amount of content
going out for that trend
to the search results for that trend.
Now, there's, you know a bajillion ways
you can get this data across YouTube and the internet.
You can just get a feel of it yourself
by browsing Reddit or Twitter and being like,
"Oh, a lot of people are talking about this game,
but I haven't seen any videos on it
from my favorite creators."
You know, that's a gap in a market.
That's the pond that you're looking for.
And in my case, I noticed that there's this huge market
for time-lapse videos for Paradox Interactive games.
What I did was I just made a bunch of time-lapse videos,
and they suck.
So the videos were terrible, but it didn't matter
because I wasn't competing with anyone else.
I had this entire pond to myself.
And so I just spent effectively a year
experimenting in this pond with an audience
that got me well past, you know, the stages of monetization
up to like, you know, 20,000 subscribers.
And then from that point, I was then able to go,
okay, well, I now know how to do YouTube.
I know how to edit. I know how to come up with concepts.
How do I then move on from this pond
and take the best parts of it with me
and kind of go into the next big pond, maybe into a lake?
- Well, how do you grow as a new fisherman
or, in other words, small channel?
- [Spiff] If you're a new fisherman, right?
And this is, like, one of the first years
you've been in this pond,
you shouldn't be expecting that, you know, your rod work,
your line skills are gonna net you the biggest carp.
And so you shouldn't focus
on trying to become the best editor
or the best script writer
so that your video has a perfect 100% retention.
It's okay.
If your concept is good enough
and you've found a gap in the market that's big enough,
your video doesn't need to be perfect
for it to still have massively above average retention
because the idea is going to be more important.
So when you've found this content gap,
the idea is the most valuable thing,
so the next most valuable thing is the pitch.
How do you know,
when this impression is served up to someone,
how do you convince them that your content gap
is the content gap that you've promised,
and it's the content gap that they've been looking for?
So the most important thing to focus on is the bait.
It is simply the title and the thumbnail.
- One of the things we discussed
was finding your place on YouTube
and how that can pretty much be the hardest part
for a lot of creators, right?
Finding content gaps might seem impossible
in some of these more condensed niches.
Especially when it comes to small channels,
it might seem that other creators
have already gotten there first,
and you're just simply late to the party.
The algorithm just isn't giving you those chances.
It's already given them to the big channels.
This is where Spiff gives us a little trick, though,
bringing different worlds together.
- [Spiff] It might not feel like that data's there for you
if you're, say, a fitness creator,
but trust me, it is.
There are gonna be topics
that are gonna be really, really in high demand
but still underserved.
It could be as simple,
let's say you're a lifestyle creator
and you do jigsaw pieces,
you can take a look at, say, the video gaming world
and go, "Well, people love speed running.
What if I do, like, speed running of jigsaws?"
Suddenly you're, like, bridging a gaming market
with, like, an IRL content market.
And then at the same time you can go,
"Well, people like competitions
in all kind of genres on YouTube.
People love competitions.
What if I did a fitness channel that was a competition?"
People absolutely love that,
and that's kind of like a market
that is massively underserved on YouTube.
Even if you're a small creator,
you are always going to be competing with other creators
and working out who those creators are
and how you can stand out from them.
Not just in terms of your ideas,
but also your, like, thumbnail design
and your title design is very important
for your long-term success.
At the end of the day,
this isn't really, like, a long-term issue.
There's always far more viewers out there in these markets
than there are creators.
So all that matters
is kind of, like, the initial video's velocity
and how it's going to appear in search rankings.
So don't feel like
if there's one really big creator in your scene
that everything's over and there's no point in trying
because over the long term,
their viewers are still going to get shown your thumbnails.
And sure, it might take you a long while
to convince them to, you know, watch both of you
at the same time,
but you will eventually get there.
- There's a big debate among YouTubers.
Should you focus on making quality videos,
or should you focus on the sheer quantity of videos
that you're putting out when starting a YouTube channel?
This advice is split down the middle,
and so we asked Spiff to break the tie.
- [Spiff] It basically comes down to,
how many videos can I upload?
And the issue with it is there's no real perfect answer.
I know creators who only have,
say, like, you know, 15,000, 20,000 subscribers,
and they do YouTube as a full-time job.
And when you're doing that at that scale,
you have to be uploading every day.
You can't really spend the additional time going,
"Okay, I'll spend two days editing this video
rather than one."
Because as soon as you do that,
initially, you've halved your earnings.
And sure, in the long term,
your videos will probably get twice as many views,
maybe three times as many views,
and that's a risk you can take,
but not everyone can take that risk.
In my opinion,
quality will always trump quantity in the long term.
There are a handful of exceptions for this.
It is completely fine to do quantity
when you're trying to capitalize on something
that is very time sensitive.
If you're capitalizing on, say, a new trend that's appeared,
if you're capitalizing on a new event,
a new shock in your sphere,
you should try and get as many videos out
as soon as possible that are relevant.
Of course, when you've covered everything
that's important, stop.
It's fine to take things slow,
and it's really important to do it
because you'll pick up on errors you've made,
you'll be able to polish a video better.
Don't focus on quantity
unless you're in an exceedingly experimental phase
where you're just throwing stuff at the wall
to see what sticks
or there's, like, a giant trend.
- Is there anything you think creators
spend too much time on which is just a waste of effort
and they just need to put aside
to focus on the things we've spoken about?
- [Spiff] I know a lot of smaller creators
spend a stupendous amount of time
trying to get their content out on every single platform
and engaging with the community at every moment.
Now, it is really fun to have a community,
but if you're spending, you know, two hours a day
running a Discord server
or playing with your fans every day,
that's two hours that you've not spent,
you know, researching ideas
or redoing thumbnails or titles of your old content.
Don't get me wrong.
You shouldn't, like, separate yourself completely
from your audience.
You should always respond to, like, comments.
It's really fun and wonderful.
But in those early days of YouTube
where every video is a massive improvement on the last,
and every step you take is so impactful,
just try and stay focused on that path.
Don't get distracted by all of the things to the side of it.
Don't try and spend all your time
chasing down, you know, collaborations with other creators,
chasing down, like, sponsorship opportunities.
There's a time and a place for it.
And when you're starting out,
just focus on your concepts, your ideas,
and how you're presenting those ideas.
- You came to this video
wanting to know how real creators succeeded
in growing their YouTube channels.
Well, in this video,
a small creator put all of his focus into limited areas,
and that helped him blow up in no time.
Follow his lead. You might do the same.