- It's never too late to start on YouTube.
(sound of explosion)
- And we are going to prove it.
- We are going to show you how this channel
got 1000 subscribers and beyond in less than a month.
- And they did it in one of the most
competitive spaces on YouTube.
Minecraft.
- I have to confess,
we'd be making a lot of videos about subscribers recently.
How get your first subscriber,
how to get a hundred subscribers,
how to get a subscriber every single day,
for list goes on.
And when I asked the vidIQ video team,
what we should make next,
one bright sparky know who you are,
came up with this challenge.
(sound of sipping)
All right. All right.
Challenge accepted.
But this time I'm going to need some help.
(sniffing)
- It's pretty incredible that somebody
playing Minecraft in 2022,
brand new channel can manage to get a 1000 subscribers
and then some in such a short span of time.
Gaming channel or not anybody can benefit
from having a solid plan when tackling
their YouTube channel.
Now, if you'll just give me one second.
- Let's start with posting frequency.
As of time of recording in just under a month,
the channel has published these many videos.
That is more than 50 videos already
and they frequently publish several videos a day.
Kind of makes me wonder if this channel
is more resource and professional than it seems.
But anyway, I digress.
The basic premise here is still the same,
a small channel taking many shots at the target.
Because even if you do know what your video topic is
and your target audience are,
you don't know if your videos are going to hit the market
until you start publishing and testing.
And this channel with a few slight tweaks to their content
is very quickly figuring out the sweet spot.
This goes back to the classic argument
of quantity versus quality.
And if you watch my previous videos,
you will know what side of offense
I tend to sit on.
Аor new channels I tend to favor quantity
because it pays off with experience
and skills very, very quickly,
which is going to lead to increase in future quality.
As I say that's a personal opinion
open to conversation and argument in the comments below.
You know what? Dan may even disagree with me,
but he's got something else he needs to tell you.
- I don't necessarily disagree.
However, I would be careful about
which quality aspect you're sacrificing here.
If it's in your editing process, then sure.
It's probably best not to obsess
over every detail of a video,
get it done as good as it can be without
taking an unreasonable amount of time.
But if you're sacrificing, researching your topic,
your title, or your thumbnail,
then I would caution you over
too much quantity over quality.
The videos on this channel,
I would actually say are of a very high quality.
They're well edited, they have playful music,
but more importantly,
they are exactly as long as they need to be.
And these aren't vertical YouTube shorts either.
These are just longer YouTube videos
that happen to be shorter.
With videos this short,
at least with the editing process
the creator likely doesn't need to worry
about quality versus quantity
because they probably don't take that long to edit.
The length could be exactly why this channel
is doing so well too.
Here you have a Minecraft channel from an unknown creator
that has kind of goofy titles and thumbnails,
but a 32nd video just isn't that much of a commitment
for a potential viewer.
But hey, let's talk about these thumbnails.
- How's that even possible?
Can't talk about a successful channel
without taking a look at thumbnail.
And this channel is no different.
First and foremost, they are simple.
Even on this canvas of 15 thumbnails,
it's pretty easy to pick one out
and get an instinctive sense of what's going on.
A dynamite tunnel,
a choice to be made, a challenge to overcome.
Each thumbnail contains a few clear,
vibrant dominant colors.
The subject of a thumbnail is of course always focused
on a topic of Minecraft,
the blocky pixels and the consistency
of style and format between each thumbnail.
It shows that even though there is no official branding,
regular viewers will almost subconsciously be aware
the thumbnail is from a creator
they've previously watched.
Text isn't often used,
but when it is it's used very sparingly
and often provides just enough intriguing context
to get your thinking.
And look at how the thumbnails are already been tweaked.
Even in a space of the first month,
the darker more detailed thumbnail will be replaced
by bright, simpler colors with more cartoony texts.
Remember that the first thing a viewer sees
is going to be one of your thumbnails,
which makes them incredibly important.
And through all of those minor tweaks,
we can see this creator making to their thumbnails,
it's clear, they're paying attention to this stuff.
Much like Dan needs to pay attention now.
Catch!
- Take a look at some of the titles in combination
with the thumbnails on this channel.
Hard MLG is the entire title of this video
and then the thumbnail is the player
just looking straight down at a bunch of TNT.
Basically certain deaths.
Super high portal has just
a thumbnail of a weirdly stretched Minecraft portal.
Different phone camera's be like,
and then you have iPhone versus Nokia.
And you have to look at this thumbnail for a while
to kind of understand the joke.
Some of these videos relate to Minecraft itself.
Anyone who plays the game understands the consequences
of what they're about to watch.
However, some of them are downright weird
until they completely different story,
but using Minecraft as the tool in which to tell the story.
The trick with these tiles and thumbnails
is their simplicity along with their entry
and the viewers have to click,
otherwise, they're going to be left all day thinking,
"If only I had clicked, what did it mean?"
Ooh!
(sniffing)
- I really don't understand what Dan's problem is.
So we've already established that these videos
are very short without being YouTube shots, right?
Which means that every single second is critical,
especially the first few.
And you would know if you've been watching
my videos for any length of time,
but branded intros tend to have a detrimental impact
on a video's performance.
In one extreme example,
we lost 25% of our audience in just six seconds,
thanks to a branded intro.
But here's incredible thing.
This channel has a less than one second branded intro.
(snap sound) - Ooh!
- It's pretty cool in it.
And these are the three elements that it work.
First, we have a hero character.
It appears in every video,
it's the channel profile picture
and the purple color contrast with the typical
primary colors used in Minecraft.
This character also comes a very cute little sound effect.
- Ooh! - I feel as if it's a unique way of saying hello
to the audience. It's very cool.
And look, it even greets a viewer by waving at them.
Now I appreciate that this is incredibly simple.
It's incredibly subtle and it's done very, very quickly,
but what it accomplishes is a branded intro.
It's a cool way of saying hello to new viewers,
completely unique to the channel,
for regular viewers when they see that intro,
they know very in exactly the right place.
There's an immediate comforting level of familiarity.
You know, what's also incredibly simple
and very, very quick.
(punching sound)
- In terms of what these videos actually look like,
there's a lot more branding going on
than just the intro robbed bench.
Instead of commentary to tell their stories,
this creator uses music and oftentimes the same song.
And that limited song library
is likely part of their strategy,
using a similar song video after video
and letting it dictate the flow of your content
is probably a great way to make your regular viewers
feel right at home anytime they cue up
one of your videos.
So a faceless, no commentary Minecraft channel
in 2022 pulling in hundreds of thousands of views,
a 1000 subscribers in a month.
I just hope you're taking notes.
- Now Dan, you can't take a look at channels thumbnails
without taking a quick peek at the titles as well.
And these titles do a really,
really good job of complimenting the thumbnails.
I thought that would sound a lot different.
Many of the titles aim to create stakes for the viewer.
What happens if I do this?
Will I survive this challenge?
Which decision is going to be made?
Over titles creat intriguing comparisons
through the passage of time
or how things might work in different countries.
As an interesting side note,
the first comparison style video centered around
a boys and girls, but they weren't working.
So the theme was abandoned, but not the comparison format.
Each title is also incredibly sharp,
30 characters or less.
And this again, aides the speed
at which the viewer understands the concept of a video.
When it comes through search engine optimization,
this creator, clearly isn't interested in any of that.
All the videos on a channel,
Minecraft appears in a title less than 20%.
The titles in the childlike way they are
punctuated and designed to do one thing,
intrigue a human being.
And for the target audience,
they're clearly doing exactly that.
Now, Dan for this one,
I'm going to pay you double your normal rate,
make a good one.
(coins sound)
- It looks like I'm getting a rise.
I just want to point out that besides
the incredibly short intros in these videos,
not any time is wasted throughout the entire video.
If you watch this creator's videos for yourselves,
you'll notice that they don't stop in the middle
of the video and beg you to hit the like button
or subscribe.
And despite that these videos are getting shared
around YouTube just fine.
There is a call to action in each one,
but it is saved for the very, very end of the video.
And you might wonder, "Well, people even ever see it,
if it's all the way at the end of the video,
cause a lot of people don't make it to the end of a video?"
But don't forget, these videos are incredibly short
and ended very abruptly like this.
By the way, did you know that if you play VR mini golf,
you only need one of these?
And it just so happens that's the only game I play.
(golf ball sound)
- Oh, you..
- Now at this point,
I feel as if we need to ask ourselves
a somewhat uncomfortable question,
is this channel unique?
I ask this because the channel bears
some striking resemblance to at least
two over Minecraft channels,
that make similar length videos with similar concepts.
The fact that this channel has been able to put out content,
which has almost immediately resonated
with a specific audience,
tells me that this is not the creator's first channel.
Whatever the background behind the channel is
the facts are simple.
The YouTube recommendation system has found
a bunch of people who want to watch this type of content.
And that channel is supplying exactly what's needed.
If a creator is able to imitate
and then iterate with a unique identity,
that's a successful formula.
Now, Dan for the final time.
Precious.
- Perhaps the biggest thing
that I think you should take away from this video
is this - don't be afraid to fail,
because this creator certainly isn't.
Earlier, we implied that this might
not be this creator's first YouTube channel.
And I do think we're right about that.
But if that's the case,
that means that even creators with this much experience
can certainly upload a flop or we're wrong.
And this is their first YouTube channel,
but then the flops are just this creator's
way of kind of figuring things out as they go.
Regardless, this creator is straight up fearless.
And given that they upload roughly eight videos in a day,
obviously they can afford to be a bit more fearless,
but even if zero out of their eight videos
take off that day, they have nothing to worry about.
They can't afford to be bothered by it
because they're working on eight more videos
to upload the next day.
Don't be afraid to make mistakes.
(cup breaking sound)
- Alright, alright, let's not panic.
I think I can repair this.
Now, here's incredible thing.
When Dan and I started this collaboration,
we wanted to find a channel that got just over
a 1000 subscribers in a month or less.
In order to make this video,
it's taken Dunn and I about a week
of going back and forth with all of the filming.
And in that time, the channel,
which I'm not even going to attempt to pronounce
has increased its subscriber size by a factor of four.
And its view counts by a factor of five,
went into the millions, which is truly incredible.
So there's a proof.
You can start a channel today
and have a thousand subscribers within a month
and one of the most competitive video topics on YouTube.
But we're going to be honest with you
it's not easy.
What you've seen there is the tip of the iceberg,
for most creators is going to take a little longer,
it's going to require a lot of learning
and a hell of amount of patience.
And if you want to see our complete guide
on how to get to 1000 subscribers,
check out the videos over here.