- A common fear a lot of YouTube creators have
is that they need to post like three times
a week or daily in order for the YouTube algorithm
to love them and for their channel to grow.
And in fact, you've probably heard a lot of creators
even tell that story about the moment their channel
started blowing up and growing on YouTube was the moment
they started publishing more videos,
more consistently on their channel.
But the truth is there's a lot happening on YouTube
that goes down behind the scenes of growth like that
and today I want to talk with you about do you still
need to publish three times a week
or daily in order to grow on YouTube?
The answer's no but let me tell you why.
(electronic slicing)
Hey guys my name is Tim Schmoyer.
Welcome to Video creators.
This channel is all about helping you grow your YouTube
audience so you can spread a message that reaches people
and changes their lives and the way to do that
isn't necessarily just by publishing more and more and more
and more as if a quantity game
is where we're still at on YouTube.
I feel like we are moving solidly into
the quality game on YouTube.
I still do think that quantity is important
but maybe not for the reasons you think.
On YouTube today there are over like 800 hours
of content being uploaded to YouTube every single minute.
It used to be that people were like hey what do I watch
on this platform, not anymore.
There's more and more competition than ever before
and the content that surfaces to the top
is not necessarily content from the channels
that are uploading the most, it's the content
that people are watching the most.
In fact when I look at some of the fastest
growing YouTube channels today, a lot of them
are only publishing maybe one video a month,
sometimes two videos a month.
But the thing that they all have in common
is one of two things, one is the content quality
is very high and consistent and predictable from video
to video and number two, they're telling a really good,
engaging story that holds people's attention
which gets more watch time and more return subscribers
watching more and more videos
and that is where the channel growth comes from.
For example, Dude Perfect, they only publish twice a month,
every other Monday, but every other Monday
they are getting millions and millions of views
on their videos because their audience, like me,
has learned that every single time they publish
a video it's worth watching.
I don't even care what the title and thumbnail is anymore,
I just know the quality's gonna be there
and I am going to enjoy it,
I'm gonna get exactly what I subscribed for.
Or take a channel like Lucas the Spider for example.
Their videos are very short, only around 30 seconds each,
which goes against a lot of what you hear
a lot of other people talking about on YouTube as well,
like videos need to be long and at least 10 minutes long
in order for people to give you enough watch time
and things like that and Lucas the Spider
isn't even publishing that often.
But the quality is super high and people love the videos
and so they all click immediately
when that new video comes out from that channel.
Another great example of this has been CGP Grey.
For years he published like once a month, maybe sometimes
every other month and still gets millions
and millions of views because again the expectation
that he set with his audience is like every single video
is gonna be quality, you're gonna wanna click and watch it.
Elle Mills is another great example here on YouTuber.
She only publishes like once a month,
sometimes every other month, but she very quickly grew
to over a million subscribers with relatively very few
videos because the audience got the quality
they wanted in every single video.
She does an excellent job with telling a story,
holding your attention to the end of the video.
There's actually a very long list of YouTube creators
focused on quality over quantity
and have seen tremendous success.
For example, Mark Rober, Cody Ko, Collins Key,
The Odd 1s Out, First We Feast, Emma Chamberlain,
Lele Pons, Matt Stonie, Veritasium, Liza Koshy, Lily Singh,
Andymation, Jaiden Animations, Sara Beauty Corner,
Over Simplified, Ruslana Gee, 4YE,
and pretty much any major music artist.
You know they take a lot of time
to produce these high quality music videos,
they have tremendous replay value,
and they publish that and it works great.
If you're in that rut of just trying to crank out content
over and over and over again to satisfy the YouTube gods,
hopefully this gives you permission to maybe back off.
My strategy is changing here.
I still publish once a week but I have spent over
a year working on quality and I haven't released
any of these videos yet, I'm working on a new series
called Creator Stories and I am putting a lot into them,
hiring a film crew and we're shot listing and story boarding
and planning out the story.
I'm flying out to these creators and we're shooting on set
with them, putting together this amazing content series
that's not only gonna give you a really good engaging story
but also you're gonna learn a ton along the way.
One of the main lessons I'm learning
by focusing on quality over quantity myself
is that it takes a lot longer to do than even I expected.
We have four episodes shot,
I'm looking forward to doing six more.
Once they're all in the can, edited, produced, ready to go,
I'm gonna start publishing one of those once a week
for you guys coming up hopefully soon.
Depending on how the series does, I might actually even
back of doing one video a week
and just make that Creator Stories series
my entire content strategy.
I did say earlier that I still think there is
a place for publishing quantity
and publishing a lot of content but it's not necessarily
for the purpose of growing your channel.
If you are new to YouTube, quantity's important
because it's where you're gonna learn a lot lessons.
You're gonna make a lot of mistakes and the best time
to do that is when your audience is small.
So make a lot of mistakes, make 'em quick,
make 'em fast, get 'em out of the way.
Produce a lot of content so you learn how to communicate
on camera and you start feeling more
and more comfortable on camera,
so you learn better how to edit
and how to present and how to shoot
and how to engage your audience and what type of content
they respond well to and what type of content they don't
and all those lessons, like there's no shortcut.
You just need to make a lot of videos for that.
And honestly, those are lessons that we're all
still learning, like you never like finally arrive
and you got it and you can move on.
But there is a point where you're like okay,
I'm ready to go more professional here
and I'm gonna move past the quantity game
and start focusing on the quality game
even if that means I gotta back off of how many videos
I'm publishing in order to now start improving
and increasing the quality of each video
that I am publishing.
So use quantity for learning and quality for growing.
I really want you guys to click on this video
you see on your screen right here.
It's by a creator named D4Darious.
He does an excellent job of breaking down
this question of quality versus quantity
and the roles they play for us as we grow our channel.
So check it out and Darious will see you over there.