- A lot of us who play games on YouTube
were actually inspired by other creators.
And often times the first creators we discover
are often ones that are well established on the platform
and seemingly play whatever they want.
So with that in mind,
starting a gaming channel and playing whatever you'd like,
it seems pretty straight forward, right?
Hello, I'm Dan and welcome back to vidIQ.
We are in fact the YouTube tool and channel that helps
to educate you along your YouTube journey.
And speaking of YouTube journeys,
today I'm going to be taking a look at another creator,
one in particular who has inspired a lot of us who
now play games on YouTube.
But before we jump into that,
my question to you is this,
who inspired you to start making YouTube videos?
And of course, don't forget to subscribe
to us here at vidIQ for more videos,
just like this one all the time.
So what prompted this discussion?
Well, my first video here at vidIQ was all about starting
your gaming channel from scratch to kick off 2020.
As part of that video,
I actually discussed the aspects of growing your channel
by narrowing down your niche to just one video game.
Now that recommendation itself has seen a little bit
of pushback here and there with a lot of YouTubers trying
to argue that they would like to play multiple games
within multiple genres on their channels
and they would still like to grow.
But recently one comment
in particular really stood out to me.
The commentor in question asks this,
what about PewDiePie? He plays whatever he wants,
when he wants and is not afraid of being bad in a game,
and does everything on his channel, not just games.
Something really clicked with me when I read this comment.
And I realized why so many new gaming channels seem
to be all over the map sometimes when it comes
to their selections and games and different genres.
It's that mentality of, well,
if it's good enough for PewDiePie,
it's good enough for me.
And that mentality may be actually a pretty good way
to start a YouTube channel,
cause you have to start somewhere.
You're going to need some practice.
But trying to follow in PewDiePie's footsteps in 2020
this is a very important aspect of PewDiePie's channel.
What if I told you that PewDiePie,
Pewds himself once had zero subscribers.
Come along as we dive into a brief history
of PewDiePie's channel.
According to his Wikipedia page,
PewDiePie had started his channel in 2010
playing primarily horror and action video games.
Over his first two years, he saw substantial growth
on YouTube and reached his first 1 million subscribers
in July of 2012.
If we take a look at some of his older videos
from around nine years ago,
you see PewDiePie probably had a pretty familiar journey
playing just some various games on his channel.
And then of course not long after starting getting
into Amnesia and it would appear that PewDiePie got Amnesia
and never really looked back.
As we do scroll down here,
we start to see some testing going on.
We have Nightmare House, we have more Amnesia, Fear 3.
So even in 2012 as things took off
and PewDiePie hit a million subscribers.
We're seeing a lot of different games,
but horror games still continually come up
as PewDiePie's bread and butter.
Let's a look at another creator's journey who you may know.
So Markiplier is currently at 25 million subscribers,
and if we're sorting by the very oldest videos
on the channel, you see what comes up is
some Amnesia, we have Fear, we have Penumbra
I'm probably not saying that right.
But once again, a lot of horror games,
there was a niche here that was being explored
while other games were being tested.
Some of these have custom thumbnails, some of them do not.
Jacksepticeye 23 million subscribers
and playing a lot of first person shooters.
That's how he got his start on YouTube.
These are some of the biggest names in gaming today
and they got their start just like us with zero subscribers,
testing out different content,
staying within their niche and growing from there.
So for those of you out there with gaming channels,
I have a bit of a strategy I want to share with you
for kind of finding your way.
I want you to know that if you still struggle
to figure out exactly what you would like
to play on your channel,
it's okay to start testing by playing some different games.
These videos, if anything can be great practice
if you are just getting started on YouTube.
You should also be working on
your titles, tags, thumbnails, descriptions.
Now obviously we have a number of videos
on getting your content discovered on YouTube.
So I'm not going to go too deep into that,
but I will say that as you're playing different games
and as people are discovering them,
you're going to find one at some point
that kinda jumps out at you.
It got more views, more engagement, more likes
than any of your other videos,
and that's when I want you to pounce.
I want you to double down on that game.
As long as you played it with the intention
of hopefully making more,
which I would imagine you did,
this strategy is going to grow your channel a lot faster
than if you continue just playing random games
and ignoring those moments when things kind of stick.
It happened to me.
I was inspired to start making videos on Minecraft
by watching other Minecraft content creators.
But one day I was gifted a new survival game
that had a lot of the same aspects build, mine, craft.
I tried it out and I put it on the channel,
and what was interesting is that video got more views
than anything else I had published previously.
It blew up,
so, I did about 30 or 50 videos on it.
I still wanted to make Minecraft videos
from time to time and I did,
but for the most part this other game,
was what was driving the growth of my channel
and I always made sure to
have new episodes out all the time.
Now I got lucky it was a gift from just a friend of mine
and I tried to play it and it worked out,
but a lot of you aren't gonna have the same luck.
And as you're looking for those new games
to test out on your channel,
might I suggest our trend alerts tool here at vidIQ
when you have no alerts,
this is what the page looks like
and you can start by creating a new alert.
So I'm gonna name my alert games to play and
then I would recommend testing out different keywords.
We have some examples here like mobile, iOS, android.
You could try things that start a bit broad.
You may already know your genre.
Let's say your genre is a building survival,
crafting games like Minecraft,
but you don't want to play Minecraft.
Type in survival game, all right?
And then put your category to gaming,
you could throw your competitors in we'll get into
that in a second and then choose
your view per hour threshold.
I'm gonna keep it low at a hundred views per hour.
The trend alerts tool is here to send you emails
and you can choose the frequency of those emails here.
I'm gonna leave that for now,
but I would recommend turning that on.
However you can just start scrolling down and looking
at the different suggestions below.
Once you're happy with your key words
and the results that are showing up with them,
I would recommend hitting create alert.
And that way it saves it
and you'll start getting those emails.
But if you just want to check this tool really quick
and not get emails, you can absolutely do that too.
And to get those competitors to show up
that you can turn on and off,
all you need to do is go into the competitor's tool
and add them right here.
They will carry over into the trend alerts tool.
So I've added the three channels we discussed today
as competitors, just for fun.
Ideally, you'd want to pick competitors that are closer
to your level of subscribers, views, et cetera.
Many or I would argue probably most gaming YouTuber
start a channel and they don't know where it's going to go,
what they're going to play,
or even for how long.
Unless you already know that it's okay
to test out different games and we want to encourage you
to double down when one of those games
becomes a viral success on your channel.
I use the word viral a bit loosely viral in comparison
to the other videos you had done Of course.
This strategy is going to be excellent
for your channel's growth and I highly recommend it.
Don't forget to tell me about
your YouTube inspiration in the comments below,
whether it be a family member or a friend
or a another YouTuber.
Thank you so much for your time today.
Thank you for watching and we will see you in the next one.
Happy gaming.