I've come to a bit of a realization that I don't want to be a YouTuber anymore.
So doodles today's topic is a little bit hard to talk about.
I feel like I've really botched shit up and I can kind of see where it started.
I have to tell you.
A bit of a story.
So when I started my YouTube channel, I started it for fun,
really, for something to do.
I was at home with a back injury, wasn't able to work.
So I'd got back into art as it was one of the very few things I
could do without too much pain.
So the first videos I did were just exploring my Ohuhu
markers that I had bought.
I had fun with it.
It had been in art school at one stage in my life, but I had to
drop out cuz my mother had cancer and I was looking after her.
I thought, you know, I'm gonna kind of pick up where I left off with art
school, cuz they really kind of taught you more on the creative side to
explore your creativity and a few art fundamentals and that kind of thing.
I think I got about three quarters through my course before I had to leave.
So anyway, I was like, oh, well, I'm just gonna get back into it.
And, I thought it'd be nice to share the journey and to hopefully help other
people with a bit of a direction to self-guided learning when it comes to art.
That was the intention.
When I created the channel, it didn't matter, on the scheme of things, if I
got subscribers or views or whatever, obviously the views kind of help,
cause otherwise you feel like you're talking to yourself, which is alright.
I was okay with that because it would just be a video journal for myself in a sense
that I could find anywhere, wherever I am.
I had returned to work.
Then, my back really stuffed out about three months later, cuz I hadn't
seen a specialist at this point.
which is kind of a little bit neglectful with the, health system.
So I ended up back off work, had an MRI found out that I did indeed have
a pretty badly prolapsed disc that was affecting the nerve bundle that
runs down the left side of my body.
I couldn't even feel my foot at this point, but nonetheless, that's
not really part of the story, although it contributes to it.
So after finding that out, I had a steroid injection in my back, but.
The specialist had presumed that I would've got the steroid injection in my
back before I started back at work for two hours a day, which didn't happen.
They took their time with it.
So I'd already returned to work for two hours a day at the time that I had the
injection and it didn't go down too well.
I ended up in loads of pain and a few complications from it.
So I ended up off work again.
so a couple of weeks after that, I got a call from my boss that, they were
letting me know that they'd sent me an email with a termination of employment.
So basically I got fired because, I could no longer uphold my 40 hour a week
contract because my back was stuffed.
I did speak to employment lawyers about it and they did
fire me, in a way that's wrong.
And I could have taken it to court and got between 5,000 and $8,000 off of them, but
it would've been a very stressful process.
So I decided not to, because it's not like it was a life changing
amount of money or anything.
So I didn't really see the point regardless with my YouTube journey.
After that, I kind of, I guess I panicked that I didn't have
a secure income any longer.
I started researching everything I could about how to grow your YouTube channel,
cuz I thought at least if I could get monetized and earn a little bit of income
from it, that it would be a good thing, you know, give me a bit of security back.
Anyhow.
I feel like that perspective was bad and I'll explain why I, Had had a video
that I put out, I think it was titled something like $2,000 on art supplies.
What does that look like?
And it went viral for my channel, I suppose you would call it.
Cause at this point, probably I'd only had maybe 300 views on my channel,
whatever, by the time I put that one out.
This was a couple of weeks previous to me being fired, I suppose.
So it was doing pretty well at the time, you know, so I started the research
and you've got channels like vid IQ and channel makers and all of that,
and they do great things and basically telling you churn out in the early days,
churn out as much content as you can.
I don't know how many different people I heard or watched on
YouTube videos telling me that.
It's like lottery tickets.
Every video you put out there is a potential chance to win the lottery.
It's a lottery ticket kind of thing.
And I'm like, okay, so I've, I've gotta do more in this endeavor to
try and get monetized or whatnot.
I lost sight of, The actual point of my YouTube channel.
The whole idea I originally had for my channel was something that I believed
would be fulfilling and I still do.
And that intention was to help other people with their artistic skills and
building them I became a, a YouTube monster, a YouTuber pushing out as much
content as I could learning as much editing skills as I could trying to
figure out what worked and what didn't.
And it completely took the focus off the whole intention of the channel.
I would like to become an artist, whatever that means.
I see myself as an aspiring artist currently, I don't.
Feel I've progressed really anywhere in the last nine months, anywhere to the
amount that I would've liked to because I've been too busy, being a YouTuber
and not actually focusing on the whole point, I've lost it, you know, and
I'm not delivering on what I promised.
Especially over the last month I put out 17 videos in one
week, it was quite grueling.
It wasn't hard.
It was time consuming.
and I wasn't really making anything that I'm particularly proud of
to be honest, but I was just trying to feed that algorithm.
My channel's just absolutely bombing out, but the problem was as well is I'm not
even doing the videos that I want to do.
I'm just trying to feed this hungry algorithm and it's turned me into
this monster and I don't like it.
I, I don't want to be a YouTuber all the time that I spend
instead of doing artwork and.
Making helpful videos.
I'm spending all of this time, editing all of these videos that I'm just
basically doing so that I can feed this hungry algorithm and keep it happy.
And it isn't working anyway.
I spent too much time listening to all the experts about, quantity.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I put 17 videos out in one week and it's basically killed my channel.
It hasn't helped it.
So I, I don't wanna be a YouTuber anymore.
Feel stupid because I
got so overwhelmed with the YouTube crap I completely lost sight of.
What I was here for.
That's not what I'm here for.
I am here to share art and I'm not really sharing art because I'm too busy
creating videos to feed an algorithm and it's not working out for me,
on a mental, like happiness factor.
I'm not happy.
I'm not happy at all.
and my channel's completely been bombing out, which is what, you know,
it's telling me this isn't working.
What you're doing is not working and what's happened in the last
month is usually I get about 30 subscribers a month, my total
extra subscriber rate is like five.
And that's because I've been at like 579 subscribers.
And then I'll go up a few.
And then I've got people unsubscribing in droves is how it feels, cuz I've lost
like at least 15 subscribers this month and then gained a couple here and there.
So it's just been floating around 5 79 to 5 81 all month.
And my videos aren't getting the normal amount of views they would
get like normally I'd put a video up like, I'm a small YouTube channel.
So, you know, but I'd put a video up and within about 48
hours, it'd have about 40 views.
I've had videos from that week where I did 17 videos and the total
current amount of views is eight.
So I've completely botched it.
I have come to some realizations.
I watched a video by channel makers the other week that he put out, showing you
how the algorithm works, and that it shows your videos to the people who are
interested in that stuff and sees how it goes with that and then sends it out.
So if you start making videos that are off topic, which basically I have,
because I've started doing videos that are showing, drawing or that kind of thing.
Not particularly exactly what I want to be showing, but still drawing.
It's showing it to people who are like art supply hauls.
It's showing it to people who like coloring.
It's not showing it to people who want to learn how to draw and it's not doing well.
And it's my fault.
I realized I've just become a YouTuber, just a general run of the
mill YouTuber, someone who's chasing subscribers and chasing views and not,
not doing anything they should be.
And.
I really, really like it was dawning on me that this might be what the problem
is, but I saw a community post the other day by Gary Vee and I'll, I'll put it on
the screen so you can see it, but it says stop making content for likes and views.
Start making content for your fucking soul.
And that's what I've been doing wrong.
In a nutshell.
I haven't been following my, my, it sounds really like , like conspiracy theorisist,
but I haven't been following my agenda.
I haven't been following my agenda at all.
I've been following YouTube's agenda.
I've been listening to all these other people and I'm
not feeling fulfilled anymore.
I'd spend hours and hours editing videos, then getting transcriptions for the
videos to help with my SEO and all of this to try and get people's attention
or YouTube to recommend my videos.
And I don't like it.
I actually don't like, it, it wasn't the whole idea of my YouTube channel.
And I know it sounds stupid saying this because that's not how YouTube works.
Like YouTube doesn't ideally work.
How I would like it to work.
It works on the basis of you put content out and it needs to go viral.
And that's how you grow on YouTube.
That's not why I started doing YouTube.
That's not what I wanted out of YouTube.
I want to help people.
And if I only end up helping five people in my entire life
on YouTube, then that's okay.
As long as I helped them.
My point is so many of us are just turning into these little YouTube content robots.
We're not following our heart.
We're following YouTube.
Rules and regulations as such.
And I don't wanna be a part of that anymore, you know?
So I think from here on out, I'm gonna actually make sure
with everything that I release.
That it is on target with my agenda, because otherwise it's just,
it's just not sustainable for me.
I want this to be fun and it isn't fun anymore.
So I'll be deleting my YouTube studio app, because I don't wanna
know, I don't wanna chase numbers.
And I think a lot of us should stop doing that and actually
start following our heart.