Hello this is the Provoked Prawn and in this video I'm going to talk to you about how I managed to
grow my YouTube channel to over a thousand subscribers in about a year and here you can
see that in graph form so you can see the wonder of over 1 47 subscribers in a year the graph looks
quite nice now obviously a thousand subscribers is the sweet spot for getting monetized and you
need to get up to a thousand subscribers in order to get that sweet sweet cash rolling in
however that's only one part of the journey and also getting a thousand subscribers is
surprisingly difficult the thing that I've found with YouTube is that you'll notice there are sort
of parts where you have exponential growth I currently have 48 000 subscribers on my main
channel and that growth has taken a few years but in the last year I managed to get about 20
000 subscribers in about a year so significantly more than my gameplay channel but I've actually
learned some new things with the gaming channel because it's entirely different setup obviously I
am creating content that people aren't searching for naturally whereas usually when I'm creating
content on let's say a mouse a microphone a gaming headset a keyboard or whatever people are looking
for those things actively searching for them in google but my gameplay channel is more about
just funny gameplay that I've created there are however some tips and tricks videos in there but
not as many as I could produce or maybe want to produce time is the enemy with all these
things but the journey to 1 47 subscribers will hopefully be a useful insight into how I've done
it and it will hopefully help you as well the first thing I want to talk about is shorts I've
done a video previously on why I hate shorts but they're pretty essential and this here as
you can see is a perfect example of why this is a short video that I did which is essentially a very
small clip you can see it's 20 seconds long and it's in that portrait format that shorts require
and those appear on the shorts shelf on mobile and if someone subscribes to you they will see more
of your shorts in future but also they are the sort of people that will get recommended shorts
and shorts are really easy because they just you just flick through them the vertical videos you
can just keep flicking through them really quickly and the thing that I found is the thing to do with
shorts if you want to replicate what I'm doing and try and get as many subscribers as you can
is to keep bashing out as many as possible it's a real shotgun effect or a machine gun if you like
basically putting out loads of shorts I probably do about 10 a week minimum and they are very very
short videos under 60 seconds in 1080 by 1920 instead of 1920 by 1080 in terms of the vertical
format and I'll show you how I edit those a bit later on and then they're uploaded now the way
I do this is I capture footage and I upload it in the normal format so I usually do a 10 minute
video of my gameplay and then I also take what I think are the most interesting parts of that and I
cut them into shorts and I upload them separately and I obviously tag it all up this is from dying
light to this video in particular it has 346 000 views but what you'll see that's
interesting about it if you look closely is that initially it did nothing at all for quite
some time in fact the first several days you can see that it was about 20 days or something into
being published before I actually started doing anything and then suddenly it shot up and it kept
going up and and is still doing it numbers now and it's got me 250 subscribers it's actually
got quite a bit of it it's actually quite a silly video it's about how there's a gun in dying light
2 and there aren't actually any guns in dying light 2 if you played that game you know that
there aren't really any guns there are some easter egg ones but you can't buy guns you got craft guns
but my friend found a gun that is found a melee weapon is basically a gun where you're holding
that barrel and then you hit zombies with it it was stupid and it was fun and it made me laugh
and I thought I'll use that and then I titled it you could sound as a bit click-baity there's a gun
in dying light too it wasn't intentionally click-baity but it is a little bit however
what I think is that people don't really watch shorts for the titles anyway it's very different
to a normal video where the key is obviously you've probably heard this already if you're
watching this sort of video thumbnails and titles are really important and also creating videos
that people are actually looking for people are searching for those videos they need to find them
then that's what you do you create a video that people are looking for you create an interesting
thumbnail you create a relevant title and people click through but with shorts it's a little bit
different because they're just on the short shelf and people are just flicking through them based
on what YouTube's recommending so it wasn't really clickbait in that way and there is a gun in dying
light too that you can hit people with so it's not actually clickbait it wasn't intentionally
clickbait is what I'm trying to say and I really didn't think this video was going to do very well
I actually also have this other one here which you can see it was very different I published this and
on probably the first or second day I can't remember exactly it just suddenly shot right up
and I got an insane amount of views in a very short period of time 240 000 views is a lot
uh even my main channel the maximum I have was about 700 000 I think on my top video but to get
this in a day essentially is quite a task for a small channel and good luck getting it on a normal
video unless you manage to go viral or something points of interest here that you can take away
is that you can see this where it basically went right up and then hit a plateau and now has done
nothing at all since I mean it does a little bit it probably a couple of views every day you can
see at the moment for example it's had 12 views in the last 48 hours whereas I basically got 240 000
views in a matter of hours when I first published it this video is slightly different it was titled
incompetent Amaru which is a character in rainbow six siege and it was basically my friend playing
that character and making a right hash of going about things she just failed a couple of times
and it was hilarious and I found it funny and I thought other people might find it funny
and they did and it's got me 131 subscribers and obviously quite a number of views now this isn't
what happens every time but I think it's an interesting talking point from these coupler
videos because these are obviously the examples of the best videos what I've actually found is
for the most part that shorts don't really get me that much traffic so here's another example
that you can see this one's from world war three and it's a 47 second clip of basically
just gameplay from that and it's entitled how to deal with snipers in world war three but it's
just various different shots of cra craziness in that game and it's only got me two subscribers but
you'll see it's only had 1 700 views and nowhere near as much what you'll also notice is again
that it's plateaued it basically goes up it hits a sort of level where YouTube decides you
don't deserve any more views anymore and then you don't get anything else and and this is
very frustrating experience I believe that shorts are the same sort of logic as normal videos in
that the more percentage that's viewed you can see on here percentage viewed the more it's shown
obviously if people liking it and commenting it and watching it then that's obviously very helpful
and that will help keep it in in the short shelf and keep the impressions for it so obviously
still creating engaging content that's a bit more interesting you'll notice the difference
here is this is 47 seconds so maybe that's too long maybe shorts might be better at 20 seconds
or as I showed already with that one yeah 20 seconds or less which is obviously very short
but it'll be very engaging and if you get the sort of interesting points right at the beginning then
that's going to work now all of this is useful I think because it obviously shows that you can grow
your channel quite quickly by getting quite a few subscribers from shorts and even the ones
that don't do that well still get me a trickle of subscribers so over time that will help grow
things you can see for example that this one's just got two 1 700 views two subscribers you know
it didn't take me long to put that video together I was already doing it for the main channel
videos and but the problem comes is that you not only need a thousand subscribers in order to get
monetized but you also need the watch hours and you can see here that I only have 3048 public
watch hours at the moment and the drama here is that shorts do not count I talked about this
frustration before shorts do not count towards your watch hours so that means that I cannot get
monetized until I have more and you could see for example this is 1 800 watch hours on that
short video and those aren't counted towards it so if they were I would have hit that time ages ago
this is a real frustration and it annoys me about YouTube treating us the other point of interest
is naturally that shorts aren't monetized anyway so even if I was monetized
I wouldn't be making money from these videos so shorts are a great way to grow your channel
they are not a great way to earn money YouTube is apparently working on the funds to sort that out
and in the long term you might find it but shorts basically need to be mixed in with other things
in order to do well so I want to talk now about standard videos now this is a video that I did
for dying light too it's about the biomarker safe code there's a quest we have to open a safe and I
basically did a video on how to open that safe because it was frustrating for me and I wanted
to show people how to do it so it's a reasonably short video it's three minutes long it talks about
that to do and how to do it and where you find it and other things and you can see it's getting
about 130 views a day I published it a fair old time ago 84 days ago and it is getting a trickle
of views every day and more importantly this video is also generating the watch time hours so I've
got 500 hours out of this video and obviously that is key because that is obviously going to help me
get the watch time hours so for the most part this channel is mostly about gameplay videos
I regularly probably every day or every other day at least upload a video of my friends and
knife playing at the weekend different games I've got world war three rainbow six siege
ready or not dying like two all sorts of different games uploaded maybe too many different games
obviously this isn't advice on what you should do on your channel and some people might dedicate
themselves to one games and one game and build an audience that way and that might be
preferable others might be variety streamers and content creators which you probably say that I am
and putting different things out but my point is those gameplay videos don't get searched
they don't get many views at the moment I get between 10 and 20 views on those videos
unfortunately I think they're pretty good I'm trying to make them better but because
they're not searched for they are not watched very heavily which is a shame unfortunately
I think that I'll need to build an audience first in order to get people engaged with it also the
problem is that I am doing content out on rainbow six siege there's a lot of people already making
rainbow six siege videos that have been around a lot longer that have a bigger stronger audience
and so I'm basically a small fish in a big pond which is a problem if you're creating videos for
a new game then you might have an advantage I have found for example that we're dying like two when I
started creating videos for that I was one of the first I did a few different videos that did pretty
well initially and aren't doing so well now but I've done one on like how to find the hoverboard
easter egg and things like that that people seem to enjoy and that picked up some traction
and again it did well so my tips basically as a summary are do shorts content whenever you can
make shorts videos and make them a lot of them also do tips and tricks videos for the
games you're playing because that will tick the boxes for what people are searching for
they'll find your channel they'll view it and that will get your watch time hours up and hopefully
your subscribers as well and also just create content that you enjoy that's what's the important
part of it create things that you think people will enjoy and things that you want to watch
but just bear in mind that even when you hit that thousand subscribers and the 4 000 hours watch
time shorts won't help with monetization it's these longer videos at the moment at least which
need to get monetized then earn new revenue so I thought it might be worth showing you how I do
my short videos so essentially this is a standard clip that I have then recreated into a short video
so I have a collection of videos in here which you'll be able to see quite dangerous I'm gonna
try not to burn them if I put it right down volume ones just for a second this is a standard clip
it's approximately three minutes long five minutes actually I capture these clips using Streamlabs
OBS or Streamlabs as is now known and I use the replay buffer so I set a replay buffer to be
constantly on then I have a button combination that I press that then captures the clip
and saves it and so usually the last minute or so will be useful because I know something funny
has just happened or whatever so it's at the end here I drag that into a main template that I have
in Vegas Pro and then I edit those down into long videos I then have a separate template
which is essentially set up specifically for pews now if you want to recreate something similar and
create short videos you can basically do this so if you're using Vegas Pro
the same sort of logic will probably apply in other editing software but essentially what you
need to do is have your project settings so that it sets up and if you look here
you can see that this width is 1080 and the height is 1920 and I'm using 60 frames a second as well
that's one part of it that's an important part of that so the project properties need to be set
to that instead of 1920x1080 which would usually be your 16x9 format we're looking at 9x16 instead
so it's 1080 1920 is what we want as the property I have this setup as a specific template for short
specifically so I can put the clips into here and then edit them down but you also need to crop
your videos so the next stage of this is essentially to take your landscape video and
put it into a short style content so what we need to do is basically to use pan and crop to format
it so you're cropping it in to the portrait size now you can see that I have a base canvas which
is 2560 by 1440 because that's I was capturing 1440p footage you might well be capturing 1080p
I wanted to capture 1440 so be a better quality that's not necessary you could capture 1080p
and then what you would do is obviously change the width here to 1080 and then the height to 1920
so it basically inverts things but because it's slightly different
what I'd need to do is to basically change this and I've found that the best setting is
800 by 1440 then once that's complete we then I'll have our clip in the right format and essentially
what I will do is it will just play like this I'm going to turn the volume down briefly but
you can see this one's about 50 seconds so it's probably a bit too long the main crux
of it happens around here which is essentially where we just managed to take down somebody
and then I use a blowtorch one which is just meant to be amusing
it's not something you meant to use the blowtorch for so it's just a silly clip
obviously we have this in that sort of format where it isn't going to fill up
the entire large landscape screen now the thing to do now is to render this clip so we need to click
and to render as and I actually have again some profiles set up specifically for this so I have a
render customized template that's up for this to make sure that it renders in the same format
so you can see here under the frame size is set as a custom frame size because generally most of the
other options are set to be 1920 by 1080 and obviously we want the other way around
so you'd set it as width as 1080 and the height is 1920. that's the basic thing is
what you need to do and obviously make sure the frame rate is the same so I've taken a 1440p
video and I put it into a 1080p project but the other way around a 1920p project I suppose
in a portrait format and I've applied a pan and cropped to it to crop it in so it's the right size
and then I'm rendering it out to make sure that it renders out and you can see one of the final clips
as I export and obviously you can check to make sure that it looks as it should and that's what
the end result is uh this clip here and then my standard gameplay clip so this full format of 16
by nine so I have a 10 minute video that I upload which is just a compilation of various different
stupid clips and then the short ones which are those big clips cut down to just show basically
the funniest part of that this is obviously what to do in Vegas Pro it might be slightly different
than other software but hopefully this has been a useful insight if you found it useful or if
you just love watching me and the shenanigans then please check out my gameplay channel and subscribe
to it and watch so long form content because it really helped me get to monetization this has
been the Provoked Prawn hope you found this video useful interesting hilarious or otherwise take a
look at these other videos I think you might find interesting as well and have a look at
the description for links and other information you might find useful click that join button to
see the benefits of being a member of my YouTube channel and most importantly have a great life