- Hey there.
I just finished my first month
of uploading consistently to YouTube.
So I thought we could have a look at my analytics
and see how my channel has performed for me
as a new YouTuber in 2021.
Let's go.
Welcome back to my channel.
My name is Dan and I am a fairly new YouTuber
who introduced a weekly upload schedule
this past month in January 2021.
I make videos for part-time creators or "Lazy Creators"
like myself, to help them find the right tools
and the motivation to get things done.
So if that's something for you, I'd be absolutely stoked
if you join my little community here on YouTube
and subscribe, but let's jump into the video.
In this video, you will see that my numbers
are not very impressive and my channel
has certainly not exploded since uploading weekly,
but I hope by showing you my numbers,
you will get an idea of the reality
of starting a YouTube channel.
And I can highlight what so many others have said before me,
that growing a YouTube channel is a marathon
and not a sprint, but I don't wanna be a downer either.
I'm actually quite happy with my progress so far.
And I think that my first month was a success
but I don't really have anything to compare it to,
'cause I usually watch analytics videos of YouTubers
that are way ahead of me with thousands
and hundreds of thousands of subscribers.
And that doesn't really relate to where I'm at.
But if you are new YouTuber who just started their channel,
let me know in the comments below about your experience,
because I'd love to find out
how other new channels are doing.
I'm going to make this video after every month of this year
to see how close I will get to that first major milestone
of a 1000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours.
Which is what you need in order to get monetized on YouTube.
So if you wanna follow along
and see how much channel will perform
over the course of this year make sure you subscribe
and hit the bell to get notified when I post new videos.
Okay, before we jump into the actual numbers
I have to say that I didn't start my channel this year.
I actually started uploading to YouTube in May, 2020.
And in total I uploaded 10 videos last year,
but I wasn't taking it seriously.
And I only uploaded whenever I felt like creating something
or I had time.
Every YouTuber always tells you that in order to build
a successful channel, you have to upload consistently
and show up for your audience at least once a week.
And that I only started this year.
So the good news is that we do have some benchmarking data
to compare my January 2021 numbers to.
So let's look at my 2020 stats first.
Okay. So here we are in the analytics panel
in YouTube Studio.
For 2020, I'm only gonna show you the overview,
otherwise this video will take forever.
Okay. So in total 2020, I had 1,200 views,
53 watch hours and I gained 35 subscribers.
My top videos in 2020 were,
"My YouTube Workflow with Milanote" and two travel vlogs.
Okay. Let's look at reach.
I had 7,700 impressions.
Impressions are the number of times
your video was shown to potential viewers on YouTube,
excluding external sources.
My impression click through rate was 6.3%,
which is the percentage of people who actually clicked
on the video when it was shown to them on YouTube.
And let's go to engagement to see the average view duration
which was 2:38 for the videos that I uploaded in 2020.
Okay. So this is a good starting point.
And now let's look at the January 2021 numbers.
So in January I uploaded four new videos
and I got 1,100 views or 1,077 to be exact,
54.3 watch hours and I gained 41 new subscribers,
which makes a total of 76 subscribers
at the end of this month on the 31st of January
where I'm recording this.
So, compared to 2020, I got a similar amount
of views and watch hours
and a slightly higher subscriber growth
in just one month.
In 2020, it took me eight months to achieve those numbers.
So that's pretty good.
Obviously there's a bit more back catalog
on my channel now for people to watch,
but I'd like to think that uploading consistently now
brings viewers to my channel.
Okay, let's look at the top videos a little later
and go into reach first.
We have this set as the month of January.
So YouTube compares it to the previous reporting period,
which in this case is December 2020.
So my impressions for January were 8,400,
which was 180% higher compared to December.
My impressions click-through rate was 6%,
14% higher than December.
And my views were 1,100,
which is 311% higher than in December.
The unique viewers were 745.
So let's go down to the traffic sources.
We have 34.9% through YouTube search,
23.8% from external sources and each around 14%
for suggested videos and browse features.
So that's pretty good,
because if your traffic comes from the search
and the suggested videos and browse features,
that kinda means that YouTube does a lot of work for you
and gets you viewers.
Whereas external sources,
when you, for example,
post your link on to other social media platforms
so this is the work you do for your video.
And then if we go down here,
we can go deeper into the traffic sources.
So here we see a breakdown of the external traffic.
So number one is URLgenius with 23.4%.
And that's a deep linking service
that I use for all my videos
when I share it to other social media platforms.
And I made a video about this,
I'll link it up here for you to check it out.
Or here.
Second highest traffic source was Facebook.
Which is, I assume all my friends and family
when I shared the links on Facebook
and then Instagram and Twitter and DuckDuckGo,
which I have no idea what that is.
Okay. So in terms of the YouTube search,
here we can see the top search words
that lead people to my videos.
And it's mostly Milanote,
three Milanote search words,
then MindNode and moving to Australia.
But that is in line with my top video,
which is the Milanote video.
And traffic sources suggested videos,
so what other videos on YouTube had my video
in the sidebar as a suggested video.
So, and this also shows
that it's mostly Milanote related videos.
Okay. So let's go into engagement.
And as we've seen before, I had 54.3 hours watch time,
which is 333% up from December, 2020.
And the average view duration is also up 5%
and is now three minutes.
Okay. So if we go further down,
we see a list of videos and their audience retention.
So this shows you, actually for the last 365 days,
it shows you the percentage of viewers
that are still watching at the 30 second mark.
And interestingly, the top video with top audience retention
was my very first video that I uploaded to YouTube,
in May last year, were just probably all my family
and friends who really wanted to support me
and watched it till the end.
Further down, we see the top videos by watch time.
And this is also not a surprise again,
it's the Milanote video,
that's on top here with 27 watch hours in January,
closely followed by last week's video.
There's currently not much traffic coming
from the end screens and the cards.
So let's not focus on that and jump into the audience tab.
As mentioned before, the channel had 745 unique viewers,
with an average view per viewer of 1.4
and I've gained 41 new subscribers,
which is 720% up from December, which is awesome.
Now, in my audience tab,
there's still some details missing that other YouTubers
usually include in their analytics videos.
And that is when your viewers are on YouTube
and other videos that your audience has watched.
But for me, there's not enough data available yet
for my channel, but hopefully I can include this
in one of the upcoming videos.
So if we go further down, we have the top geographies.
We also have the watch time
in relation to who's a subscriber and who's not a subscriber
and a few more audience details.
Now, I'm not paying attention
to my audience tab that much at the moment,
because I don't really trust the data.
For example, in the age and gender box down here,
it says that 100% of my views in January
were from male viewers between 25 and 34 years,
which I for fact know that that's not true.
So I don't really know pay attention to this.
Let's go back to the overview tab
and down to the top videos.
So as we've seen, the Milanote Video,
is still my top video and it's actually
the most successful video on my channel at this stage,
with almost 900 views in total.
Followed by all the videos I uploaded in January,
with my latest one being number two.
I'm actually very proud of this one,
so I'll link it up here in case you wanna watch that next.
But let's look at the Milanote video in more detail
and specifically at reach.
So for January, there were 4,800 impressions,
which was 125% up from December.
And that's actually more than half the total impressions
that I got on YouTube in that month.
513 new views, which is 182% up,
so the majority of the total views
on that video I gained in January.
That might be because YouTube is pushing
out the video a little bit more
as I've gained more authority as a channel
due to uploading regularly.
But I also optimized my keywords using TubeBuddy
and a recently changed my thumbnail on the video.
So that might explain the increase
in click through rate in January.
TubeBuddy, in case you don't know what that is.
It's an awesome YouTube management tool
that I use all the time, since the end of last year.
And it helps you research in keywords and topics.
And with the overall optimization for your videos.
I'll link it down below in case you wanna check that out.
All right, that's it for this video.
Whew, that was a lot of data.
I hope it was okay to follow.
If you're still watching,
I would love for you hit that like button below.
Let me know in the comments
if there's anything in particular,
you'd like me to include in my next analytics video
and make sure you subscribe so you don't miss that.
Thanks so much to everyone who's subscribed already
and who's followed my YouTube journey so far.
I love you.
And if you are thinking about starting
a YouTube channel yourself,
I hope this video helped you understand
where you might be after your first month.
See you next week, take care.