- Over the last few weeks
we've taken you from your very first subscriber
to your very first play button.
Now there's just one more step.
(upbeat music)
(applauds)
Couple of facts about this here, play button.
First of all
(play button knocking),
sculp made of gold.
It's made of brass.
Having said that it's a lot heavier than you might think.
And it's clearly not designed for IKEA shelving.
This is all very fascinating of course
but do you wanna know what the most interesting thing is?
It's not the only thing you get at a million subscribers.
(upbeat music)
So how do you get one million YouTube subscribers?
(beep sound)
Well, we now of course can speak from experience
but I do wanna stress this,
reaching such an incredible landmark
is very much dictated by personal experience.
The individual journey that creators and their team
have been on.
The way we've reached one million subscribers
is very different from every other creator
because to do it requires an incredible amount of time,
perseverance, failures, experiments and so many decisions
that no path to a million subscribers will ever be the same.
So in this video, we're gonna show you
how vidIQ got a million subscribers.
It may not be the best way.
It may not be the quickest way, but somehow we made it.
But it all starts with, well, yeah just how rubbish we were
getting a million subscribers.
To date more than eight million and a half people
have pressed the subscribe button
on the vidIQ channel,
but half a million of those
have subsequently pressed it again and unsubscribed.
Had no one ever unsubscribed from the vidIQ channel.
We would've got our gold play button
over a year earlier than we did.
Look, I'm just gonna be honest with you.
There's no way to sugar coat this in any way shape or form.
Subscribers are incredibly fickle.
A large proportion of subscribers
will often watch one of your videos
for a minute and say to themselves,
yeah, this is pretty good, subscribe to it.
45 seconds later, they're closed down the video
and never watch another thing from your channel ever again.
And even more subscribers simply stop watching.
And when that happens,
you get it in the ear from the classic YouTube troll
Ah, this channel's got a million subscribers
and it's only getting 20,000 views.
Why should I watch them?
The truth is this happens to all channels.
I mean, PewDiePie has 111 million subscribers,
and yet less than 5% of them watches videos
on a regular basis.
And this isn't to shame PewDiePie in way.
It's just how YouTube works.
In fact, we've got a lot to thank PewDiePie for.
You see all of these huge spikes in subscribers?
Yeah, they all came from a slightly excessive coverage
of the PewDiePie versus T Series subscriber race
that went on for about six months.
Yeah, we gained a lot of subscribers from that
even though they had little to do with YouTube education.
But hey, we learned a lot from it.
And when we return to YouTube education content
we gained a lot more daily subscribers than we did before.
The truth is that over time you change
as a creator as do the watching habits of your viewers.
You're not gonna keep everybody all of the time, yeah.
I know I mentioned this earlier on in the series
but return viewers really are a better measure
of current channel size
and whether or not your channel is growing.
In order to keep this number climbing
viewers have to actually come back to your content
subscribers don't.
In fact, when subscribers stop watching your content
they tend to do absolutely nothing including unsubscribing.
So why do they unsubscribe at such an alarming rate
on the vidIQ channel?
We'll get back to that one, because first of all
we need to talk about, luck.
Now I have to admit the vidIQ YouTube channel
has had a fair amount of luck, but not in the way you think.
I don't think we've been lucky with the algorithm
which is what many people accuse YouTube of being.
I believe we've deserved every view we've earned
because the audience has decided to watch our content.
And we've kept people watching our videos
for long enough to convince YouTube
to promote our content nearly a billion times.
But what I will say is that we were you with timing.
A lot more people started to take YouTube a lot
more seriously in the mid 2010s
when YouTube brought reliable, lucrative
and relatively untapped revenue making opportunities
to individuals and a lot more people
started making YouTube channels because early adopters
had proven it was possible to create a business
and earn a very decent living from it.
Aspiring creators were passionate
about what they wanted to say and very hungry
to learn whatever they could to gain an edge.
Much like they are today.
But back then,
YouTube education as a video topic on the platform itself
was very underserved.
There were only a handful of creators
who dedicated their channel to YouTube education
to teach an audience of millions.
Many of us who are full-time creators today
can trace their education back to Tim Schmoyer and Dar Leaf.
So they're both still around by the way,
and very very successful at what they do.
They just don't post that much anymore on YouTube
and cater to a very different career creator audience
these days.
Fast forward to today,
and there are still millions of creators
who want to know how to grow their YouTube channels.
But now there are hundreds,
if not thousands of talented educators
with the experience and skills to do just that.
I know I refer to these two quite a bit
but there's a reason why Ed from Film Booth
and Nate from Channel Makers
have earned over 100,000 subscribers
in the last year with their own YouTube education channels.
They know their stuff, and they are incredible
at communicating it with their audience.
I'll be honest with you as I always am.
I don't think
if I started a YouTube education channel today
I'd be able to replicate this.
The competition for YouTube education views
is both massive and fiercely competitive.
Like I said, sometimes timing is everything.
Or to put this all another way this is why
it's in incredibly hard to start a video game
let's play channel or an iPhone tech channel
or a Bitcoin channel, or a family vlog channel.
At this point on YouTube
it's all been done a million times before.
To be successful on YouTube,
you even need to be one of the first,
one of the best or offer a completely different perspective
to a video topic,
but to truly become one of the YouTube elites,
you need to be great at all three.
And although it often might not look like this
to the viewer,
obtaining a million subscribers is very rarely achieved
by just an individual.
Of course, you see me most of the time
and my face is placed across the channel banner,
but don't feel get Dan and his contributions.
Fun fact, his very first video on the vidIQ channel
has well over 8 million views.
And we even worked out that he's personally responsible
for over 50,000 subscribers
and he loses a lot less subscribers than I do.
That's a little worrying.
We have a rolling cast of channel auditors
including Travis, Jeff Viper, and all of our vidIQ partners.
The social posts on Twitter and Instagram.
I don't do any of them.
And can you remember this vidIQ intro
- [Male Voice] vidIQ.
- [Female Voice] vidIQ,
- [Male Voice 2] vidIQ.com.
- I didn't know that it's not even my voice
vidIQ.com, nah.
As your channel grows
and you start to earn a sustainable income
you don't have to do everything yourself.
In fact,
you probably shouldn't especially the things you hate.
You can definitely outsource that.
The thing most YouTubers wish they had more of is time.
For small creators this is pretty obvious
when they're juggling a full-time job
along with their new passion.
Now, yes, if you are able to turn this passionate hobby
into full-time career, you get a lot more time.
But you still wanna maximize that time to what you do best.
So if you love filming, but you can't stand editing
spend money on somebody who can do it for you.
So you get that time back and you know what?
If we wanna grow vidIQ well beyond a million subscribers,
we're gonna have to do this as well.
We need more help.
Stay tuned for that.
But anyway, back to why we lose so many subscribers.
Let me answer that.
Let me show you this.
The vidIQ channel gets a disproportionately
large number of subscribers from the channel page
and other sources but it also loses a lot
of subscribers from those same sources.
And the reason for that is vidIQ itself.
Just in case you didn't know,
we have an incredible set of YouTube growth tools
that 2 million people actively use
and millions more have downloaded in the past decade.
And for years
new users have all been fed through this workflow.
Now, would you look at this?
It's a letter
from Susan congratulating us on a million subscribers.
Ain't that nice?
By the time you reach a hundred thousand subscribers
and beyond,
it's very likely that you already have
an established presence beyond YouTube and obviously
you're gonna leverage all of your platforms, right?
You're gonna send people from YouTube to your emailing list.
You're gonna send people
from your website to YouTube.
for vidIQ it's the same thing.
We just have a very powerful
other platform to send people to YouTube,
but it's also a double edged sword.
Most of those people who press that subscribe button
from the workflow
haven't necessarily ever watched a vidIQ video.
And that means that the value of that subscriber
is very questionable.
In reality, a view of several views from a single user
should always come before the subscription.
And so when you reverse engineer it
this is what happens a lot of lost subscribers.
Now there's nothing necessarily wrong with this strategy.
After all, we got the play button and we got the letter
but how valuable are those subscribers to our content?
As I said earlier,
this is our journey to 1 million subscribers,
which will differ greatly
from the next million subscribers channel.
And don't forget,
this is one of the reasons why we're here in the first place
to practice what we preach.
The vidIQ tools have helped the vidIQ YouTube channel
to reach 1 million subscribers.
We can provide you with 50 video ideas every single day.
We can turn keywords into popular search based questions
that people are looking to answer every single day
on YouTube.
We can compare your thumbnails to the best performing ones
on YouTube and if you are stuck for a click-worthy title
we can instantly generate as many as you need.
I use this tool recently to get a one of 10 video.
This is the other side of our promotional endeavors.
We're sending you from the YouTube channel
to the vidIQ software, go on, download it.
It really does make a difference and it's free.
But having said all of this,
I'll tell you now the biggest reason
why the vidIQ channel has hit 1 million subscribers
is simply because we never gave up.
Now, I know this sounds pretty cliche than easy to say
but to actually do it is really, really difficult.
And you, as a creator should know this to a certain extent.
Let's put all of this into perspective.
When I made my first video for the vidIQ channel
we had just 1200 subscribers.
On day one that video five years ago got 566 views.
No doubt,
that was a start but it was a long way
from where we are today.
Since then, there have been hundreds,
if not thousands of YouTube education channels
that have sprout up, 90% of them,
if not more have vanished because they all quit,
but we didn't.
We still haven't.
And we have no intentions of doing so.
We continue to turn up week in, week out without fail.
We started out with one video a week,
then two videos a week, a live stream, two live streams,
YouTube stories, YouTube shorts, YouTube community posts,
foreign language channels, and so on and so on.
And you know what?
Even after over 1000 videos,
we still turn up and we still have something to say.
That is a very essence of YouTube
but it's a hard thing to do.
We've been there
when hardly anybody was subscribing to our channel
and hardly anybody was watching our videos.
But we knew this wasn't impossible
because we'd already seen pioneers such as Tim Schmoyer
and Dar Leaf succeed.
So we weren't about to quit.
The truth is wherever you are in your YouTube journey
whatever struggles you are going through
whatever feelings of failure you have right now
I can guarantee that every single successful YouTube creator
on the platform has felt exactly the same way as you
at some point in their journey.
If you ever have doubts here's what I recommend you to do.
Take a look at one of those creators
who inspires you or one of the largest creators
in your video space.
Go to their channel and sort the video list by oldest.
But don't watch their oldest videos,
go 50 to a 100 videos into their YouTube journey.
- [Gentleman's Voice] What's up guys,
before I go on a mini rant, which I'm about to,
I'm gonna touch on the gameplay real quick.
This is a free for all on sovereign.
- At that point, then they were just like you are today.
Still figuring out YouTube,
still figuring out who they want to be on YouTube.
Still literally a million subscribers
away from being the finished article, if there is one.
From having never used a video camera in my life,
it has taken me over a decade
and more than 2000 YouTube videos
to reach 1 million subscribers.
With all of the education and resources at hand,
you can do the same and probably a lot quicker.
Very simply put I quit is not in the YouTube dictionary.
Now I do have a bit of a confession for you.
When you reach 1 million subscribers
you don't actually get this.
You get a paper version of the letter
and it's not personalized in any way, shape or form.
But interestingly,
what you do get in this rather enormous YouTube box
is one of these.
YouTube only gives out one award per channel.
So this website allows creators to purchase more awards
for their team and the special framed and plated letters
for both silver and gold awards.
The most interesting thing here
is that the framed plated letter differs
from the paper letter.
So what I recommend you do is rewind this video 10 seconds
and play it back at 0.25 speed, so you can read it
and we get enormous amounts of watch time.
Oh, and if you're curious to know how much they cost
these are $50, whereas one of these is $450,
before tax and shipping and handling.
But in all seriousness, all of this isn't achievable
without one crucial element, the community.
In other words, you.
Whether you've subscribed or not,
the fact that you are watching this video
means that you are supporting this channel.
And you're supporting this channel
because we give you value.
And whether you are trying to get your first subscriber,
your thousand subscriber, your million subscriber,
it pretty much boils down to that.
Make content your audience wants to watch.
If you do that, and you have a little bit of patience
YouTube will take care of the rest.
Now I appreciate that 99% of those watching
aren't even close to a million subscribers.
So first of all, thanks for watching this video.
But if you do wanna watch some tips, trick, strategies
and advice, which are really gonna help you out
pretty much no matter the size of your channel
then check out the ultimate guide
to growing your channel on YouTube right here.
Thanks for watching.
Take care.
What rubbish has vidIQ uploaded today.
(groaning)