Can you grow your gaming channel with daily gameplay content? Yes ... No, it's not that
simple.
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I'm Dan, and welcome back to vidIQ, the YouTube tool and channel that helps educate you on
your YouTube journey. Don't forget to subscribe and let me know in the comments. I want to
know how often do you upload gameplay videos to your channel or any videos. If you're not
a gamer, how often do you upload to YouTube? Let us know. So in gaming, daily uploads can
be kind of simple and I've seen it done a lot of ways. Generally speaking, someone will
sit down and record for about maybe four hours or so, and they can break that up into several,
let's play it like, episodes. Here's my game, episode one, two, three, and so forth. I've
also seen reuploaded live streams broken up into several episodes, and all of these are
opportunities to upload more frequently.
Now, the strategy of recording for a long time and then breaking it up and uploading
every single day, segments of this recording has its place on your gaming channel, in my
opinion. But I've tried this for myself and I can tell you, if you're looking to grow
your channel instead of just engage your current audience, this strategy isn't going to be
very effective. The temptation here to upload daily is of course the curiosity. Well, doesn't
YouTube reward me if I upload content as much as possible? And of course, if you feed the
algorithm regular content, then yeah, that can definitely be a boom, but if you're simply
just uploading episode 82 of your gameplay video, that's probably not a big search term,
and therefore the algorithm isn't going to be doing you any favors at all. Of course,
daily uploads also have the benefit of getting you seen by your audience and having them
know exactly when you're going to have a new video up because you've made a habit of uploading
every day.
So those would be two pretty big temptations, right? Number one, it's pretty easy to upload
content every day when all you're doing is hitting record and just playing your favorite
game, and number two, YouTube is going to help you get your content seen because you're
just uploading so many videos. So let me explain why smaller channels, why newer channels should
take a different approach. The first issue you're going to have is burnout. When I was
doing this on my channel, I was trying to upload every single day and I would play my
game and I would just keep hammering out videos as often as possible. Not only did I get tired
of the game fast, I got tired of all of it. Editing the videos, creating thumbnails, trying
to think of new titles and tags, and it can just be draining to make that much content
all the time.
More importantly, it became harder and harder to come up with ideas about what I was going
to do in every video. Even if it was a game like Minecraft where I'm just kind of building
something, it doesn't take very long after about 50 days or 50 videos in to run out of
things to build. Combine all of those problems with the fact that I just simply wasn't growing.
I will tell you the turning. The turning point for me when I finally started to see growth
is when I cut back on the amount of content I made. That's because instead of just making
content as often as I could, I took a step back and ask myself, "What are people who
play Minecraft really searching for? What are the problem areas? What is getting people
discovered on the channel, because I have this many subscribers and I'm not growing
and they seem to like what I'm doing, but how can I grow my channel?" So adopting that
quality over quantity method helped me grow, and that was a huge turning point for my channel.
Now, as someone who started a gaming channel, I, like many of you had somebody or a few
people I was watching who inspired me to keep creating. I would watch their channels as
a fan and I would see them uploading every day and I would see their videos getting thousands
of views and it made me excited. But I want to show you something. This is really important.
Here, follow me now.
Now, what you're seeing here is the vidIQ competitor's tool. This tool allows us to
take any channel we want and check out how their videos are doing based on views per
hour, views in general, or just the date uploaded. I have it set to showing me things just from
this week alone. The reason I've picked these very large Minecraft creators relative to
the size of my own channel, is because I want to show you that when you just type in Minecraft,
these are the names that typically come up, just for the search term, Minecraft. Even
they are doing a lot of work on their titles, their thumbnails. These are well-established
creators who can get almost 20,000 views every hour on a video that was posted two days ago,
but even they need to be putting in that quality work.
You'll notice that a lot of time has been spent on their very custom thumbnails. These
are not screenshots taken from Minecraft, these are handcrafted, very nice thumbnails
that are all very eye-catching, have a lot of color to them. There's one specific channel
I want to point out that does a really good job though and that is Pixrift. Now Pixrift
uploads from by the looks of it every single day there's a new Minecraft video. The thumbnails
are pretty nice. They are screenshots from the game and they simply say Minecraft and
then what it is. SkyBlock, The Survival Guide and so on.
What's cool about this channel is everything is still part of an ongoing series. This is
a series about SkyBlock, but specifically going to the nether in SkyBlock, which is
going to be a search term, that title was undeliberate. How To Spawn Bee Nests in 1.15.2.
Something someone is probably going to search for. This video is going to help someone,
but it's part of the Minecraft survival guide series. What Pixrift tends to do is stay within
that same Minecraft world. So in effect, these are still, let's play videos as you may know
them, as you might create for yourself, but they all have a purpose.
If we zoom in on the title, we'll notice that SkyBlock Curing Zombie Villagers, this is
part eight of the series. If we go back here, this is part seven, that's the very last bit
of information that your audience really needs here. The point of me showing you this is
on this channel, everybody's happy. Pixrift is making content that's probably going to
get him discovered by a new audience and his current audience gets to watch as he plays
Minecraft and progresses through the game.
Now, of these creators I selected, they all have pretty large audiences. They have nice
thumbnails, and nice titles, and a lot of time an efforts has been put into their content.
You'll also notice that they have a pretty high upload frequency, they upload quite often,
but what is important to remember when looking at your competition, especially when you try
to compare yourself to larger channels, is that these channels in this case are a lot
more established than my own.
Some of them are doing this as a full time job, some of them even have teams of people
helping them cope with new thumbnails, helping them edit videos, helping them do research
and try and figure out what their next video is going to be about. So as a new smaller
channel, this is a struggle I had. I had to remind myself that I have to start somewhere.
I can't come out of the gate at the same level of these other creators. Even if I know I
can make quality videos as nice as theirs, I can't do that every single day without quitting
my day job or hiring a bunch of people to help me. I'm not saying that's what you have
to do to get to this level. I'm just saying for me at the time, that's what I've struggled
with.
All of our journeys are different. Mine is going to be different from yours and all of
the creators we just looked at had an entirely different journey, but we all have one thing
in common and that's every single YouTube channel starts with zero subscribers. They
start by asking maybe their friends to subscribe and they make content and they test things
out and they have to grow over time. Some of those creators you saw have been around
for quite some time and that also gives them an advantage in the Minecraft space. Maybe
Minecraft's is the the best example, but the point of it is if I want to grow as a Minecraft
channel today, I'm going to have to try a whole lot harder because a lot of those questions
that people are searching for are being answered because there are a lot of competitors who
are already covering those topics.
So when I say quality over quantity, it's especially important depending on the game
you're playing and just how popular it is. So do daily uploads help grow your channel
on YouTube? Yeah, absolutely. If you can upload one video a day and you've put in the time,
the research, you've made an awesome thumbnail, you've made an awesome title, you've made
awesome tags, and you've done everything you can to make sure that video is as high quality
as possible, if you can upload one video a day, I say, "Go for it. That's amazing." But
if you're watching this video and going, "I have school or I have work, I can't, I don't
have time to do all that work. I just want to kind of upload my content and I want people
to find it." I would highly recommend instead of daily uploads, perhaps one video a week,
two videos a week, try to pick a couple of days that are spread apart. Say Monday and
Friday, new uploads every Monday and Friday.
This is going to give you a lot of time in between videos to come up with those ideas
to make a nice handcrafted thumbnail to really research your titles, really research the
questions people are asking about your game, and it's going to do the same thing as daily
uploads will do, except slower because the key here is going to be consistency. You want
to make sure that you upload videos frequently enough so your audience is used to finding
them and YouTube is used to knowing when it should push your videos because you've uploaded
them at the same time consistently week after week.
So say you upload your one or two videos a week and you find yourself some extra downtime
and you think, "Oh, that Dan guy's totally wrong. I want to make daily videos." I still
think that's totally cool because as you make those more searchable, high quality videos,
you're going to want to maybe put some more out there for your audience to watch that
has already subscribed, has already decided they like you. There's nothing wrong with
posting a regular old gameplay video every day. You just want to make Minecraft episode
58 I found a cave. Maybe no one searching for, "Hey, this guy found a cave, let me watch."
But your current audience who likes you is probably going to enjoy the fact that you
took the time to do that. But main take away from this video for you is that quality over
quantity is going to help with the overall growth of your channel and bringing in those
new subscribers.
So armed with my opinions about how you could be growing your gaming channel, I really do
want to know how often do you upload to your YouTube channel? Perhaps as a bonus, how often
do you think you might upload now? Be sure to hit like if you've enjoyed this video.
Don't forget to subscribe. We will see you in the next one.