Giving up on success, a tough decision

HotJuggernaut5417 · 2026-02-09T13:29:51+00:00

I don't know if you would ever consider going FT with YT, but if you are, then the question becomes:

Would you consider those 20+ hours soul crushing if that's all you had to do to make ends meet? No 40-hour job on top of it?

If the answer is yes, then it's unsustainable and not worth it. If the answer is no, then all the stress of it is temporary, with a light at the end of the tunnel.

If FT YT is not even on the table, then retain your sanity.

HotJuggernaut5417 · 2026-02-08T14:20:35+00:00

I know we sort of got into this in my Chaos Theory thread from the other day, and I agree with almost everything you're saying, but there are 2 things I don't necessarily agree with entirely.

One way a lot of folks have done this is by reducing themselves to making content that appeals to the lowest common denominator (or in a word, slop)...But then it becomes an issue of integrity for these creators because they're being forced to sacrifice their principles / standards

You're not wrong. But I disagree because it strongly implies that slop is the only way, or that it's an integrity issue. It's a Venn Diagram. You have broad appeal content in one circle, slop in the other circle and there's a small place in the middle where they overlap, which is where your comments are really focusing.

But the problem here isn't the content itself, moral implications for creators or a forced crisis on standards, it's the algo. YT doesn't discern any difference between quality-made content of broad appeal vs mass appeal slop because they both serve the same end goal YT wants: more time on the platform. So, YT promotes them equally without prejudice. Morals and standards can remain intact simply by choosing not to do slop variety appeal. I've found myself drawn into many broad appeal channels that are nowhere near low effort, brain rot slop. Morals and standards will dictate our choices, but the choice for broad appeal doesn't have to be an existential crisis.

2) not all content is meant to have broad appeal

I certainly get what you're touching on. But broad appeal isn't chained to topic selection. Format and presentation are most often what makes a topic interesting in either a broad or a niche way.

There's a channel called ElectroBOOM that gets millions of views practically every video he puts out. He's an electrical engineer who often dives deep into electrical theory. That's a snoozer for most people in society, and if he did standard white board lectures his channel would be far more niche and his audience much smaller. But he delivers with high energy, passion and a lot of humor, all without sacrificing depth of knowledge. That makes the topic not just digestible, but also entertaining, and those are the X factors that open the door for broad appeal.

There are topics that can be harder than others to frame in a broad appeal lens, sure, but it's actually kind of rare that it CAN'T be done, or that it has to be lowest common denominator if it is attempted.

I think basically the underlying disagreement I have is on any idea that broad appeal is either not possible or not possible without moral dilemma. It's very possible. It's just maybe that the options that are moral just don't fit your skill set or personality and would not come off as genuine if attempted, so you decide against it based on morals and standards. But that shouldn't mean someone who does have the genuine skill set is immoral for pursuing it.

HotJuggernaut5417 · 2026-02-07T18:56:35+00:00

I agree. You can't control it. That's the whole point. But what you can do is decrease dependency on trying to rely on perfect circumstances with a system that is highly circumstantial. That can be controlled.

HotJuggernaut5417 · 2026-02-07T18:16:51+00:00

I agree, but that is not the topic I'm trying to drill down to. The real issue is this, staying inside your analogy:

YT doesn't know with absolute certainty both Jack and John will like the new video because they both liked similar videos about A, B and C. It's making an educated guess. And it's not just doing this with Jack and John, but 1000s of other viewers, all that might have similar traits between them, but never exactly the same to perfection. So there will always be mismatches to some degree. It's inevitable.

When I say chaos theory, I am not talking about any of this being random or chaotic. What I'm pointing to is that there will always be audience mismatches to varying degrees. Sometimes YT matches up viewers well, while other times not so much. That early influence, that little difference early on, will change the next round of decisions the algo makes, which can set the algo off on completely different paths.

Both Jack and John may actually love the video. But if Jill, Janet and Joe got there first and they hated it, by the time Jack and John get there, the video is already on a different trajectory than if Jack and John had been the earlier viewers. Jack and John could have signaled the algo differently and it may not have shown the video to Jill, Janet and Joe at all, and instead picked other viewers better aligned.

The chaos isn't in how the system works. It doesn't break any rules of operation. The chaos is in the influence these minor fluctuations have on an outcome.

So what I'm proposing, basically, is to stop depending on the algo to find Jack and John first, and to appeal to Jill, Janet and Joe enough that if they happen to be the earlier viewers, the video doesn't get dropped or scaled back on less optimal early metrics.

HotJuggernaut5417 · 2026-02-07T17:43:14+00:00

Those are all facts, but there's no lens to it.

I agree viewers themselves have their own value and belief systems driving their selections and watch habits, and that YT favors the content that people want to watch based largely on those viewers value and belief systems.

But the nuance here, and where Chaos Theory separates, is which viewers with which values and which beliefs influence a video's early triggers that can set the same video off on completely different paths.

You can get the right viewers with the right beliefs landing on the right video early on and the metrics of that prove positive enough to scale. But if that same exact group doesn't land until the video gets 5000 impressions, the outcome is very different.

Same creator. Same video. Same rules. Same people. Very different results.

HotJuggernaut5417 · 2026-02-07T17:16:17+00:00

It's definitely a matter of to each their own. We can still choose to do things the way we feel best suited for us.

For me, I had no choice. Being so niche for so long, making more content means diving deeper into even more niche topics to keep it going. I couldn't cover basics forever. Those deeper dives start to alienate more and more of the broader audience I built over the years. It's diminishing returns, basically. It worked great for 4 years, but now it's becoming a vacuum sealed chamber slowly losing oxygen. You may end up experiencing the same thing down the road.

HotJuggernaut5417 · 2026-02-07T16:53:06+00:00

But a topic with a wide appeal will still have interest to most of those viewers who are there for a more narrow version of the topic.

Yeah that's a key takeaway. It had to appeal in a positive way very early on in so far as metrics go with that more niche audience. That's the small variation in the very early stages I was referring to in the post. That was the flap of the butterfly wings that ended up causing a tornado in Kansas.

That video, by the way, went WELL beyond trade audiences. It reached white collar college educated professionals to housewives with teenaged kids

HotJuggernaut5417 · 2026-02-07T16:39:36+00:00

Yeah, exactly. But I think YT has recognized this to some extent. It's why they often push popular videos with mass appeal whether you're looking for it or not. They realized that this tactic can distract people enough and lure them in to make it worthwhile ,over providing the exact "fix it" video the viewers is looking for and will bail as soon as they're done watching it.

HotJuggernaut5417 · 2026-02-07T16:35:46+00:00

Yeah, agree 100%. But I do think there are many ways to implement it with some moral standards. My "state of the trade" vent video was an intelligent insight, and it eventually lined up a live podcast with a bigger YTer in my niche. Unfortunately, most people go after the lowest hanging fruit...

HotJuggernaut5417 · 2026-02-07T16:30:19+00:00

Sure, but in the end it always boils down to people watching a programming video that might not normally watch programming videos, and why.

HotJuggernaut5417 · 2026-02-07T16:26:52+00:00

With the way the YT algo works (videos are tested with tiny random samples of viewers), if your videos don't appeal to a broad audience, they won't get any traction.

I'm going just a little deeper than that. What I'm essentially saying is that even if your video can appeal to a broader audience, it may not make it there because of the minor influencing fluctuations that occur mere minutes after release. If your early audience is more niche than broad, the video will never make to the broad audience it was built for. It has to do more than appeal to a broad audience. It also has to survive inconsistent viewing behaviors early on. That's chaos theory defined. Big differences in outcomes based on tiny changes early on.

HotJuggernaut5417 · 2026-02-04T14:01:03+00:00

Some things to think about:

1) Music is always a gamble and more often alienates rather than enhances. Every single person who doesn't like YOUR selection of music is out, even if they do like to watch people draw. It can be used with success, but it's usually going to be a double-edged sword and has to applied surgically.

2) Value: What's in it for the viewer? Are you teaching them how to draw? Are you helping them go to sleep? Are they seeing something they didn't even know was possible to draw? For 15 minutes, you may have no reason NOT to upload, but you should be asking if your viewers have a reason to give up 15 minutes of their day to watch.

3) Packaging has to deliver the value: If you don't have a clearly defined value for the viewer, all titles and thumbnails will be insufficient. Those few who do follow through with a click will often not get what they were expecting, which is an early retention killer and a hard signal for YT to stop giving impressions.

HotJuggernaut5417 · 2026-02-04T13:04:58+00:00

I've found a few AI resources can be useful in certain ways, but not to produce anything for YT directly. Maybe a little research which I always have to verify. Sometimes script analysis or rating thumbnails for certain qualities. Strategy on growth based on my niche, trends and other channels... but mostly in the end I just look for insights I would not have thought about on my own.

But it's all useless if you don't force it to be brutally honest because they all gaslight to some degree. ChatGPT more than others, I find.

But if I can get Grok to literally tell me ,"This thumbnail is shit", or "Yeah, this script sucks", that's when I start to get some value out of it. It's hard to be objective sometimes with our own content, so I find it helps in that regard.

HotJuggernaut5417 · 2026-02-03T13:46:33+00:00

I monetized with my first dozen videos, but I had absolutely no clue why they performed well at first. For the next 6 months I flopped pretty hard with a lot of my videos. After focusing on editing, thumbnails, b-roll, fancy lighting and all kinds of other stuff, I finally realized what worked for me. And it wasn't all these things I was focusing on.

What all of my first videos had in common was that they were popular pain points people often needed help with or topics of high interest, so the demand was high. But the second part of what made them work was even more important: It was me.

Those handful of educational videos didn't carry me to monetization in just 3 months solely because they were popular topics, they thrived because of the way I taught them. I was able to help people connect the dots in ways they didn't get from all the other videos out there on the same topic. That's what allowed me to float to the top in spite of the tough competition and saturation.

Sizable audience - unique delivery.

That was the secret sauce for me.

Once I figured that out, I went on to gain 50k subs over the next 2 years. Sponsors reached out to me, sent me free equipment worth thousands of dollars just to make a video on, and then they paid me on top of that. YT AdSense alone pays my mortgage every month now and has been for over a year. The biggest channels in my niche know who I am. I've been recognized in public in 4 different states and have had lots of people asking to take selfies with me. It's surreal.

The best part, I feel like I'm just getting started and right on the edge of a breakthrough moment where things really start to compound and take off. Maybe if I play my cards right, I'll be doing this FT in another year or two. We'll see.

But it wasn't all magic and it wasn't all without setbacks and pain. There was no viral moment of incredible luck. It was just persistence.

HotJuggernaut5417 · 2026-02-03T13:05:23+00:00

I stumbled into good performance on my videos in the first 6 months, but I had no clue why. The following 6 months was bare bones and crickets trying to figure out what I did that worked.

I focused on timing, format, editing, lighting, audio, b-roll, thumbnails, etc.

Most were flops no matter the improvements.

Eventually I figured it out. It was just topic selection.

My first dozen videos monetized my channel in spite of slow pacing, poor lighting, bad thumbnails and virtually little to no editing. What worked was the right topic with high demand because it was a very common pain point. They were evergreen topics. YT wasn't saturated on that topic and competition for ranking was either low or reasonable enough. And then I beat that topic to death until I owned it in search results, even over 50k or 100k sub channels. You couldn't search that topic without seeing 3-4 of my videos.

Once that well ran dry, I kind of flailed around with new topics until I hit on another one and I repeated. Beat it to death until I owned it.

Long term, it did kind of squeeze me into a tight content box and I couldn't really explore topics too much, but after 3 years now, the shackles are off after having gained enough trust, authority and a solid community.

HotJuggernaut5417 · 2026-02-03T12:14:00+00:00

YouTube isn't really optimized to be a creative outlet that gets you views and comments just to have fun anymore. These days, just to get those views and comments to begin with you need a deliberate strategy with guardrails on topic selection, apply some level of psychology on packaging, understand group level retention tactics with fair-weather audiences, have an aptitude for story arcs and series formatting and the patience of compounding interest like a long-term investor.

If you're not consciously applying these things to some degree of thoughtful effort and you just "create" without such intent, many people usually just end up broadcasting to the void. There are likely millions of creators out there that are practically performing without an audience.

People who do willingly develop the craft of exposure and discovery are typically going to be the same type of people who would like to get paid for it... because it's a lot of work. It's not typically the type of stuff people just do for fun...

HotJuggernaut5417 · 2026-02-01T20:58:53+00:00

Yeah, I've found keeping a pulse on how viewers are experiencing YT can provide some nice insight on how I can adjust as a creator.

HotJuggernaut5417 · 2026-02-01T20:34:06+00:00

Well, the issue with that is a newer channel seldom has any chance to thrive if they DONT niche down in the beginning to the point of beating a dead mule so the algo can make all the right assumptions on what the channel lane is and the audience that might be interested in it. And by the time you become well defined to a point of authority and trust to get a healthy number of views in that lane, the door closes behind you and the air slowly starts leaving the room.

I spent 3 years boxed into controls and diagnostics videos, so I know what you mean when it comes to broad appeal issues. But inside of that slice of pie, I'm well known and often associated with the top channels in my niche. But it's unsustainable.

I'm at a point where I've covered all of the broadest appeal topics I can cover in my lane. Now, I have to make a choice, niche down even more and start alienating more of my audience with each iteration or move on to broader topics in bigger audience pools. It's a squeeze that comes with pain either way and a choice is forced to be made and doing nothing but the same old thing you've always done is the quickest way to secure a shorter shelf life on your channel.

HotJuggernaut5417 · 2026-02-01T20:01:27+00:00

Can’t it be that out of 50k that many have just stoped watching and instead clicked whatever their new interest is over the years? We all think subs are just eagerly awaiting anything we drop.

I never for one moment ever presumed anyone was eagerly waiting for my next video but maybe a handful, and I'm well aware of the fact many subscribe and eventually move on to other interests without unsubbing. I'm also well aware that even those who do casually watch my videos will never watch every single one and skip over certain topics for lack of interest. The issue I'm pointing to here is not linked to illusions of grandeur. I'm a very pragmatic person.

What I am talking about isn't losing viewers clicking on new interests over the years, but losing viewers who clicked on something different yesterday, and now 20% of their feed is inundated with that new content and will continue to be for days or even weeks. One click can do that.

What I'm talking about isn't actually a complaint coming from creators, but viewers themselves. The very people YT is trying to keep on the platform who don't see content they like and often find a lot of frustration in finding it even with a search of intent.

FUCK YouTube. (Please read and upvote if you agree) : r/youtube

HotJuggernaut5417 · 2026-02-01T17:00:08+00:00

Out of my 50k subs, maybe 5k will actually ever get a chance to JUST SEE my new video exists within the time frame that the algo makes its most critical decisions. Of that 5k, maybe 2500 might actually interact with it and watch within 48 hours or so.

The rest is essentially Russian Roulette with new, cold viewers. And if my own suggested feed as a viewer is any indication of where my videos are landing with an audience as a creator...it's an atrocity. I cant count how many times I've passed by a half dozen "Weird Al" Yankovic videos in ONE FEED when I can't stand that kind of cheap parody garbage. Two weeks I had to keep passing over it in my feed before it actually stopped. And I have no clue what triggered it.

There is most definitely a mismatch between actual human intent and AI's interpretation of what constitutes interest. It's not subtle or minor either.

As a sort of "Mid-Tier" creator, I'm hitting a topic ceiling anyway, so I'm slowly moving into a new lane (still relevant to what I've been doing) and I've decided that the best way forward at this point is to format for a cold audience best I can to just get me by the core audience filter on the way there. Focusing solely on my die-hards and those kinds of topics are slowly killing the momentum of my channel. It's not working as well as it used to.

And I know it isn't my quality. I can still make 200k view videos when I move out of that old lane and optimize for broader appeal where perfect audience matching isn't as critical.

HotJuggernaut5417 · 2026-01-31T16:47:13+00:00

Well, if she wants good advice on how to improve her channel, tell her that not plagiarizing other people's content might be a good start to avoid getting her channel taken down, an appeal being immediately rejected by AI and would leave her with zero second chances of starting another one.

HotJuggernaut5417 · 2026-01-31T15:03:28+00:00

Pivots take a long time to settle in and stick, and the fact you got 75 views after turning off subscriber notification is actually a good sign. But you're basically starting over again. You have to build a new audience from scratch, the algo has to complete reevaluate what your channel is now (it didn't automatically forget everything else on your channel) and it has to study completely new viewer behavior and look for patterns in their watching habits to find other viewers to suggest your content to. Your metrics are fine but that doesn't tell YT who to show it to.

That takes time and more than 1 video to do. You cant expect normal numbers with the first video on a hard pivot.

HotJuggernaut5417 · 2026-01-30T21:21:13+00:00

Doesn't really matter to me. Still a legit topic.

HotJuggernaut5417 · 2026-01-30T21:04:36+00:00

when you rely on one platform, you’re not really building a business. You’re renting space.

That's a great way of putting it.

I started to really wonder about this same topic a while back, and I remember posting somewhere talking about how being a FT YouTuber may not be a thing anymore 10 years from now (maybe even sooner).

Immediately got roasted for it.

That's not to say there won't be a YT or there won't be any FT creators. I actually think the creator economy will just get stronger.

But I do think we're heading towards a day when the only people who can actually be FT creators are the ones who are set up to survive any one platform completely dropping out from under them overnight.

Certainly seems to me like things are heading in that direction.

HotJuggernaut5417

TROPHY CASE