Youtube video transcript
So today we’re gonna talk about something that I’ve never discussed on camera before. It’s all the stats to do with this channel and exactly how long it took me to get up to the minimums of 1000 subs and 4,000 watch hours. So don’t go anywhere. Hello, YouTube and a very special hello to all my subscribers, my name’s Phil.
And welcome to my channel. This is where I document my journey building an online income. So we made it guys we’ve managed to build up this channel to more than 1000 subs and more than 4,000 watch hours, which probably as is the minimum in order to join the YouTube partner. Program. So what I’m gonna do today is just give you a bit of an insight into this channel and exactly how long it took me to build it up and how much effort that took.
So this really is a niche within the niche. So I basically document my journey following the Income School Project 24 system. And so it’s a very small niche within making money online. So I think by looking at this case study and applying it. Perhaps a fairly bigger niche is a more popular niche.
Let’s say you might be able to build up a channel like this even more quickly than I. First of all, I’d like to show you the stats for the last month. So this is really from just starting the channel until it was monetized, which was around the 16th of September, 2020. So I’m gonna show you that last month between September and August.
So you get an idea of how many views and all that sort of thing that this channel’s. So what I’m gonna show you is the channel from the beginning. So around, it was 8th of August, 2019 to September the 16th, 2020. That’s when it actually hit the minimum thousand subs. And it was able to be monetized, to join the YouTube partner system.
So I just wanna give you an idea. Firstly the amount of views and everything like that for the last month. So let’s have a look at that. So you can see that here we’ve got in the last month. So from August the 16th to September the 16th, it got 10,200 views. The watch time was about 1,200. It’s gained just under 300 or 290 subs in the last month.
So thank you guys. And as you can see it wasn’t monetized during this period because it hadn’t reached the minimum, the minimums. It’s quite interesting to me. It reached the watch hours, the 4,000 watch hours way before it got to the actual subs. So in terms of reach, you can see about 120,000 impressions here last month, the impressions the click through rate is about 3.3%.
And again, you can see the views, but the unique views are about 5,000 and everything is going up and up. It seems that YouTuber really short. They’ve taken the channel and they’re showing it to more people. So that’s all really down to you guys. So thanks very much for watching. So in terms of traffic source here, you can see that almost half of the traffic comes from the brows feature, about 15% from YouTube search and 13% from.
Suggested videos and here on the right, we can talk about watch hour and you can see basically where all that comes from now. I’ve gotta admit, I’m still learning the ropes with all the stats, but it’s interesting to see where everything comes from and in terms of external traffic, most of it is coming from Google, nearly 60% here.
And I don’t really get much. Much traffic at all from the playlists or anything like that. It seems the most traffic coming from a temporary playlist. And this is really for Mike Mike, my my friend and colleague from the artist ground. He likes suggested videos. He likes to look at this in our channel.
So most of the traffic 13% is coming from one of my updates month 14, but I’m also getting quite a few people. 6.8% coming from another video from another Project 24 member. And he’s actually doing a lot better than I am in terms of making money. But that’s because he chose one niche and just stuck with it.
So if you’re interested in finding out a bit more, go check out Cody orgi. So this is a Aussie guy and he’s in kind of a cycling traveling niche. If I remember he’s just killing it right now. You can pick up some really good tips on that guy. Okay, in terms of engagement.
As I said in the last month, it’s got 1,200 views. And the average view duration for this channel for that month was six minutes and 48 seconds. And if you consider the fact that a lot of my videos are anywhere between. Six and 40 minutes long. You can see that people don’t watch the whole video, but they are watching a far older chunk.
And in this period, the top video is that month 14 update. I have a feeling it’s something to do with the thumbnail. I think it’s something that people find a little bit interesting. Cuz I’m talking about the fact where, we don’t really do any back link building when we. Following the Project 24 methods.
And most of my bigger videos are really these updates. So this is obviously what you guys like to watch. This is something I’m gonna try and do a little bit more of if I can over the next couple of months, and you can see the playlists that do get a little bit of engagement. So the real passive income lessons are something that people seem to enjoy watching.
This is really where I’m just sharing. The weekly tips, the things that I’m doing, the things that I’m picking up in addition to the updates. So in terms of the audience for the, this month, you can see that, as I said, unique Vives are about 5,000 and it seems that. Each view on average is watching the videos more than once, which is great.
Really isn’t it? Maybe it’s cuz I talk too much and you gotta come back and watch the rest of it later on. And the subscribers just went through the roof in the last month. A really cool thing here is that you can actually see when the viewers are checking out the channel. So if you are questioning when you should release videos and things, you can look at this and check out when people are watching you most.
The other thing is clearly I’m getting a lot more viewers who are not subscribers. So if you’re watching and you haven’t subscribed yet, why not do that now? So this kind of can give you an idea that maybe. You’re producing interesting material, but it’s not something that people really want to subscribe to.
So maybe that’s something I need to change in the future. And then in terms of who’s watching, you can see this here in the audience. So it looks like it’s us blokes really not too many women are watching me. Maybe I need to like, get a bare haircut or something. I dunno. I dunno what it is. And then the age groups, it’s really guys between 25 and 44, that’s the main audience, which I think is.
Pretty much the same as in Project 24, they have a similar sort of audience. And yeah. So I’m getting a lot of you guys, you yanks from the states. So thanks for watching guys. Also some guys from India that’s really cool. And some of my fellow Brits as well, it’s mainly English speaking audiences, obviously.
And in terms of revenue for that, It didn’t make any money cuz it hasn’t been monetized. It only got monetized around. I think I got the email on the 16th of September. Okay. So before we look at the bigger numbers for the entire year, you can get the big picture of how much time and effort it took to build up this channel.
Let’s just talk a little bit about the background story, just so we are on the same page. So I started this channel back on the 8th of August, 2019. Since then it’s got about 63 videos. So I’ve been trying to upload a video every single week normally on a Monday or now it’s a Tuesday. I did actually skip a couple of weeks here and there, maybe about two or three, but I also added one week where I published a video every single day.
So that’s why within about a. in 13 months, it’s got 63 videos on it. The other thing you may know if you’ve been watching this channel since the beginning, some of you obviously have. I started off with a different name for the channel. So originally this channel was called. Income School student.
And that was because that’s what the channel was about. Me documenting my journey as a student of Income School. But another reason why I studied the channel, which is no secret, is that Income School has a pretty good affiliate system where they pay you a nice little commission every time that you are able to re.
The course and someone signs up through your link. I originally started off as an Income School student. Then they changed the affiliate program back in about April or may of 2020. And they realized that I. It’s basically a trademark infringement, they said, but they were pretty cool about it.
And they just said, can you change the name of the channel of the website? And we’ll let you back into the program. So since about may this has been called passive income film, mainly because I don’t have a lot of inspiration. So that’s why I came up with that name. But the channel really took a bit of a changing direction fairly early on.
I must say that the first couple of videos that I shot were a little bit more salesy, a little bit more spammy scammy, perhaps. Mainly because that’s what I was used to. That’s what I thought internet marketing was like very early on in my journey with Income School. Then they corrected me, but the main thing was that I got a message from David at M David, 76 M I should say, and he just called me out on it and said, Hey man, these videos, they’re just like one long sales pitch.
Why don’t you do something a bit more useful? And that’s when I changed tack and I started reporting my numbers for my websites and just documenting what I was doing, mainly what I was doing wrong. And just trying to help people. And I think that’s perhaps what people appreciate most, and it makes me feel better about the whole thing as well.
Okay. The other thing I kind of wanna talk about is my equipment that I use and also my approach to this channel. So firstly, I was really concerned with content overall. So I just wanted to get the content out and I didn’t worry about anything like the camera to start with sound.
Audio or the lighting really. And I didn’t worry about the background. And as I’ve gone through the channel, I’ve changed little things as I’ve gone. So I concentrated on the content. Then I was concerned with the audio to try and make that as, as good as I could. Because to begin with, I wasn’t actually using any audio equipment at all.
It was just off a webcam, then a phone and then off a camera. And after that I was worried about lighting. So I got myself a couple lights, but nothing fancy just from Ikea, but they seemed to work. And then after that I consent. Concentrated on getting a better camera. And I’ll talk about that in a moment.
So my philosophy, and this is very much the philosophy of Income School, is just to get started. Don’t worry about having the best equipment. Don’t worry about being an expert when you get onto YouTube. So I started off. If you look at my very first video, I just had a very basic webcam and the quality was really bad, but it was more of a sort of a screenshot and the image of me was just in the corner.
And I don’t think it really mattered that much, that video’s got a lot of views. Mainly because it was my first one. And then I just switched to my phone. This is a very basic phone. It’s the only smartphone I’ve ever owned. It’s the brand we. I dunno, I got it in France. I dunno if it’s a popular brand and basically I just started shooting on that and again, the quality wasn’t great, but it was a little bit better than on the webcam.
So around black Friday, which is what in December, right? I went out and from Amazon, I just got a little camera like this kind of a, just a generic kind of. Video camera. And again, this was a step up from the phone a little bit. This was shooting in full HD and I think it worked okay.
I’ve used it on this channel. I’ve used it on another channel. I have the iOS grind. My only complaint was quite often. I used to get these kinds of red lines down the middle of the screen, just. Flashing through and I never knew if it was the camera or if it was actually the editing program that I was using.
And the other thing I had with this, it came with a shotgun. And we plugged it in and I spent a whole day shooting Michael and I for the arts grind. And for some reason we just got this kind of electronic work like this buzzing sound. So we lost a whole day of filming because I didn’t test out the camera.
Then about a month ago, I actually invested in one of these You’re like looking at me through it now. So this is a Cameron, a cannon M 50 EOS. So as she got this on the recommendation of another Project 24 member Emma cruises you probably would’ve seen her. She’s been interviewed on the Income School channel.
She’s also been on content warriors. Which is Anna’s channel. And I think she’s even been on channel makers. They’ve spoken about her there; she’s everywhere. So with this camera, it can shoot in 4k. I’m still learning how to use it a little bit. So sometimes it doesn’t always work, but it’s a real step up.
And this probably. Compared to the camera I got before, which was around the hundred dollars, $130, mark. This is around sort of the 500, $600 mark. But I think it’s a good investment because hopefully it’s gonna make the image look a lot better. So let’s talk about audio. So originally I didn’t have any audio at all.
I was just working off the phone off that kind of stuff. And to be honest, it was hit and miss. So I already had this kind of Boom mic, it’s this one’s a BM 800 and I’d got this well a couple years ago for another project that I had and I started using it and it worked okay. But the issue I had was my laptop, actually.
Wasn’t great. And this plug straight into a little sound mixer, then straight into the laptop with a USB called. And the thing I had was when I was doing screenshots. Of looking at the screen and all the stats and stuff like that. Sometimes I’d get these little electronic kind of buzzes and.
Clicks and things like that because the computer was struggling to do two things at once. I think. So although I think this is a, this can work for most people. You gotta make sure that your computer’s good enough to handle it. So I did this for sort of the best part of six months, I would say then I invested in this stuff it’s so this is a Boyer B Y w M a pro K two.
And I actually. I invested in it because I was quite lucky with the school that I work at here in Taiwan. So they had this tradition of giving red envelopes. During special occasions. So there’s a few things they celebrate here. So during Chinese new year, there’s a moon festival. That’s actually coming up this weekend and obviously like birthdays.
And these guys they’d forgotten to give me a red envelope for about a year. So they suddenly gave me the equivalent of something like $300 all at once. And I spunk it all on these. So you get two transmitters in this kit and one receiver. So I actually got it because I was starting this project with my friend Michael, the iOS grant, and we needed two.
And it’s really good because I think the sounds are a little bit better and. It doesn’t go straight into a computer. I think it’s a little bit more reliable. So with these lapel mics, these audio mics, you need an audio recorder to capture the sound. So the one I got was the task cam. It’s the Dr.
Zero five X. So this isn’t the one that Income School recommends. They recommend a slightly more expensive one. This one, I think it was less than a hundred dollars. I can’t quite remember now. It was a really good deal and I’m really pleased with it. So basically what I do is the, you got the receiver from the Boyer system here and it plugs just straight into the audio recorder here.
And yeah, I don’t really have any. Problems with it. It always works. So the battery life is pretty good. The only thing is I’ve tried to plug the mic straight in which you can do. It does have a kind of a pre amp. I’m not an expert, but it has that ability, but the sound isn’t as clear as when we do it through the audio transmitter and receiver system.
So that’s the equipment. And as with anything as you go through, you can update it. But like I said, I started off with a webcam. And then just basically a mobile phone. And I have to say my wife just bought herself a new Samsung phone and it’s way better than anything I had before. So you don’t need to invest in all this stuff you can really get by with just a mobile.
So let’s go look at a few more stats in a little bit more detail, so you can see the big picture of this channel throughout the last 12 to 13. Okay. So if we look at the channel for the entire period, from the beginning of August, 2019 to the 16th of September, it got a total of 47,395 views and 4,962 hours, 4,962.
So as I said it got more watch hours, or it got to the minimum watch hours way before it got to the minimum subs to join the partnership program. Around the 16th. It had 1023 subs and the impressions were around 518,917 impressions. And you can see a little bit that the top video I have there is the very first video.
The one that I filmed on the webcam got over 4,000 views and. Yeah, what nearly 500 watch hours. And you can see that the click through rate really is an average of about 5.9, that doesn’t really change through the period. And we’ll see that in a little bit later on. So it’s a little bit difficult to see all the stats.
So what I did I arranged a lot of the details I wanted to share with you. Into little tables, little graphs and things like that. So let’s talk about that. So here, we’re looking at the watch time spread through those months, August, 2019 to September, 2020. And you can see it does fluctuate a little bit, but we start off with about 13 watch hours in the first month.
And it builds little by little as we go through. It jumps to about 150 in September, 2019. And obviously the most successful month was August where it gets over 800 watch hours in one month. And although it’s September here, it’s looking like it’s less than the previous month. That’s only halfway through the month.
It really is the snowball effect. So here we’re looking at the average view duration and it was pretty much the same throughout the period around the five to six minute mark. The only rule outliers are later in the year. So June it got up to about seven minutes and I think.
June is really when I, yeah, it was the month 14 video came out that update, which was really popular and YouTube are really pushing that out for me at the moment. So that got a little bit more. And in the last two months, it seems that the watch time is up as well. So here is a look between click through rate and impressions.
So you can see that impressions just go up and up throughout the period. And it starts. Fairly small, about 500 impressions in the first month since launching the channel and sort of in August, 2020, it’s up to about 83,000 impressions. But the click through rate month to month is pretty steady.
It’s around sort of the five point something percent mark. I don’t really. Is that a good thing or bad thing? I can’t tell you, but it is consistent. So the other thing is the subs. So I arranged all the subscribers that I got each month here. So in the first month, only six subs, it was steady sort of 27, 27, going up to October.
That kind of doubled going into November and December January. Wasn’t a very good month in terms of having subs and it fluctuated through till June and June really picked up. It’s almost three times what I was getting the previous month. And then July not so many things might have happened maybe.
I didn’t produce very good videos in July. I don’t know. Maybe I didn’t ask people to subscribe, why not subscribe? And then August and September things have really been taking off. And I think this is because the algorithm has really picked up this channel and is pushing it out to more and more people.
And again, if we look at the views, it’s fairly similar to impressions. Really. It has the same kind of. Sort of movement here. So it starts off low and it just over time just increases but fluctuates as it does that. And you can see that again, August was the best month. So a couple little things I wanna share with you.
So firstly, like to dislike ratio for the channel, it’s getting about a 94% average. And the thing to remember. Although, it’s not nice to see a dislike. It’s all good engagement in the eyes of YouTube. So that’s what this channel gets as an average throughout the year. And in terms of subscribers that I gained and lost.
So at the time of recording this, it had 1,020. Actual subscribers. And throughout the period of the channel, it managed to get 1,156. So if you’re good at maths, you can figure out how many I lost during the year. But, it’s just, it happens, people, they come, they find what they’re looking for and if they’ve learned what they need to learn and they don’t want to watch anymore.
That’s great. That’s what YouTube’s all about. So you don’t really have to worry too much about losing people. You never know. They might come back to you later. So another little metric for you here is how many comments I’ve had throughout the year on the channel. So I managed to get 583 comments.
And if you go into YouTube, you can actually see per video, how many comments you get and things. Again, something that a little metric I can show you. So this is how many shares the video’s got. It’s got 170 shares. I dunno if that’s really a good or bad thing. Perhaps it’s not, I don’t really share the videos myself.
I don’t promote this channel anywhere. Occasionally I’ve shared videos within the Project 24 community, but. To BNS. I don’t really want to blow my own trumpet too much if it’s relevant. If it’s useful, I will share it. But often it’s other people sharing this channel because I’ve said something that they thought was useful to others.
So I think there are really two comments that kind of changed this channel. The first one was David 76, who basically said, Hey man, stop making these sales videos. And that really helped me out. The other one was from the guy and his name escapes me right now, but he said, Hey man, your thumbnails are rubbish.
And I actually did a video on this and I think this is one of the best things that’s happened to this channel because I. After hearing this, I changed my approach. Like I said, with lots of other things on this channel. I haven’t worried about things until I thought it was time. So just like audio lighting backgrounds, I didn’t worry about YouTube thumbnails until I’d got everything else rolling.
So about a month or so ago, he sent me that. Email that message. And that’s when I started changing things, I followed WP Eagle. So Alex from WP Eagle, he’s got some really good videos about making thumbnails. I also checked out some videos by Nick Niman. and adapted his style, adapt no adopted his style.
I basically stole it, but he said that was fine. And I think thumbnails do make a big difference because they are a bit more attractive now. So I use a combination of Canva pro and I also use a. A three-talk called gimp, which is a lot like Photoshop. And if you check out my video where I talk about which thumb now is better I will go into a lot more detail about how to use those tools, but I really like Canva actually.
I’d recommend it. If you are. If you are trying to build thumbnails, it’s really cool because the best feature for me is when I take a screenshot from the actual video I can actually put it into Canva and remove the background really quickly. If you watch my other video, it took me up to 10 minutes to cut out the image before and now you just press a button and the background disappears.
Then what I do is. Take that, and I download it, open it up in gimp and give it a kind of a white border. Give it a drop shadow, import it back into Canva and you’ve got all these free elements. You’ve got these backgrounds that you can use. I like to use a gradient background and the idea is just to make the text nice and easy to read.
And you’ve gotta put in a picture of yourself because people are more likely to click on a picture. There are other ways to make thumbnails, but I think Canva is really great. I use Canva for making thumbnails. I make my images for the blogs. I make infographics, all those kind of things, and it costs about 120.
Bucks, I think a year is really worth the money. I’d really recommend it. And you wanna check it out? I do have a link to Canva pro in the description, and if you wanna buy through my link, it really helps me out. The other thing is they just introduce these videos that you can use. I’m gonna talk about this in another.
But these videos that you can download and put into your YouTube videos as mini B roll, I’ve just started playing around with it. And I think it’s really good. So again, I just wanna say a big thank you to all my subscribers. This really would not happen without you guys. Hopefully you’re finding this channel useful and you’ll keep watching.
So what I’d like to do. Time is we didn’t talk about money, right? I’ve mentioned that I’m a part of this affiliate program for Income School, but I’ve never really spoken about if I’ve made any money out of it. That’s something I wanted to put into its own video, which we’ll talk about next time.
So if you are not a subscriber and you are enjoying what you are seeing here on this channel, why not subscribe now? And also if you’ve enjoyed hearing about my journey with Project 24 and you think it’s a right fit for me. Why not check out that link in the description because I can really recommend it.
Okay, guys, I will see you in the next video. Thanks for watching.