This is my first successful YouTube channel that generated around $5.6M in revenue for advertisers, and where I learned a lot of the skills that help me grow channels nowadays. In the first month after posting a handful of videos the channel took off rapidly to reach 32 Million views in its second month. It now sits at 307 thousand subscribers and 284 million lifetime views since starting in 2020.

My strategies with this channel were first to identify a niche in which I could firstly create the content and secondly improve upon it. This ended up being TikTok compilations which during the lockdown of 2020 ended up being one of the most watched videos on the platform. A lot of people will look at only the channels that have succeeded and have millions of subscribers and views when starting a YouTube channel but I think this is a mistake, I made sure to also find channels which failed to take off and analysed why I thought they failed. Often this was related to the thumbnails and titles being bad, editing poor or the video topic or idea not interesting. After analysing succesful and unsuccesful channels I started to upload daily content to create a library of videos. These videos were about different topics but still within the TikTok niche so that I had the best chance of success in seeing which topic did best. Eventually YouTube started to test my content with groups of viewers and one video did well. It was a video that already was created a few times on the platform but I included more content, a better thumbnail and title and it ended up outperfoming the currently uploaded videos. This then led to viewers checking out my channel and watching more of my videos and this snowballed into huge growth within just two weeks of the first video being recommended. From there staying consistent with uploads, constantly improving and trying out new things kept viewers engaged and returning for the next years to come.

The image above shows you the monthly ad spend advertisers spent to run ads on my videos the 3rd month I started it. Over the course of the year advertisers spent around $1.5M to run ads on my videos not including sponsored ad slots in them. Let’s assume conservatively they achieved a 1.5x / 2x or 3x return on ad spend on this… That’s $3M – $5M in revenue my channel generated for businesses in one year. This channel licensed a lot of content from record labels and media agencies so I “only” ended up taking home around $18k a month in ad revenue + around $7k from sponsored posts bringing in around $300k a year total compared to the $3M businesses generated off of my videos. This made me realise I need a product or service to promote in my videos to make some real money and I’ve been working on a site with designers and developers the past year but this takes a lot of time so I have a lot of spare time to then dedicate to helping businesses with a great product or business but a lackluster youtube channel that isn’t generating much if any revenue. It’s a no-brainer for the companies I work with and saves them spending so much in ad spend to generate great returns from their channel. If my channel with a very broad audience managed to generate $5m worth of revenue for businesses advertising on it. Then imagine how much better, with albeit much fewer views, your channel will work for promoting your business and generating revenue. Each viewer is worth easily 20x or even 100x more to you on your company channel than they were on my channel.

My biggest takeaways from this case study are to pick a good niche to create content within and to analyze successful and unsuccessful channels to learn from the mistakes they made. These results are atypical as my channel became the largest in the TikTok compilation niche within a month of starting and remained there for the next two years but the lessons learned translate to most other channels and have allowed me to grow more of my own channels and help others with theirs. I realized you need a great product or business to promote using your channel to generate real revenue, which I started to work on my own but that leaves a lot of time to partner with companies who already have that great product or business but just don’t know how to create youtube content effectively to generate great revenue.