I’ve been running my channel full-time for about two years and for the first year and a half I thought subscribers really mattered, to how much money I made later finding out that it had nothing to do with it.
it’s about views and view duration.
When I started my YouTube channel to share the gift that I’ve been given by God. Showing people how to work on their automobiles from home and showing them some of the nice tricks that I’ve learned in my 30 years of working on automobiles.
I only started full-time after I was cheated out of $80,000 (my life savings). With nothing to do but work on a bunch of cars I started shooting YouTube video and I’d like to think over the years I’ve gotten better at it if you ever need any advice please ask. I will be happy to tell you what little bit I know but I do get over 500,000 views (very consistently) a month with a small subscriber count of only 19,000.
I don’t personally think that 19,000 is all that many people as followers. but I have started gearing my channel towards advertising and just helping people by answering everything that people say to me even if I don’t want to I’m always polite even when they’re not very polite to me.
Okay. I want to say this here so that maybe you and others can understand this. If more people understood what I am about to tell you, there would be a lot less misunderstanding about the subject of subscriber count. The first thing to understand is that not all subscriber counts are the same. You can't compare your channel with 19K subs with a channel like Cocomelon with 40 Million. You have to compare your channel with other channels that produce content in the same genre as yours. Some genres like cocomelon, trynottolaugh, and others, are what I call" gobbledygook" channels. They are like the candy store or donut shop of Youtube. They produce hollow, shallow content that is for meaningless entertainment purposes only. Guess what? People LOVE that kind of content. That kind of content appeals to a broad spectrum of people, so they have a pool of hundreds of millions (If not billions) of people to draw subs from.
Now, say you have an interest-based channel about renewing 1957 Chevys, or knitting, or canoe building. How many people are interested in those things? Not many. So, how many people available in that pool to draw subs from? There are some, but there are not millions. This is why you cannot compare an interest-based channel with a gobbledygook entertainment-based channel when it comes to subscriber counts. 1000 subs on a narrow interest-based channel dedicated to renewing 1957, or how to nit, or how to make a canoe, might be equivalent to 1 million (or 10 million) subs on a gobblygook channel. Why? Because out of the very small pool of people that are interested in the narrow topic of your channel, you got 1000 of them to sub to your channel. People that subscribe to gobbledygook channels are not serious people. They will hit that subscribe button without any thought. People that subscribe to interest-based channels are very serious about the thing they are interested in and won't just hit that subscribe button because they found your channel. You have to really impress them t get them to hit that subscribe button. If you also take into account that your channel is competing in the same market as these huge gobbledygook channels that are getting all the attention (YT suggestions), that means that those 1K subs are even more impressive.
I don't know your genre, but 19K is nothing to be ashamed of. It is true that subs do not equal more money, but subs DO equal MORE SUBS. Humans are very crowd influenced. The more people they see doing something, the more they feel comfortable doing the same things. Even though subs do not equal money, they equal respect, and respect equals more money. The problem is that most people do not understand the subs vs genre issue. So the see a channel in a much less popular interest-based genre and they expect it to have the millions of subs like the huge gobbledygook channels. This is very unfair. The same is true for sponsors. They think that if you don't have a million subs, you are not worth talking to, regardless of what genre you are in.
This is definitely a problem with channels in narrow interest-based genres that don't have a large pool of people to draw subs from.
