youtube

I've just reached the milestone of 30,000 subscribers on my Youtube channel. It took less than a year to grow my subscriber base from 4,000 in November 2015 to where I am today. I'm just amazed at the growth potential of Youtube.

Here are some smaller milestones for subscriber count that I've been tracking.

• Nov 2015 - 4,000
• Jan 2016 - 7,000
• Mar 2016 - 10,000
• Oct 2016 - 30,000

I get around 80 new subscribers each day on Youtube now compared to only 30 when I first started tracking my progress. My growth on Twitter and Facebook is so pathetic I don't even want to share them here. What's obvious is different platforms require different growth strategy. With Youtube, my strategy is to put out helpful content with relentless consistency and so far that has been working out well for me.

Where the viewers are from

On average, around 12,000 viewers watch my videos daily. Only 0.6% are referred by my blog -- that's 79 viewers from Parkablogs daily. The rest are viewers from the Youtube platform. In other words, there are a lot of viewers on Youtube searching for art content. That's no surprising though, as this is the 2nd biggest search engine on earth.

Compared to other artists on Youtube

Numbers can actually say a lot about the channel.

Here are statistics artists that I subscribe to, arranged based on the number of subscribers they have.

View count

I may not have as many subscribers as other Youtubers, but my view count is quite high -- almost on par with Lachri Fine Art who has more than 3 times my subscribers. I attribute that to the many art product reviews I've created. I want to make one video review for all the art products that I've reviewed on my blog.

I value view count because ultimately, ads on Youtube payout are based on view count. On a bad day, the payout is around USD $1 per 1,000 views. From there, you can calculate exactly how many views, videos or subscribers you need to make a full-time living. Unless you have a knack for putting out viral content that skews your statistics, growth rate on Youtube is quite predictable and you can do forecasts easily. For example, if I get 2,500 subscribers each month, one year later, I can safely say that I will have 30,000 more subscribers.

If you have a full-time or freelance job, you won't even know if you will have a pay increment next year, or earn as much.

Start early

One reason why some Youtubers have a lot of subscribers is because they started early. A channel that started 10 years ago, provided they produce content regularly, is likely to have many times more subscribers than a new art channel today. If you want to start something, start early. The payoff will only come years later. I wished I had started my channel at the same time I started my blog. So now, I'm actually making up for lost time by putting out as many videos as possible.

There are many different strategies when it comes to choosing the type of content to produce. An art channel can focus on tutorials, artist interviews, speed paintings, art product reviews, advice or whatever you can think of really. This is probably worth an article on its own.

Youtube has incredible reach

My videos reach more people than my blog posts. For example, the article that I wrote regarding Wacom MobileStudio Pro on 14 Oct only received 2,440 views to date. The Youtube video talking about the same thing published 3 days later received 4,229 views. I believe that video was able to get a higher view count because I have a large subscriber base. Each time I publish a video, a notification email is sent out to those subscribed to my channel, making it easy for them to watch. I don't have that feature on my blog and I don't use my newsletters to promote individual posts like this, and even if I do, I only have 1000+ newsletter subscribers compared to 30,000 Youtube subscribers.

Ultimately, content is king

There are some channels with fantastic growth rates even though they don't have a lot of videos, But those channels do have compelling content. Two good examples are the art creation videos from kelogsloops (20 videos with 125,052 subscribers) and Iraville (48 videos with 94,510 subscribers). What this means is, if your content is really great, you can get subscribers easier, although how the subscribers find the content is still something I'm trying to figure out, because it's either a combination of Youtube Suggested Videos or through SEO.

Moving on

Making videos daily is not easy. Some days, I may not have ideas or just don't have motivation. That's why I keep a list of ideas and populate it whenever I have an idea for a video.

I'm just gonna continue what I'm doing now and see where it will bring me next year. My prediction is I will have 60,000 subscribers by October 2017.

Hopefully, I can have 700 videos produced by the end of 2017. That would be incredible.

My Youtube channel has now crossed the 9,000 subscriber mark. That's up from 7,000 since my last post about Youtube.

Today, I want to talk about using Youtube and Facebook to promoting your art videos. By art videos, I'm taking about art tutorials, demonstrations, art supply reviews, speed paintings, artist interviews and basically anything that's related to art.

Youtube and Facebook are the two biggest sites today where millions of videos are watched. Facebook viewers now watch as much as 500 million videos per day. What does that mean to you as an art creator?

Let's take a look at the advantages and disadvantages of posting on both platforms.

Pros and cons of posting video on Facebook

The advantage is you get views, Likes, comments, some followers.

If your video is popular enough, Facebook does promote it and give it better exposure and reach.

The disadvantage is once your content gets pushed down, it will be lost and there's no easy way to find it. You won't be able to search for it using the search box. And if it's too far in the past, people will get tired of scrolling down and give up. Unless your video has the viral factor, it's not going to be seen again after it's being pushed down.

When you're online, any content that you create should always serve to help you into the future and in this case, your Facebook content will only be useful for a few days. That's just not optimal for the effort you put into creating your video. It's like salaried job where once you stop working, you no longer get the pay cheque.

Think about how people are going to find your page. If they don't know your name or brand, there's no way they are going to do a search on Facebook to find you. If you want new followers, you have to link to your Facebook page from your website, or hope that your Facebook page gets shared by others.

Pros and cons of posting on Youtube

You will still get views, Likes, comments and some followers.

On Youtube, you have the added advantage that there's good search functionality and if your video has a good title and description, people can search for it using the search box. This means even strangers can look for content that you have posted months ago. Your content will still be useful to you and help/entertain your audience into the future. The more videos you have, the more people you can expect to be looking for them in the future.

It's easier for people to check out your other videos because you have your own channel page and playlists.

Youtube has better analytics for video. In addition to the basic demographic stats like the age group, sex, location, you also get useful information such as the watch time, like how long people are watching your video before they stop. You can use the analytics to understand what type of content is popular.

If your content is helpful and relevant to people, your video will be ranked higher and they will be showcased in the Suggested Videos sidebar where you can expect strangers to click on them. Youtube promotes other videos at the end. You have a better chance of getting a stranger finding your video, and discover that you exist.

Youtube is a better discovery platform in the sense that people can search for content they want, and not get irrelevant content pushed to them. Because of that, the type of audience you can expect on both platform are different. You won't see people who are looking for art tutorials search for them on Facebook.

Because Youtube actively promotes related video content to audience, your content if relevant, it will get promoted. That's going to earn you extra views and extra subscribers. 30% of my views are from the Suggested Videos sidebar and that's quite significant and helpful at getting new subscribers. You can build a community a subscriber base easier on Youtube than on Facebook. That's important because people who are subscribed to you won't subscribe again, whereas strangers who are on your video page may have a chance to subscribe.

Youtube is more of a balanced playing ground compared to Facebook. While I don't have any accurate statistics to back up what I say but from what I gather online from hearsay, videos uploaded on Facebook gets a preference over videos uploaded on Youtube and linked in Facebook. Youtube is Facebook's competition and it's not surprising that Facebook would limited Youtube video's exposure.

In the long run, you'll benefit from Youtube more than with Facebook because you'll have strangers discovering your content daily, unless you're really good at creating viral video content on Facebook.

Lastly, if you're in the Youtube Partner Program, you can earn money through the ads that are run above your videos. It's not going to be significant if your videos have low view counts, but in the long run it adds up.

Recently, there was a popular video called Upside Down & Inside Out by the band OK Go. They released it initially on Facebook and received 48,000,000 views and 600,000 shares. They released it one week later on Youtube and received 600,000 views and 6,000 shares (at the time of me writing this post). Ads online cost USD $1 per thousand views. So the band left $48,000 dollars on the table by uploading the video on Facebook. Of course you can argue that you may not get as much views on Youtube, but you don't know for sure if it can't get more either. Anyway, it's important not to neglect both platforms when uploading your video.

One interesting thing about OK Go's music video is, when they posted the trailer for the video on Youtube pointing to Facebook, they received avalanche of Youtube comments asking why the video is not on Youtube. That trailer has since been deleted.

As for me, I post mostly reviews and sketching tutorials so I won't be uploading my videos on Facebook because I know nobody would be searching for them there.

In the long run, you'll get a better pay-off from Youtube.

Yes! I've now reached 280K subscribers on my Youtube channel. It was just 7,000 subscribers back in 2016 when I wrote the original article, and 4,000 subsribers on 19 Nov 2015. The journey has been long and there's still a long road ahead.

The tips and strategies below are from my personal experience and from analysing other successful Youtube art channels. I've used the same tips to grow my channel, and also started a tech channel which now has 35,000 subscribers.

Alright, the tips...

Wow. I've reached 5,000 subscribers on my Youtube channel. An average of 40 people subscribe each day.

My channel for sketchers and features sketching tips, sketchbooks, fountain pens for drawing and art product reviews.