RetroBreak Recap – March 2024

Hi everyone! I’ve struggled with motivation this month, I know I shouldn’t focus so much on the analytics, but I can’t help it. Seeing the ups and downs and trying to make sense of it feels like kind of a game to me, albeit, one that plays on my mind a bit too much, and has the ability to make me feel like nothing I do is ever good enough. It’s extremely frustrating to put so much time and effort into a big video, only for it to show up as a 10/10 and for YouTube Studio to shout at you that your audience doesn’t care about the video you just spend weeks perfecting… I know I need to try and step away from the analytics and keep making videos that I enjoy, rather than pander to the algorithm, but…

As a challenge to myself, and as a bit of an experiment, I decided to make my next video as fast as I possibly could, no research, no editing, just record in one take, just swap between the different camera angles, add the intro at the start, and upload. I managed to get the whole thing done in less than two hours, compared to usually four days of planning, recording and editing. Of course, it far exceeded not only the previous videos this month, but also became the best video of the entire year so far. Proving my point that YouTube (and the viewers by extension?) don’t care at all about good editing or pacing, they don’t care about detailed research or color grading, lens choice, frame rate, composition or anything like that. The ONLY two things that matter are the video topic, and the title.

Compare these stats this month, one from a well researched history video, and the second from the quick low effort video:

In some ways I’m incredibly frustrated that a throwaway video that I put no effort into at all has outperformed some very meticulously detailed and crafted videos which took me weeks of research and lots of late night editing, only to die on release, and even loose me viewers in some cases.

On the other hand though, it proved a point I’ve been thinking about for a while, and has made me feel better about being able to keep up the weekly schedule, as I don’t need to stress as much about the editing and pacing for most videos. Of course I still want to make bigger, well researched content too, but that’s purely from my own creative standpoint, not one that will help grow the channel and earn me money.

Im sure you can tell how conflicted I am about this, on one hand I think I shouldn’t look at the analytics at all and keep making the content that I enjoy, but on the other hand, YouTube studio is telling me to make quick and easy videos, which bring in so many more views. To get an idea of just how much worse off I am making content I want to, rather than what YouTube wants me to, here’s some very alarming stats…

The history video I released gained me 3 subscribers, and £2.45 over 3 weeks.

The quick video I made has made me 72 subscribers and brought in £25, over 4 days so far…

When you take the days since release into consideration, here’s where things get interesting. The quick video gains me now an average of 18 new subscribers per day, compared to 0.14 on the history video, that’s an increase of 12757%! Insane. The revenue difference is just as crazy. The quick video made me about 11p per day since its release 3 weeks ago, compared to £6.25 for the new video. That’s an increase of 5581%! Obviously if I want to keep growing my channel and have a chance to go full time sometime in the future, I can’t ignore the stark contrast between the two! I really need to try and find a way of either making the deeper videos more clickable, or find a way to enjoy making the more simple videos, or find a nice balance between different styles…

Despite my frustrations, It’s certainly been a valuable learning lesson, and I plan to put a lot more attention towards the title and packaging of the video, rather than continue to perfect my editing and presenting style. I think I’ve grown to a high enough level in terms of general production, things like lighting, audio quality, on camera presentation skills, pacing etc, that I can afford to not continue to sink time and effort into studying how to improve them. Now I can turn my attention to the less concrete things which will make a bigger difference, things like how to write a good title, how to create a clickable thumbnail, how to package the video in a. way that appeals to a larger and broader audience. I will try some more experiments next month with these new ideas in mind and see how it goes!

I can’t believe that after making videos every single week for 8+ years, there’s still so much to learn and understand, it really is a never ending journey, and I do intend to keep doing this forever. Eventually I’ll reach a point where I’ve gone through every trial and error path that I’ve come across and emerge on the other side with a much better understanding of everything related to online content. Who knows how long it will take to get there (or whether I’ll even realise it once I do get there…), but I will keep you all updated here on my journey!

I also got an interesting email to my retrobreak inbox this month. A viewer sent me some suggestions for improving my titles and thumbnails after coming across my GBA history video. He brought up a lot of good points, and I need to find the time to sit down and study it, he even offered to help with some thumbnails! I might just take him up on the offer!

Bit of a long intro this month, but I think it’s really interesting to see these insights from fellow creators, so hopefully seeing this from me will help some of you come to your own conclusions about how to change and improve your content too!

Here’s how my content schedule looked at the end of March:

Videos

Watch here – YouTube.com/RetroBreak

2nd Channel Vlog

Streams

Watch LIVE on YT or Twitch at:

https://www.youtube.com/@RetroBreak_Live

https://twitch.tv/retrobreak_live

Podcasts

Listen on Podcast Apps —> https://anchor.fm/retrobreak

Listen on Youtube —> https://youtube.com/@retrobreakpodcast

Favourite Content

Her’e some of the best content I found this month! Enjoy! I don’t actually watch many gaming videos, so my picks might be a bit eclectic if you’re expecting retro gaming content…