We plan to make YouTube a major part of Infinite Black. We have lots of material, especially stories, that we want to get out to everyone so they can enjoy them, but also a lot of material that provides a glimpse behind the scenes at creating our worlds. YouTube is a great format for distributing this kind of content.
Therefore, we recently opened the Journey to the Tree of Sorrows YouTube channel. We decided to create a new channel specifically for Journey to the Tree of Sorrows so that it can be tightly focused on its stories and development. We will be promoting this channel heavily over the coming weeks and months, and I would like to be able to track its progress.
The purpose of this blog post is to establish a baseline to understand how well we are doing growing the Journey to the Tree of Sorrows YouTube channel. This will be the first in a series that tracks our progress toward our goals.
I already have experience with running several different YouTube channels with different degrees of success. They are:
- my personal YouTube channel,
- the RAINN Studios & Infinite Black channel, and,
- the GeoMindz channel, where I post educational content in geography and geographic information science.
Over the summer of 2017 I kept careful track of the numbers regarding my efforts to grow the GeoMindz YouTube channel. I even created vlogs about what I was doing and posted them to my personal YouTube channel. Those are the only hard numbers I have regarding what it takes to grow a YouTube channel to 1,000 subscribers, so that is what we will be comparing Journey to the Tree of Sorrows to. I report on all the numbers in my final vlog here:
I used Facebook as the primary driver of traffic to the GeoMindz YouTube channel. That made it very easy to divide the total amount of money I spent on Facebook advertising by the number of subscribers I had attracted during the time to arrive at a “cost per subscriber”. That cost ended up being $0.22 per subscriber. We will also use Facebook as a major driver of traffic to the Journey to the Tree of Sorrows channel as well. Will the cost per subscriber be more or less than GeoMindz? I have no idea, but we are going to find out.
We have a number of subscriber goals for the Journey to the Tree of Sorrows YouTube channel. They are:
- 1,000 subscribers,
- 5,000 subscribers,
- 10,000 subscribers,
- 25,000 subscribers, and
- 50,000 subscribers.
We will keep track of how quickly we can obtain these goals.
However, very importantly, just because someone subscribes to the channel does not mean that they watch the posted videos. By far, GeoMindz has the most subscribers. As I write this, there are 1,704 people subscribed to the GeoMindz channel. But, the RAINN Studios & Infinite Black channel has the most views. GeoMindz has 71,536 total views with 1,719 subscribers, RAINN Studios & Infinite Black has 83,973 total views with only 1,045 subscribers.
Therefore, we also have major targets for total views on the channel. We will be tracking how many total views the channel receives. Goals in this area are as follows:
- 10,000 total views,
- 25,000 total views,
- 50,000 total views,
- 100,000 total views,
- 250,000 total views,
- 500,000 total views, and
- 1,000,000 total views.
Also, on the level of the individual video, my most watched video on YouTube by far is a video on the GeoMindz channel where I discuss “What is Geography?”. At the time of this writing, it has 8,620 total views.
Being that an educational channel on geography and GIScience should be a more niche audience than the Journey to the Tree of Sorrows channel which is, broadly speaking, an entertainment channel, we expect it might be easier to attract views to the individual videos. I think that one of the main story videos on the Journey to the Tree of Sorrows channel should relatively quickly surpass this video in total views. Therefore, I will also track which individual video is the first to make it to the following marks:
- 5,000 views,
- 10,000 views,
- 25,000 views, and
- 100,000 views.
We will see if any of our videos make it to those levels and, if they do, how fast.
For the purposes of record keeping, we will set as our “mark” the date we publicly released the Journey to the Tree of Sorrows Youtube channel. That was November 8, 2017. On that day we had 0 views and 0 subscribers. As of November 23, 2017, we already had 597 views and 96 subscribers, so we are on our way!
Would you like to help us reach our goals? To help us reach the subscriber goals, please go over to the Journey to the Tree of Sorrows Youtube channel and click the “subscribe” button. If you would like to help us reach our viewership goals, all you have to do is watch the videos. For ease of watching, I have embedded the videos we have released below. Watch for the release of the audio production of the first Journey to the Tree of Sorrows story on December 5, 2017.
In the meantime, what strategies would you recommend for growing the Journey to the Tree of Sorrows YouTube channel?