On the first day of every new months YouTube gives creators a report of how their channel performed during the month before. I knew July of 2023 would be good for me but I was surprised to see how good it actually was. Let's have a look at some numbers.

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Views

Views often tends to be the most interesting and important metric when it comes to videos. If a video doesn't get any views then what is even the point?

My channel has had it's average views almost tripled in July. All of this does of course come down to the fact that I did actually post videos in July. The last video I posted before before July was back in April. Before April I hadn't posted since October.

Not only did I post videos but I posted rather successful videos. I started featuring a new game called Halls of Torment that has currently gotten me over 50,000 views over 6 videos. At the same time I've been posting a few videos about my partnered game called Century: Age of Ashes that has been performing less than ideal due to interest in the game heavily dropping.

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Watch hours

Watch hours may not be the most interesting metric to someone who isn't the creator itself. What this measures is the amount of hours people spent watching your content. In July this amounted to 4,300 hours for my channel.

It's of course no surprise that this curve is pretty much equal to the views. More people watching my videos will of course lead to more watch hours. The reason why I wanted to include this metric is because in July alone I had more watch hours on my channel than what is needed for a new channel to get into the YouTube partner program. It's a metric I was desperately trying to increase in the early days of my channel and now that fabled number is a walk in the park. It's also pretty cool that people spent HALF A YEAR watching my gaming content this month.

Subscribers

The subscriber count tends to be the second most important metric for creators. Seeing the subscriber count go up is always a good feeling. As you can clearly see here my upward subscriber curve isn't as drastic as with the views and watch hours which has a very natural explanation.

I rebranded my channel this month. I changed my channels name and all its accompanying visuals. At the same time I branched out of my current niche. I used to be focused on free to play gaming with a focus on Century: Age of Ashes and a game called Lost Light. I now intent to post more about games I enjoy in general instead of locking myself to free to play gaming.

Naturally this has lead to a loss in subscribers. I haven't posted Lost Light content is months and every time I post something different I lose a few subscribers. I haven't looked into the exact numbers but I've most likely lost around 100 subscribers after my rebrand. People aren't getting the content they subscribed for any longer so it's only natural that they choose to unsubscribe. I don't blame them. I would have done the same.

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Top performing videos

The above image showcases my top 5 most viewed videos for July of 2023. 3 out of 5 are from Halls of Torment videos that amounts to more than half of my views for the entire month. The bottom video was also released in July.

The middle video is an old video. This video is over 3 months old and is still performing really well. This is one of the things I really like with YouTube and algorithm based platforms in general. Content can keep on performing for a long time. On Hive content is pretty much dead after a few days. I think I've only ever gotten a comment on a post that is more than a week old once or twice in my soon three years on this platform. This is definitely a shortcoming with the Hive platform.

On YouTube I can create videos that keep on performing and bringing me income for years to come. My focus has always been to make evergreen content with a few exceptions when I've covered gaming news that will only stay relevant for a few weeks or days. Evergreen content means it will stay relevant practically forever. Out of my 51 videos there's only around 10 of them that are dead. The rest are still getting views even if they're a year old.

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Future plans

My rebrand is the root to all of my success this month and it has helped me regain my motivation to keep working on this channel. I don't feel the limitations of my old brand anymore and that has given me a new drive. I can basically to anything I want going forward and that is what I plan on doing. I'm going to keep covering Century: Age of Ashes and Halls of Torment while slowly introducing more games.

I've slowly started playing Project Zomboid which I hope to create some videos on. I was also contemplating posting classic let's play videos but I most likely won't. That type of content doesn't resonate well with a large audience anymore but I have had the thought of creating a second channel where I post low effort unedited lets plays that I later turn into higher quality edited videos on my main channel.

I'm looking forward to seeing how August unfolds. It will most likely take a downward dip again as I'm currently traveling for a week and then I'll have another week at home creating videos before I get back to work on the 14th. Hopefully my average will still be higher than the past few months which I'm fairly certain it will be anyways. I'll be back here updating when we enter September so stay tuned!

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^{All images in this post are screenshots taken by me.}

^{Follow me on: 3Speak | PeakD | Hive.Blog | Twitch | YouTube}