small YouTube channels really only have one question when you break it all down how do I grow my channel to potentially millions of subscribers and millions of views with every video I make Well normally we would sit here and give you our take on that but today let's talk to somebody who's done it already with over 3.5 million subscribers spiffing Brit seems to have cracked the code and in one of the most competitive spaces on all of YouTube we assume having a British accent and witty humor helps but there's always a bit more to it
than that so on your half we've asked him every detail when it comes to succeeding on YouTube from thumbnails to strategies spiffing Brit pretty much debunked a lot of Comon advice we hear all the time for growing a YouTube channel and he even made us question some of the things we tell small channels all the time take this exchange for example one thing we are constantly telling YouTube creators is focus you got to focus YouTube only gets more complicated right there's like more and more and more things to focus on just want to ask you
spiff what does Focus mean on YouTube especially these days focus on YouTube these days is very different to where we were like say 5 years ago where you could just upload say part 27 of a Minecraft Let's Play you had no one to compete with you had a very basic algorithm pushing you and there was only one platform and it was YouTube whereas now you're being told well if you upload a video on YouTube you've got to cut it down into a short for say Tik Tok you've got to post about it on Twitter you've
then got to probably go live on Twitch afterwards and at the same time when it comes to making content your content now has to be more polished it's apparently got to be edited it's apparently got to be really long or really short and it's got to fit into these Keen niches that we've apparently grouped everyone into it's got to have an established format and you've got to focus on what everyone else is doing in order to work out what you're going to do and the problem when you focus that hard that you kind of miss
the grand strategy the grand plan that you might have to be a Creator so there's no point worrying about okay is the thumbnail the best thumbnail that's ever EX existed on a video what all we ever hear about is focus on thumbnails and spend hours and hours studying them test over and over again but here's the thing instead it should be can I get everything on this video to a slightly above average quality because if you're doing that then focusing on actually making content that has a market then everything's just going to work out you
don't have to be the next Mr Beast you just have to be slightly better than the average human being honestly we have got some deliberately terrible thumbnails on the channel I have which are literally just black and white text however it's brilliant if you know a video is going to hit the trending page or hit a search like area because it just sticks out like a sore Farm you just want to stop scrolling and go okay what is this is this something that interests me and it's about stopping that scroll that matters with these weird
josing thumbnails I think it's partly why Mr Beast deliberately has those weird uncanny valley like smile faces they're not natural they're not normal and because they're not normal they make you want to stop where do you think creators fall over most which means that the video itself doesn't produce a good result at the end of it I think quite often creators are focused so heavily on copying other people's content and then they copy it so hard you don't actually look at the wider market and creators don't realize that what they've done is they've basically made
a subpar copy or a slightly better copy of someone else's work and there's nothing wrong with that you can do that everyone is taking each other's ideas on YouTube nothing is original the only issue is if two thumbnails are being shown for the same game and both videos are fine you've suddenly split an audience of say 100 people between these two videos getting 50 each and if one of those creators is an established creator with say a million subscribers and you're just a brand new Creator it doesn't matter if your video is actually better maybe
it's got better retention maybe it's got you know better interaction better engagement it it could just be a perfect video it doesn't really matter if that's the case you've already already made the issue of focusing on something that is just a copy of someone else's work and ultimately you split an audience basically you've split a market and there's no point trying to compete with other people in this market because it's so big you can compete when you're you know later into the game when you've been doing YouTube for years and you know how to one
up other people but when you're starting out don't try and swing for the biggest guy who you love watching instead just try and find a like Pond that nobody else has ever touched and just make that your pond and then you're going to become famous for it how do you find that pond I use viq SEO tools because you have this fun little thing on the back end whereby it shows me trends but it also shows me kind of like the relative amount of content going out for that Trend to the search results for that
Trend now there's you know a bajillion ways you can get this data across YouTube and the internet you can just get a feel of it yourself by I know browsing redit or Twitter and being like Oh lot of people are talking about this game but I haven't seen any videos on it from my favorite creators you know that's a gap in a market that's the pond that you're looking for and in my case I noticed that there's this huge market for time-lapse videos for Paradox interactive games what I did was I just made a bunch
of timelapse videos and they sucked so the videos were terrible but it didn't matter because I wasn't competing with anyone else I had this entire Pond to myself and so I just spent effectively a year experimenting in this pond with an audience that got me well past you know the stages of monetization up to like you know 20,000 subscribers and then from that point I was then able to go okay well I now know how to do YouTube I know how to edit I know how to come up with Concepts how do I then move
on from this Pond and take the best parts of it with me and kind of go into the next big pond maybe into a lake well how do you grow as a new fisherman or in other words small Channel if you're a new fisherman right and this is like one of the first first years you've been at this Pond you shouldn't be expecting that you know your Rod work your your line skills are going to net you the biggest carb and so you shouldn't focus on trying to become the best editor or the best script
writer so that your video has a perfect 100% retention it's okay if your concept is good enough and you found a gap in the market that's big enough your video doesn't need to be perfect for it to still have massively above average retention because the idea is going to be more important so when you found this content Gap the idea is the most valuable thing so the next most valuable thing is the pitch how do you know when this impression is served up to someone how do you convince them that your content Gap is the
content Gap that you've promised and it's the content Gap that they've been looking for so the most important thing to focus on is the bait it is simply the title and the thumbnail one of the things we discussed was finding your place on YouTube and how that can pretty much be the hardest part for a lot of creators right finding content gaps might seem impossible in some of these more condensed niches especially when it comes to small channels it might seem that other creators have already gotten their first and you're just simply late to the
party the algorithm just isn't giving you those chances it's already given them to the big channels this is where spiff gives us a little trick though bringing different worlds together it might not feel like that data is there for you if you're say a fitness Creator but trust me it is there are going to be topics that are going to be really really in high demand but still underserved it could be as simple let's say you're a lifestyle Creator and you do jigsaw pieces you can take a look at Say the video gaming world and
go well people love speedr running what if I do like speedrunning of jigsaws suddenly you're like bridging a gaming Market with like an IRL content market and then at the same time you can go well people like competitions in all kind of genres on YouTube people love competitions what if I did a fitness channel that was a competition people absolutely love that and that's kind of like a market that is massively underserved on YouTube even if you're a small Creator you are always going to be competing with other creators and working out who those creators
are and how you can stand out from them not just in terms of your ideas but also your like thumbnail design and your title design is very important for your long-term success at the end of the day this isn't really like a long-term issue there's always far more viewers out there in these markets than there are creators so all it matters is kind of like the initial videos velocity and how it's going to appear in search rankings so don't feel like if there's one really big Creator in your scene that everything's over and there's no
point in trying because over the long term their viewers are still going to get shown your thumbnails and sure it might take you a long while to convince them to you know watch both of you at the same time but you will eventually get there there's a big debate among YouTubers should you focus on making quality videos or should you focus on the sheer quantity of videos that you're putting out when starting a YouTube channel this advice is split down the middle and so we asked spiff to bring break the ti it basically comes down
to how many videos can I upload and the issue with it is there's no real perfect answer I know creators who only have say like you know 15,000 20,000 subscribers and they do YouTube as a full-time job and when you're doing that at that scale you have to be uploading every day you can't really spend the additional time going okay I'll spend two days editing this video rather than one because as soon as you do that initially you've halfed your earnings and sure in the long term videos will probably get twice as many views maybe
three times as many views and that's a risk you can take but not everyone can take that risk in my opinion quality will always Trum quantity in the long term there are a handful of exceptions for this it is completely fine to do quantity when you're trying to capitalize on something that is very time sensitive if you're capitalizing on say a new trend that's appeared if you're capitalizing on a new event a new shock in your sphere you should try and get as many videos out as soon as possible that are relevant of course when
you've covered everything that's important stop it's fine to take things slow and it's really important to do it because you'll pick up on errors you've made you'll be able to polish a video better don't focus on quantity unless you're in an exceedingly experimental phase where you're just throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks or there's like a giant trend is there anything you think creators spend too much time on which is just a waste of effort and they just need to put aside to focus on the things we've spoken about I know I
know a lot of smaller creators spend a stupendous amount of time trying to get their content out on every single platform and engaging with a community every moment now it is really fun to have a community but if you're spending you know 2 hours a day running a Discord server or playing with your fans every day that's two hours that you've not spent you know researching ideas or redoing thumbnails or titles of your old content don't get me wrong you shouldn't like separate yourself completely from your your audience you should always respond to like comments
it's really fun and wonderful but in those early days of YouTube where every video is a massive Improvement on the last and every step you take is so impactful just try and stay focused on that path don't get distracted by all of the things to the side of it don't try and spend all your time chasing down you know collaborations with other creators chasing down like sponsorship opportunities there's a time and a place for it and when you're starting out just focus on your Concepts your ideas and how you're presenting those ideas you came to
this video wanting to know how real creators succeeded in growing their YouTube channels well in this video a small Creator put all of his focus into limited areas and that helped him blow up in no time follow his lead you might do the same
