It all started in early 2007, when I first started my YouTube channel, I just uploaded random videos that pertained to my interests. So I uploaded all the music videos of my favorite songs I could find off of Limewire along with the occasional Halo video, which was usually something really good like Itwasluck's 5th and 6th Halo 2 montage. After getting around 50 subscribers or so after a month or two, I, being the impatient teenager that I was, decided to give up all this YouTube crap. Going mono-Halo videos definitely surfaced as a possibility, but Airguitar901 was doing an amazing job with it all and he had a whopping 1,200-ish subscribers (making it impossible for me to compete) so I discounted the option.
Cue early 2008. The original owner of Airguitar901 had stepped down and was replaced with a guy named Blackout. Blackout did a LOT for the channel, and I respect him a lot for it, but given his schedule, he was only able to upload on one day of the week. This led to Airguitar posting 6-7 videos at once every weekend. He actually did a fantastic job getting all the videos, but the problems with this way of doing things are:
1) People don't like to wait
2) A bunch of videos all showing up at once clutters the subscription box, and this annoys some people
3) When a ton of videos are all uploaded at the same time, it's a simply a giant clusterfuck which ends up with all the videos taking views from one another and no video getting a good amount of views (unless it's ridiculous)
I saw an opening for a new Halo channel to rise up, and this spotted opening along with... my lots of free time, I guess, led to me starting up the channel again, this time as one dedicated purely to Halo.
I started off by uploading EVERYTHING, and I mean EVERYTHING. If I saw a video on Halo2Forum with a download link attached, I downloaded and posted it 99% of the time. My bar was essentially non-existent, and this led to me uploading upwards of 7 videos in a day. The theory behind this decision was that I wanted to go a database-esque purpose with my channel, simply having everything imaginable Halo video-wise. I mean, how can someone simply not subscribe if I have everything they'll ever need to satisfy their Halo desires? Another thing I did was put all-caps descriptors (you know, those "AMAZING" and "INCREDIBLE" labels I'm ultra-mega famous for), on pretty much anything of any quality whatsoever. In short, I was a view-whore.
Halo2Forum has ALWAYS been a spring of great Halo material and even the average stuff from H2F is pretty good by YouTube standards, because YouTube was, and still is, absolutely infested with horrible, horrible videos. So despite me being a view whore that uploaded everything and put all-caps adjectives next to half my stuff, I wasn't constantly flooded with comments telling me how much of a liar I was with my videos. Slowly but surely, the subscribers started to roll in, and my videos started getting more and more views. As an unknown uploader, I had to do something to stand out, and my method, as dishonest as it was, was something that stood out, which I why I think it worked.
So in the beginning, my strategy was fairly simple: Upload everything and have appealing titles. After I reached around 1,000 subscribers, my approach to YouTube gradually began to change. The ridiculous 5-7 uploads in a single day moments began to happen less and less, and soon I was averaging only 2-3 uploads a day. 3 of the reasons for this are exactly the same as the logic behind why Blackout's way of running Airguitar was poor. None of my videos were taking full advantage of my subscriber base by getting views from each, or at least most, of them. This is bad for 2 reasons:
1) Good videos don't get the views they deserve
2) Videos with small amounts of views have a very small chance of making it to stardom (I'll explain this more in depth later)
Even though 1,000 subscribers certainly isn't nothing, I knew that stretching my subscriber base by posting shit-tons of content everyday wasn't the way to go. The other reason why I slowed down my upload rate is because when you consistently expose people to a certain standard, the standard eventually becomes boring/too low, and they want something better. So when people subscribed to me, their standards naturally rose as they became accustomed to the caliber of the content on my channel, which meant that I had to raise it somehow. The easiest way to do this was to become more selective, and this in turn led to me uploading less. While uploading a bunch of videos may get more views from your subscription box, it lowers your chances of your videos being discovered outside of your subscribers because all of your videos will have poor launches (a phenomenon that will be explained later). To illustrate my example, a video with 100,000 views in its first week will pull in more views in a year than 100 videos that each got 1,000 views in their first week. In the end, it's an issue of balance: You want to upload frequently enough so that people don't unsubscribe, but rare enough so that your uploads actually mean something and they're given a chance at longevity.
Speaking of how I began uploading less and less to meet my fanbase's standards, let's talk about fanbase maintenance, because this is something that I've tangled a lot with over the years and still consider a vitally important issue. Obvious point alert: Your fans are important. In the end, you are nothing without your fans because they're what provide you with views, favorites, ratings, subscriptions, etc. After I had developed a sizeable fan following, I began cultivating my relationship with my fans. I read almost all of my comments, replied to many of them, and listened to all of my fans' opinions and demands. And similar to what I sometimes do now, I responded to hateful comments politely, tried to quell their hatred, and turn them into a respectful, contributing member of the Halo community. The difference between now and then was that I responded to ALL of these comments. These were the glory days. Not many people hated me, and there were very few people who were disrespectful of other people's comments and the videos on my page. This effect lasted until I hit something between 5,000 to 10,000 subscribers. I'm not entirely sure about this, but I think why I was able to do this was because I was in touch with my community. So here's my lesson to you based off of these experiences: When you're a small channel, take advantage of how small your fan following is. Positively interact with each and every member, build relationships, and create loyal fans. They are the initial core of your channel, so give them the respect they deserve. They WILL return the favor.
Naturally, as your channel becomes very large, it becomes difficult to maintain everything fan-wise. There's simply too many comments/messages/people. It will be physically impossible to keep track of every member due it being a massive time-sink. This happened to me a while back, and after a while, I just went, "Fuck this, I can't do this anymore." I stopped commenting on videos, I didn't prevent flame-wars by calling out troll/dumb posts and logically deconstructing them, and I didn't respond to personal messages. Don't do this. Never ever forget your fans. They are what made you, and if you let your fan base get out of hand, your channel will suffer greatly. The important thing here is balance. Obviously, you don't want to spend your entire life answering to every single message, comment, and hater, but you don't want to neglect your fanbase completely either. No matter what happens, ALWAYS try to maintain some sort of connection and always be trying to come up with ways to do it more efficiently. As an example, I will use Hutch, who, as we all know, is one of the biggest names on YouTube. The man has over half a million subscribers, so obviously responding to things one at a time would be incredibly inefficient and therefore stupid. Hutch recently uploaded a Vlog to his page updating his fans and delivering a heartfelt thanks to his fans. You could easily tell that his appreciation was genuine and that he appreciated each and every one of his subscribers. The response was overwhelmingly positive, and from the comments, it was clear that a ton of his fans still felt very connected with him despite him doing more stuff for Machinima instead of for his own channel after he got a job there. This is one of many examples of the way to go when it comes to tending large fan bases.
To wrap this up, here are the perks of having a loyal fanbase:
1) They're more tolerant of when you fuck up (upload a bad video, don't upload for a while)
2) They're more likely to do things that build your channel (share your channel with a friend, comment, favorite, thumbs up, etc). Of course, it's always good to get these things because you post quality stuff, but it obviously can't hurt to get these things using the "Wow, this guy seems like a genuinely good person and I will do this because of that" effect.
Now, let's move on to issues that are less obvious: Stuff involving numbers, statistics, and all that other awesome stuff. Why are moving into this? Because we're moving into the point in time when YouTube Insight (which is now YouTube Analytics) came out. If you somehow don't know this, Insight/Analytics is a tool that YouTube provides to analyze the numbers behind your channel.
When YouTube Insight came out, I was pretty excited. I've always loved working with numbers (Asians and math stereotypes go!), and I could finally gain a concrete, mathematical glimpse into the inner-workings of YouTube. Here's one of the first things that I noticed: Around half of my views came from the related videos/suggestions sidebar that appears to the right of any YouTube video. This discovery led to me developing a technique that I coined as "video batching". I used this technique to maximize the amount of related videos views I got by making all of my videos relate to each other. In other words, I wanted to prevent the views from my subscribers to "leak" outside of my channel, getting me more views and giving less of a chance for my competitors to grow.
People usually view tags as a place to dump each and every popular word that is connected with their video in any way whatsoever. To illustrate my point, this is something a newbie YouTuber would use as a set of tags for a Halo video of his:
"Bungie, double, triple, overkill, killtacular, killtrocity, killimanjaro, killionaire, BXR, BXB, MLG, pro, Walshy, Sniper, Snipe, Headshot, Spree, Killing, Halo: CE, Halo 2, montage, stick, Phurion, Kampy, Dutchy, Warthog, 343, Industries, Bloom, DMR, Battle Rifle, Invincible, Perfection..."
And the list goes on and on and on with the rationale being: If I have everything ever in my tags, my video will show up for infinite YouTube searches and therefore get infinite views. Yeah, that’s wrong. Here's a tip: Tags aren't very relevant, especially what you use for tags and how many of them you have. Here's what tags are good for: Being the driving force behind determining the related videos of a video. Back then the trend was this: The more similar the tags of two videos are, the higher their chances of being linked via related videos. This meant that videos with the exact same set of tags would pretty much always be related with each other. This is part of the basis of video batching. As soon as I discovered this, I started using the same set of tags for all of my videos. Eventually, smaller channels caught wind of this and started using my set of tags for their videos to sneak their videos into the related videos of my stuff. When a substantial amount of videos had snuck into these spots, I simply changed the set of tags I used. These smaller channels would follow suit, and then I would switch again, and again, and again, until they just gave up. Anyways, after I had started posting massive groups of videos with the exact same set of tags, I began to see a pattern, which I will illustrate with this example:
I start using a new set of tags for my videos. I upload video 1 with this new set of tags, then 2, then 3, all the way up to 8. A couple videos after video 8, let's say, video 15, I start noticing something interesting: For every video after video 8, the first 8 related video slots are occupied by videos 1-8, and usually in a fairly accurate semblance of the original 1 through 8 ordering too (video 1 is always on top, video 2 is always 2nd, etc...). Naturally, these videos accumulate a TON of views over time because almost every single video after video 9 is linking to the 8 of them. I call videos 1-8 the "seeds" of a new batch of tags, and I will now explain to you why they're important. Oh yeah, I should point out that this strategy doesn’t work out that well anymore with YouTube having changed 9352 times since late 2008 (when I discovered this).
Seeds are important because they let you control which videos of yours soak up all the related videos views, which, when you're running a large channel, is obviously a lot. So let's say there was this video or group of videos that I wanted to get a ton of views. Back in the day, when this strategy worked very well, I would start up a new batch of tags with these videos, and after they became established as the seeds of this new set of tags, they would start racking up views at an insane pace. I did this accidentally when I first discovered video batching. This is why Gernader Jake's Halo 3 montage, "Extermination", got around 100,000 views in its first year on YouTube; it was the #1 seed of the tags I used during this time. This also explains why it doesn’t get any views anymore; it’s not a seed of anything I upload nowadays.
Before I finish the section on seeds, I want to point out that copy-pasting the tags of super popular videos like those of RayWilliamJohnson or whatever doesn’t work. Tons of other people have the same theory, so there will obviously be a lot of competition, related videos are established primarily right after uploading, so unless you know a video’s tags before it’s uploaded, it won’t work, and even if you do get in there, people probably won’t go from the popular video to yours if it looks unrelated. If you’re completely unknown and you make similar content to whatever video you’re trying to leech off of, go ahead and try this strategy, because you have nothing to lose, but if you have any sort of following, it’s better to concentrate the related video views within your own channel instead of trying to get other channels to lead into yours. If you ignore what I say and try this strategy anyways, in the end, you’ll most likely end up feeding that video even more views while receiving nothing in return, and I know this because I’ve actually tried this a couple times.
Moving on from seeds, let’s delve into something that’s infinitely more important: Discovery. Discovery is when people who don’t know about you stumble onto your material. Nowadays, for small channels, the main source of discovery is search. So how do you get your videos to appear when people search things? Well, first we need to establish an important concept that I call “hot terms”. Hot terms are simply words or phrases that people search very often on YouTube. Hot terms are important because you obviously want your videos to appear at the top of the lists of commonly searched things. Now how do we identify these hot terms? Well, there are some that you can deduce by simply asking yourself, “When I go to YouTube, what do I want to search?” When I was trying to think of hot terms relevant to Halo, I came up with stuff like “Halo montage”, “Halo machinima”, and other obvious phrases. To verify that these were indeed commonly searched phrases, I searched them and made sure that their corresponding first couple of results all had high view counts. Nowadays, you can discover hot term by entering something into the search bar and using the auto-completed relevant phrases, which are usually listed in order of popularity. Another way of finding hot terms is by looking at the “Discovery” tab of your videos in YouTube Analytics. If one of your videos is randomly getting a lot of views, there’s a high chance that this is because it’s showing up for some hot term. This leads me into a somewhat off-topic point: ALWAYS analyze anomalies. When a video of yours is getting a lot of views and you don't know why, open YouTube Analytics for that video ASAP, identify the source(s), and try to take advantage of the source(s) for your future videos if you can.
Now once you’ve identified hot terms, how do you take advantage of this knowledge? Well, when it comes to search, it’s always been mainly an issue of video title. Everything else has almost no bearing on the matter, including tags. This is why whenever I post a montage, I always try to include the phrase “Halo _ montage” in the title, even when it’s customary to name it a dualtage or tritage when there’s multiple people in the video. This is also one of the reasons why I put “100% MLG” or “Lots of MLG” in the titles of montages; “MLG” is a very commonly searched word and I've gotten many views from people searching it and finding an MLG montage from my channel. There’s obviously a lot of competition to appear at the top of search pages, so here’s a tip: The closer to the beginning your hot term is in a video title, the higher chance that video has of appearing at the top of the list for that hot term. In other words, the title “(Bunch of stuff) – Halo 3 Montage” has a smaller chance of being one of the first results for the search for “Halo 3 Montage” than “Halo 3 Montage – (Bunch of Stuff). So to summarize this paragraph, this is what you want to do with all your video titles:
1) Cram in as many relevant hot terms as possible
2) Prioritize the more popular hot terms by placing them closer to the beginning of the title.
Nowadays, search pages are a lot more stagnant. Once videos have established their place at the top, it takes a lot to budge them. Back in the day, whenever I would post a Halo 3 montage, it would become the first result for “Halo 3 montage” almost automatically, and it would stay there for a day or two, because there was some priority mechanic that highlighted fresh material relevant to that term. I got a LOT of views that way, and even though search pages are pretty stagnant like I said, there’s no harm in trying and there’s always hope to squeeze your newest video onto one. Let’s say you make a Halo montage, and it’s entitled, “Destiny”. Yes, the thumbnail clearly indicates that it’s a Halo montage, but there’s absolutely no harm in adding “- A Halo Montage” to the title to try to get a couple views from search instead of merely titling it, "Destiny".
Now let’s move on to other sources of discovery. The next one is networking. This is when you get views from famous people and big websites linking to your stuff. Both are achieved through putting out super good material which eventually reaches these 2 sources by word of mouth, but there is definitely a role that you can play to make it happen more often. First of all, you can submit your own videos to these people and websites, but if you’re unknown to these people and on these websites, this usually won’t amount to anything; your messages and posts will be ignored. You can change this by:
1) Trying to make friends with powerful people. Now the best case scenario is them approaching you because your stuff’s awesome and they stumbled upon it, but you’re generally going to have do some of the work by approaching them. When doing this, make sure to be polite, take the time to punctuate and spell correctly, and be grateful. These people probably go through dozens of messages a day, the least you can do is sound intelligent, be thankful for them spending their time to read a message from someone they don’t even know, and not seem as if the only thing you care about is getting more views and subscribers.
2) Making a name for yourself on websites such as Reddit, Digg, etc. This one's pretty simple too, similar to number 1. Sound intelligent, be polite, post good things. Done.
The last source of discovery is the YouTube awards list and their featured content. Both are pretty irrelevant, because it's pretty impossible to get views from either of these sources. YouTube is naturally an industry that's hard to profit from seeing as how they're constantly hosting several terabytes of material with another terabyte being added every day or whatever, so they're always doing everything they can to plug the material of their biggest partners. As a result, the featured YouTube stuff is always a RWJ or ShaneDawson video or whatever, though Just Mad's final Halo 3 montage and Salaya's "The Experience" were somehow featured back when they were posted. Moving on to the awards list, this one's hard to take advantage of because it's completely dominated by large channels, and the large channels nowadays are freaking gigantic. Back in the day, I could pretty easily get videos onto the Top Rated and Top Favorited sections for gaming because the CoD boom hadn't happened yet. In fact, LBYL 2 used to be on the Top 100 Rated videos of all time for all of YouTube, because back then, the system revolved more on how high the average rating was rather than how many ratings there were. In simple terms, super good videos used to get a lot of views because super good videos usually have a high rating to view ratio along with a high average rating, which lead to them making it onto awards lists, which in turn got them a lot of views. This leads me into my next point: Remember, views have to come from somewhere. A video won't magically get views because it's super good. With how dominant the large channels are nowadays, this statement is even more true than it was before. This makes begging for likes, favorites, and comments to get more views pretty irrelevant unless you're a large channel and you land a video on an awards page every time you do this. So if you aren't a large channel, you should do this sparingly in order to not cheapen the message, and when you release a video that you think is really sick, go all out and hope that this is enough to make it onto these lists. Ask for the whole shebang, and if your video is actually as good as you think it is, you should get a really high feedback ratio (ratio of likes/comments/favorites to views) due to the caliber of the video and your message having more weight because you don't use it very often. This is why I try to use all-caps adjectives in titles very sparingly nowadays; I want it to count when I do use them.
Another simple way of getting more views is to simply know where your fans are from and who they are, and using this information to upload videos at the right time in order to have my videos be at the top of as many sub boxes as possible when my fans go to YouTube. For example, I know that most of my fans are American students. This is why I upload my videos between 2-4PM PST (Pacific Standard Time) on weekdays; everyone has either just gotten back from school or has been home for a couple hours. You also want to try to release your better videos on weekends, because that's when everyone is home and your additional effort will be rewarded the most. If my fanbase had an even split between Europe and America, I would upload when it's afternoon in Europe as well. And now I digress into the process of "championing" videos (inventing terms ftw).
"Championing" a video is when you go all out to give a video as good a launch as possible. The launch of a video is its most important time, because how well a video does in the first week or so of its release usually determines how well it will do in the future. This is because the fresher a video is, the higher chance it has of making awards lists (the weekly list is obviously less competitive than the monthly list), making it onto search pages (age is still one of the factors), and getting views from outside sources (people hate old stuff). In other words, a video's beginning is the best time for it to become noticed. Championing videos is important because it helps you ensure that your best videos are getting the most views. Similar to how money makes money, views get views. A video with a lot of views (generally with at least 100,000) will naturally keep on getting views because it's established in many search pages and related video sidebars, and it has a lot of appeal simply because it has a lot of views (the rationale being, "Hey, this video has a lot of views. It must be good if it has so many of them, so I'm gonna click on it."). This means that your most viewed videos will be responsible for a lot of your discovery, and you naturally want your most viewed videos to be your best ones because this will give people a good impression of your channel. Furthermore, sorting a channel's videos by most popular/most viewed is one of the most common things people do when they check out your channel page, and you want your best stuff to be up there so they can give good impressions and do this faster and faster as they get more and more views from the most popular/most viewed tab. Anyways, this is what you do when you want to champion a video:
1. You can try the seed trick by starting a new set of tags for it and getting all your next videos to have it as the number 1 related video.
2. Get it onto awards lists by asking for comments, likes, and favorites. There's also a fairly overlooked "Most responded" awards list, which is based on how many video responses a video gets. When "Legacy" came out, I responded to it with a couple hundred videos to instantly put it on that list. When you're asking for feedback, you can do it via annotation, but since you can turn those off now and some people probably have them turned off by default, having something within the video is obviously the most effective, especially if it's actually you delivering the message and not some text screen.
3. Post it at a good time. For me, this would be during a weekend afternoon PST.
4. Have a flashy title. In my case, I add in all caps adjectives. And make sure to still jam in as many hot terms as possible.
5. Don't upload anything new for a while so it can soak up as many subscriber views as possible.
6. Have it as the featured video on your page, and sticky it in your videos and/or favorites list for redundancy if you want it and are still using the old YouTube layout.
7. Post it everywhere.
4. Have a flashy title. In my case, I add in all caps adjectives. And make sure to still jam in as many hot terms as possible.
5. Don't upload anything new for a while so it can soak up as many subscriber views as possible.
6. Have it as the featured video on your page, and sticky it in your videos and/or favorites list for redundancy if you want it and are still using the old YouTube layout.
7. Post it everywhere.
Now I want to go into networking between your videos. This goes over how deeply your videos are interconnected to one another. We've already gone over one aspect of this with the section on related videos. Now I want to move into annotations and video responses, and there really isn't much to say: Link your videos together via video responses and annotations. It strengthens the possibility of the dream scenario happening: Some person stumbles onto your video or finds it in his subscription box. He sees it, likes it, and proceeds to another video of yours via related video, response, annotation, whatever. This continues and by the end of the day, this person has contributed 50 views to you. If you can, incorporate those nice title screens at the end of your videos that plays clips from your other videos in boxes which you hook up with a spotlight annotation. The last thing I want to go over is playlists. I overlooked playlists for a while because I find them to be pretty useless, but one day I did a search for "Halo 3 montage" and saw a couple playlists as the second result, one of them being my "My Top 10 Halo 3 Montages" playlist, which I never update. I was shocked, and I proceeded to look at the YouTube analytics for the videos in the playlist: The first video in the playlist had gotten over 10,000 views from people checking out the playlist! What's really awesome is that this one playlist took the space of one video in the search page but was getting views for 10 videos at once. It was essentially a super-video since the playlist started with one video and then auto-played into the rest of them and even looped when the last video was done. So yeah, playlists are awesome. They appear via searches, and they raise attention for several videos at once. When you can, make playlists containing hot terms; it only takes a couple seconds, and it can do you wonders by appearing on search pages. Also, try to make them series playlists when you can. This nifty, new little feature makes the first related video slot of any video in a series playlist whatever playlist that video is in. So if some video of yours is in a series playlist with 50 videos, the first related video slot of this video essentially links to 50 videos. Efficiency ftw.
To end the video networking section, I want to go over a neat little trick I learned quite recently: Let's say you want to link video A via an annotation in video B. Now let's say video A is in a playlist. When you're making this annotation, go to the playlist that A is in, and click on A. Now use the URL of this page for your annotation. When people click the annotation in B, they will go to video A, but it will be in playlist mode. If the person's paying attention, there's a chance they'll check out the rest of the playlist, and if they aren't, you might snag a couple extra views from the auto-play function of playlists.
On to channel views, which is when people view your channel page. Channel views are awesome because they lead to subscriptions (obvious), and you can easily convert them into video views. The easiest way is through your featured video player, which now has an autoplay option for everyone, not just YouTube partners. If you haven't already, make your channel default to "Featured" instead of "Feed" and turn on auto-play. However, if you're confident that people care about your feed enough to actually click on the things in it, continue using your feed as your default page and favoriting and liking your own. Anyways, then remove modules that can't provide views such as your list of friends, subscribers, and subscriptions. Channel comments are pretty useless too, and they're about 90% spam once you have any sort of fan following whatsoever. Lastly, jam as many playlists as you can onto your video page, because like I said before, playlists are awesome.
And now more networking, and by more networking, I mean social networking. Social networking, mainly Twitter and Facebook, not only provide a better way for you to interact with your fans, they also essentially provide you with another subscription feed. Let's say that you post a video, and after a week, it's not doing as well as you would have hoped view-wise. You can post it to Twitter/Facebook, and assuming it got muscled out of a lot of people's subscription boxes, it should get a wave of extra views. You can also do this with your older videos for your newer fans. The YouTube subscription box is a competitive arena, and Twitter, Facebook, and other social networking sites essentially give you another subscription box to broadcast your content through. And speaking of extra subscription boxes, since YouTube feeds also broadcast general activity now, take advantage of your "likes" and "favorites" in a similar fashion to your Twitter and Facebook pages. Try to set up "box4box"s with large channels, if you somehow haven't figured that out already.
Lastly, I want to talk about content. Besides the obvious "make good content" and "do what you want" pieces of advice, I want to go over accessibility. If you're reading this post, you're probably a gamer, and subsequently, if you want to start a YouTube channel, it's probably one dedicated to gaming. Your potential demographic is automatically limited, because not everyone is a gamer. And if you're going to post material from a certain game, you're limiting yourself even more. If you're looking to go big, remember to keep your options open from the very beginning. If you settle into a niche like I did with Halo montages, you're severely limiting the amount of attention you can get because you only appeal to a certain demographic, and in my case, a certain piece of a certain demographic. The "from the very beginning" part is relevant because your fans will come to expect a certain type of video from you, which means that any attempt to shift or branch out will be met with some amount of negative reception. In summary, if you want to become the most subscribed gaming channel on YouTube, don't only upload MLG Halo 3 montages.
Super lastly, don't get hung up when you're not getting the amount of views/subscribers you want, especially with subscribers. In the end, views are the only thing that matter; subscribers don't mean anything if they don't watch your video. This is why "sub4subs" are stupid; you're merely increasing your sub count, which is a useless number unless it gets you onto an awards list. I would much rather get 100,000 views per video with only 10,000 subscribers than 10,000 views per video like I am now. Even though caring too much won't really hurt you directly, it can show when you're networking with other people, and it's not good for your reputation, which decreases the chances of people helping you out and giving you attention. If you're going to connect with your fanbase like you should, it's best if you don't seem like a view/subscriber whore. But in the end, it's a balancing act and a gamble. If you don't have that annotation asking for a like and favorite on your newest and greatest video, it may never reach an awards lists and snowball into stardom, but the more of these you do, the lesser your reputation is.
Whew, I think that's all I wanted to say. To summarize this monster of post, here are the bullet points in non-bullet point format:
1. Connect with your fans and give yourself a face. During a time where talent is springing up everywhere, human personality is a great way to distinguish yourself.
2. Connect your videos together via related video, annotation, video response, and playlist. You want to turn every view into a cascade of several views.
3. Know who your fanbase is so you can take advantage of time-zones.
4. Network, network, network. Establish a presence on large websites, get to know people, create pages on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, and do box4boxes.
5. Make material that is accessible to as many people as possible.
6. Don't care too much about numbers. Have fun with it. Be natural. It'll pay you back, don't worry.
7. Find the hottest terms and jam your video titles with them whenever you can. Do this with playlists too.
8. Champion your best videos.
9. Take advantage of your channel views. Have it be on "Featured" instead of "Feed", jam as many playlists as you can onto the page, and eliminate modules that don't get you views. Also, limit your news feed so that it only contains relevant information.
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