Transcription
This video has been a long time in the making for me. After over a year, 13 months to be exact, and nearly 100 long form videos, I am officially accepted into the YouTube partner program after having one video go viral on December 26th, the day after Christmas.
If you are a new YouTuber or not even really particularly that new like I was. I had been going at this for a year with very very slow growth and if you're feeling stuck, if you're feeling discouraged, if you're thinking about maybe even quitting, then this is the video for you.
Up until December 26th when that one video just blew up for me on my channel, I was sitting at about 700 subscribers and 2800 watch hours. Now, to be accepted into the YouTube partner program, where your videos can actually be monetized, where you are earning money from the ads that YouTube plays on your videos, you need 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours. And I just went through this, well, a year of putting a lot of effort into a long form video, getting maybe two or three subscribers per video, and feeling discouraged along the way. Several times I would get burned out and I would think about quitting. I didn't quit.
During the times of burnout where I felt really discouraged, I would still upload shorts. The shorts definitely kept me going during the times where I was very discouraged by all the effort that goes into making a long form video, editing it, uploading it, and then just seeing very, very low views, low engagement. So, all of that changed with this one viral video.
And I'm sure you're wondering what the title of the video was or what the topic of the video was. If you're seeing me for the first time, my channel is all about my vintage reselling business. I am a vintage reseller with an antique booth in a brick-and-mortar store. I would appear in my thumbnail, often wearing this shirt, "easily distracted by antiques." I put my face in, I think, every thumbnail that I did. I just wanted people to become familiar with me and keep clicking on me because they would recognize me. So that's a bit of advice I have for you about thumbnails: put your face in your thumbnail and have a consistent looking thumbnail. A lot of the times the background for me was the bricks of my house and that created a decent background. I took those pictures outside so it also gave me good natural daylight for the photos that I was taking of myself.
So, the title of the video that went viral is "vintage items that won't sell in your antique booth." And I put "updated for 2026." As of today, that video has gotten 357,000 views and 26,000 watch hours and has earned me 2700 subscribers. Now, that's just amazing. Up until this video, my best performing video ever, only had 3,800 views, and I was just struggling right there below 3,000 watch hours. This one video alone has gotten me 26,000 watch hours. And I am just blown away by these numbers.
Okay, why do I think that this video actually blew up? I think it might have been for a couple of reasons. I have been working on titles and thumbnails for a very long time to try to attract more viewers. My title contains two very important keywords, "vintage" and "antique." Well, actually "antique booth." So, those are two very important keywords or key phrases in my niche. And I also published the video on December 26th with the wording "updated for 2026." And I think that at the end of the year, that YouTube was purposely pushing out videos that had something to do with looking ahead toward 2026. So I think that worked in my favor.
And the other thing I suppose is the concept of fear of missing out. The video title said, "These things won't sell in your antique booth." If you're an antique booth owner or a vintage reseller, or you are thinking about becoming a vintage reseller online or in a booth, you don't want to waste your money buying a bunch of things that won't sell. So, I think that attracted people to the video as well.
Another thing that I think worked in my favor was that I uploaded the video on December 26th, a day that a lot of people had off of work, that people were just on the platform.
I just want to talk a little bit about some things that didn't work for me in the beginning. The first thing that I decided upon was a content schedule. And the content schedule that I drafted for myself was to post a video every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I quickly realized that I was not able to keep up with that schedule. It was just way too much for me, especially as someone who was learning video editing software from scratch. Like I had no knowledge. I used a free version of Da Vinci Resolve and I really like it a lot. But the learning curve was very steep for me with video editing software.
What I finally settled into was trying to do one long form video per week. I did go to the analytics and look to see when my audience was most on YouTube. And I used that information to sort of guide me into when I would upload that video. And what I found by looking at my analytics was that for a very long time, the majority of my viewers were on the platform on Sunday afternoons. So my new content schedule was basically Sunday afternoons, one video per week. And then for a while there, I was also doing a short maybe midweek. So I was trying to put out two videos per week. All in all, I had a little over 100 videos at the end of my first year on YouTube. Some of those were shorts, but the vast majority of them were long form videos.
Next, I want to talk a little bit about the equipment that I used. I use my Samsung smartphone to film my videos. I was not willing to spend money on a camera if I wasn't earning any money on YouTube. I spent a little bit of money in the beginning on a lavalier mic that clips to my shirt. And then more recently, I've got this stand microphone that I'm using. And I hope it's better. I'm not sure if I can tell a huge difference. So, I don't have fancy equipment. I have an old HP laptop. There are times when it crashes because it can't handle the workload from Da Vinci Resolve. When I got my notification from YouTube that I have been monetized, I went ahead and got a new laptop. It has 64 GB of memory. I'm still using a Hewlett Packard. I really like their laptops. And I figured that after having that old laptop, it has been serving me very well for about 8 years, I think, that it was time for an upgrade. I still don't have a fancy camera. I'm still filming today using just my cell phone.
Back to the periods of burnout that I experienced, and I mentioned that during those times of burnout, I would still upload shorts. There is a lot of debate on YouTube as to whether or not shorts help or hurt your channel. I watched a creator who suggested that if your views are suffering, which mine were. In the beginning of the channel, my views and engagement was steadily growing and then I seemed to just, I hit a wall where my views were significantly down. People who watch shorts are only interested, and maybe they only have the time to be on the platform to watch a video that's three minutes or less. So what happens is I was getting subscribers from those shorts, but then I would put out a long form video and YouTube would push it out to those new subscribers and they didn't watch it because they're not long form video viewers. They consume content that is much shorter. So I think that's why I went through a period of very low views is because the people who had subscribed to me because they liked my shorts were not clicking on and watching the longer form videos. What this does is it tells the YouTube algorithm that your subscribers are not watching your new videos. So, if your subscribers aren't watching them, then the YouTube algorithm won't push it out to a wider audience. They just won't take the risk if your subscribers are not even interested in the video.
So, the creator that suggested this, and I'm going to put a link to his channel in the description box of this video, he said that all the big creators, I'm not a big creator, but like, he mentioned Mr. Beast. Mr. Beast has a separate channel just for shorts and a separate channel for his long form videos. He's got multiple channels now, but and that was his suggestion: if you want to do shorts, to have a separate channel just for your shorts. So that is really interesting food for thought.
Once I stopped producing all the shorts and actually like doubled down on my long form content again, I was still struggling with low views until that one viral video.
When I struggled with burnout and feeling like I wanted to quit, there were a couple of creators who I would turn to just for some moral support and encouragement. One of those is one of my favorite YouTubers, Rob the Maritimer. He is just like a no-fluff, like down-to-earth kind of guy and his whole entire niche is to help encourage new YouTubers. And also Tai Myers. He is also a very down-to-earth guy. Seeking out other YouTubers who encouraged me not to quit when I felt like quitting was important in helping me to keep going. I think Ty Myers was the one who really did a good video on the dip and I had experienced the dip in views and he basically explained that you have to make it through the dip without quitting to experience the uptick again. And that is what I ultimately experienced with this one viral video.
A little bit of advice I have for you is to overcome the urge to compare yourself to other creators in your niche. I would watch other creators in my niche and they would go shopping at thrift stores and they would be able to have a really good dialogue of themselves shopping in a thrift store. I am just so shy and I care way too much about what people think about me. Or when I'm in a store and I'm filming the shelves and I'm talking to myself, I just feel so silly. So, I just had to figure out what worked for me. And what worked for me was doing videos where I was actually sitting down in my house or outside delivering helpful information to other vintage resellers or going shopping in a thrift store, coming home and doing a voice over. So, you have to find what works for you and just be authentic to yourself. Don't try to copy someone else if it's just not going to work for you. You have to be yourself and figure out how to make your own videos with your own personal style.
Another reason why I think that my video did so well was that I immediately started replying to the comments. Now, I have always said in my videos, "Please leave me your comments. I will reply to everyone." So then I get this video with thousands of comments, right? And I was determined that I was going to reply to every comment unless it was purposely intended to be hurtful toward me or nasty or just, um, I had one that was even really sexist towards women and I deleted the ones that were offensive or just really nasty, just purposely intending to be hurtful to me. And the thing is is that the people who have nothing better to do than insult you or try to make you feel stupid or whatever the case may be, the comment says more about them than it says about you. I'm pretty sensitive. Like I can get a hundred nice comments and get one mean one and I will dwell on that mean one. So that's why I decided to delete the mean ones is because all they were doing were upsetting me every time I would go back into YouTube Studio and try to tackle my comments.
One thing that helped is that when my video popped off, my husband and I were traveling for Christmas and on the 27th, the day after I published that video, he drove us home. So we were in the car for about four hours and he drove and I just responded to comments all day. So, when the YouTube algorithm sees that there's a lot of engagement in your comment section, it will continue to keep pushing your video out to wider and wider audiences. And that's what happened with my video.
Another thing I did in the video is I encouraged healthy debate in the comment section. I'm sitting outside, my notes are blowing away, but and that definitely happens. I'll show you here a clip of where I did that in the beginning of my video. "Today, I'm going to share with you several categories of things that just do not sell for me in my antique booth. Now, you may disagree with some of that, and that's okay. I think healthy disagreement is just fine, and we can do that in the comment section." I knew that there would be people who disagreed with me and people who agreed with me. What I did not predict was the extent to which I would get engagement in the comment section. But all of those, even though some of them were maybe a little bit sarcastic or cheeky or know-it-all, I didn't delete them even though they, they didn't upset me. They just got me kind of worked up. And I didn't delete them because comments show the YouTube algorithm that people find your video interesting and engaging enough to comment.
It's interesting. Some of the meaner comments I got were, "Oh my gosh, this lady is just incredibly boring." And another one of them was, "I had to speed up your video to 1.5 speed just for normal conversation." And basically what that person was saying was that I speak too slowly. I ended up deleting those two comments because they were off-topic. They had nothing to do with the topic of the video. It made me feel bad, so I just decided to delete them. However, if a comment was a little bit sarcastic or a little bit cheeky and it was on topic, I kept it.
This is going to be my last sort of bullet point in this video, but I wanted to talk to you where I am now in the monetization program. I reached my watchtime hours. Like, I crushed my watchtime hours that I needed. I needed 4,000 to get monetized and I crushed that in a matter of a couple of days with that viral video. But I didn't officially get accepted into the YouTube partner program until January 1st. So there were several days there, December 26th all the way through December 31st. There were several days where that viral video was getting a ton of engagement and views and watchtime hours. And I'm not going to get paid for those days because all of those views happened before I was accepted into the YouTube partner program.
Now, why did it take so long for them to recognize my watchtime hours? I have a couple of theories on this. One is that YouTube has to work really hard to make sure that all of my views were legitimate. There are people out there who will fraudulently pay people for views. And that's not something I did. I actually got all of those watchtime hours legitimately. And when you look in the comment section, you'll see that those are real people who are making those comments and engaging in those conversations with me and with each other. So, it took YouTube several days to actually investigate my channel. And they did explain that. There's a little question mark. I kept clicking on it and it explained it can take several days for your watchtime hours to become updated. And I do think that it took real people and not, you know, robots to actually examine my channel and make sure that everything that was happening on it was legit because like I said, to go from your biggest video having 3,800 views and then that was an outlier for me because after that several of the videos that I made after that had 200 views or less to having a video that quickly, you know, got 100,000 views, like really quickly, it probably raised a red flag. And I think it's possible that in that period between Christmas and New Year's, just like any other business, YouTube had a lot of people who were on vacation from work because it was the holidays.
Where I am right now in the process is that I have uploaded a picture of my government ID. It's my driver's license. And I have linked my bank account into my Google AdSense. And now I am waiting on a piece of snail mail. And it's going to have a PIN in it and I have to plug that PIN in to the right screen and then I will be able to get paid. So, that's exciting.
As of today, even though I'm not going to get paid for those several days where that video was blowing up, I have older videos that are also doing really well. I have no idea how the algorithm chose which ones of my older videos to push out next, but I'm going to keep looking at those and seeing what I did in those titles and what I did in those thumbnails that worked. And I'll just double down on what's working. As of today, my earnings just from January 1st to January 7th, which is the day that I'm filming this, it won't be the day that you're actually seeing it for the first time, but I've made an estimated $455 in just those seven days. After a year and a hundred videos and hundreds of hours of work where I was working for no pay, I'm really excited about that $455. I'm not going to continue to have viral video after viral video, but my videos are definitely not in the 100s range now. At least they're in the thousands range, which is super exciting.
So, I hope you found this video valuable today. I hope that you feel motivated by my experience, all the highs and the lows that I've had over the year. >> [music] >> I would encourage you if you are feeling stuck, if you are feeling discouraged, don't quit. Ride out the dip. Ride out the low point if you're [music] experiencing one. Reach out to other YouTubers. Watch videos by YouTubers whose niche it is to help people like us who are growing. Comment on those videos. Maybe you'll get a reply. It's wonderful. I'm telling you.
If you are interested in me doing a follow-up video to [music] this one where I've actually gotten my first paycheck from YouTube, then please go into the comments and type "more info." And if [music] I get some comments that say "more info," I will know that you are interested in me putting out another video a couple weeks from now where I can sort of give you a better idea of how much money I [music] made in my first 30 days on YouTube.
Well, I think I've probably gone on for long enough today, but I just wanted to say thank you so much for watching today. And as always, I look forward to seeing you again in the next video.