YouTube : Rags to Riches in 1 Week?

If you’ve followed me on Twitter you will have seen me posting links to videos on my YouTube channel. You can see me talking about starting the channel in the first video.

One week and 5 videos in and I’ve just hit 50 subscribers. Watch out PewDiePie!

One thing I didn’t mention in that video was my hopes/expectations as far as subscribers are concerned. As I said in one of my writing tips posts, Oracle is a niche subject on the internet. If you put out some half-decent content on a YouTube gaming or fitness channel, you would probably expect to get a few thousand subscribers fairly quickly. That’s not the case for an Oracle channel. Before I started this YouTube channel I did a little research and the biggest Oracle-related channel I could find was about 30,000 subscribers and that was Oracle’s main YouTube channel. After that some were knocking around 1000-4000 subscribers. Below that were a bunch of channels that were pulling double or triple figures of subscribers. Starting an Oracle-related channel is *not* a good idea if your master plan is to dominate YouTube! 🙂

OK. With that bullshit out of the way, how have I found my first week?

• Making YouTube videos is hard! It takes a long time. I’m estimating about 1 hour of effort per minute of footage. The first 3 minute video took 3 days, but that included learning the technology and getting to grips with editing. Hopefully I’ll get a bit slicker as time goes on. 🙂
• Doing the vocal for a video is a nightmare. After a certain number of retakes your voice ends up sounding so flat you start to wonder if you are going to send people to sleep. I listen back to my voice on some of the videos and it makes me cringe. It’s monotone and devoid of personality (insert insult of your choice here). As I get better at the recording thing, I’m hoping the number of retakes will reduce and my vocal will sounds less like I’m bored shitless. 🙂
• I love the fact I can do “quick” hit-and-run videos and not feel guilty about not including every detail. I’m putting links back to my articles, which contain more detail and most importantly links back to the documentation, so I’m happy that these videos are like little tasters.
• I’m being a bit guarded about the comments section at the moment. When I look at other channels, their comments are full of spam and haters. I can’t be bothered with that. I’ll see how my attitude to comments develops over time.
• I’m hoping to do some beginner series for a few areas, which I will build into playlists. This probably won’t be of much interest to regular followers of the blog and website, but it will come in handy for me personally when I’m trying to help people get started, or re-skilled into Oracle. I might be doing some of that at work, hence my interest. 🙂
• I’ve tried to release a burst of videos to get the thing rolling, but I don’t know how often I will be able to upload in future. Where Oracle is concerned, the website is my main priority. Then the blog. Then the conference thing. Then YouTube. The day job and general life have to fit in around that somewhere too. This is always going to be a labour of love, not a money spinner, so I have to be realistic about what I can achieve.

So there it is. One week down. Five videos. Four cameos by other members of the Oracle community. Superstardom and wealth beyond my wildest dreams are just around the corner… Not!

Cheers

Tim…

Note to self: Why is this a blog post, not another video? 🙁

Author: Tim...

DBA, Developer, Author, Trainer. View all posts by Tim...