If you have a YouTube channel, there’s a dashboard inside your account that is meant to provide all the analytics your heart could possibly desire.1 And if you’ve uploaded a video recently, the first thing that smacks you in the face is a top 10 list.
Everyone likes top 10 lists. You know where they start (usually with 10) and where they end (in this case, 1), and that’s more than you can say about a lot in life.
But this top 10 list is different. Because this one is evil.
Imagine you go to work and at the end of your day, every single day, your coworkers rank your performance compared to each of the last 10 days. This is the YouTube version of that: A ranking of you against your recent creative self, based entirely on how many others are enjoying your recent creative work.
You might be thinking, “Andrew, what’s the problem? Your latest video is the top performing video out of your most recent 10 uploads! Everything is just as it’s supposed to be. The sun is shining and the planets are aligned. Just imagine the growth… 133k views in 1.5 days and a CTR on the moon?? Pop the champagne because we are so fucking back, baby!”
To which I would say, “Yeah, hey you know what? Now that you mention it… You’re right. I am a fantastic creator. I worked damn hard on this video. I sweated the poker swings—Cinnabon got there twice in a 5 figure pot!—and that’s before all the time put in recording and editing, and then paying for additional editing help, finding a thumbnail, deliberating over the title... And now it’s time to reap our favorite kind of rewards: Gimme a quadruple shot of that sweet sweet dopamine, straight to the dome.”
1 of 10 is the YouTube gold medal. You’ll settle for a podium finish, but when it’s a 1? Oh baby, that feels good. The YT distribution engine is in top gear. It’s recommending your work to people around the globe, working for you while you go out for a decompression beverage that evening after a long week’s effort, and even while you sleep it off that night. If every video was 1 of 10, it would be constant reinforcement of your ideas. You would be constantly growing your channel, constantly attracting new eyeballs, constantly gaining subscribers and fans, constantly increasing channel revenue, constantly increasing the value of your videos for sponsors and brand deals, constantly improving the quality of your life…
But here on planet earth, in the lands of humanity and creativity, nothing is constant. It’s a top 10 list for a reason, not a top 1 list. Remember all those steps I mentioned, the ones that are required to get a video across the finish line? Those exist for every video. Even the ones that are 10 of 10. That sucks. It shouldn’t suck, but it does, if you are susceptible to the YouTube top 10 list.
This 10 of 10 video took the same number of hours, and came from the same brain—yours. It’s an expression of you. It is you. And you’re a dud. The world has moved on. Maybe just for this week, but maybe not. You can try again with another video, but god help you if you don’t crack the top 5, AT LEAST. Imagine if you put two bagels up in a row? It might be time to start thinking about a new career path. Maybe it’s back to the poker grind without the videos. Nobody lasts forever in YouTube…
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Try and think about how many people you personally know. You can include family, then add friends, coworkers, acquaintances, people at stores you frequent… What is it, maybe a couple hundred? Ok now try and think how many people you could name that are alive today, including famous people. Maybe you could get upwards of a thousand?
That lava cake-titled video currently has a total of 20,589 views and is essentially my worst-performing upload ever. It’s a packaging disaster—the title is completely outside the normal realm of my channel, you can barely see the food in the thumbnail, and the video opens with a completely unrelated topic. And that disaster of a video was watched by 20.5k people, or approximately 20x the number of people that I could even name, with a 98.7% like-to-dislike ratio. It was watched by 828 people in the UK! I think I know 3 or 4 people there.
I knew I was cooked with that video an hour after uploading. 60 minutes is plenty in YouTube time to know whether you’re a brilliant creative or a dud, at least for this week, and at least with this packaging. Sure, you can change the thumbnail and title. I probably should have, as a professional YouTuber. But maybe I just felt like protesting against the entire existence of the top 10 list.
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YouTube is cool in some ways, and one of those ways is that the distribution engine will inevitably connect you with some people you otherwise never would have. And one of those people I’m thankful to have been connected to is a guy named David Hill. David is an incredibly talented writer and creator, and all around cool guy. Lucky for us, he also enjoys gambling in general, so he very often points his talents towards that world to tell colorful, longform stories from within. (I am blessed that he reached out to me as he wanted to do an episode of his fantastic Gamblers podcast about my story and the vlog.)
You should check out Dave’s stuff but I mention him here for one reason in particular. On a break during the recording of the podcast, I asked him if he knows how the individual episodes do after publishing. Like, analytics-wise. And the answer was No.
“I never look into that stuff. I just post and publish, and forget about it. It’s done.”
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The trick isn’t to convince yourself how to not worry about the 10 of 10’s; it’s to not bother with the list at all. It’s to not get high on your own dopamine supply from 1 of 10’s. If you inject the list and everything that it represents into your veins for anything other than raw numerical analytical feedback (like if you aren’t an artist and you don’t have a soul) then you will struggle as a creator. There are some tricks to the YouTube trade that blend some algorithm science and human viewership nature with your art, and those small tricks will help with video performance. But you really gotta find the intersection of what you like and what you’re good at, and sit there. Then just post, publish, and forget about it.
It’s a message to myself, too, and know it’s easier said than done. But I’ll try.
Actually it would be cool if they broke down your viewership by city. They only go as low-level as countries and then US states. We always kinda wished they’d do cities too so that we’d be able to easier detail the value of a couple of YouTubers doing Meet Up Games to a casino suit. And now that I think about it, it would be cool to know who exactly skipped what portion of the vlogs. Because if people with more disposable income like the drone sequences, I’d feel better about making more of them. I might, again, be getting lost in the sauce, here…