Advice for YouTubers

One of the questions I get asked a lot, apart from how to write a book and get it published is, “Drinker, you’ve done pretty well with this whole YouTube thing. How can I start a channel of my own, turn it into a mega hit overnight and make a shitzillion dollars in the process?”

Well, you’re in luck, dear viewer. Because now I’m launching The Drinker’s online YouTube Academy – YOUR pathway to success. For just $5000 per month, you get access to my barely functional website loaded with spyware and unskippable banner ads, where you can listen me shamelessly flexing about how rich and successful I am, while spouting generic, inane nonsense about having the courage to take risks, believing in yourself and above all, having fun.

Or you can just read this article for free, and hopefully learn a few things.

Now, I’m definitely not gonna pretend that I’ve got some magical formula for guaranteed success or anything, but I have learned a few things about being a YouTuber over the past few years. Some of it I learned from other people, and some through my own experiences. And just like with writing advice, I figured it was easier to make a video about it, rather than trying to help each person individually. So here it is – the Drinker’s list of do’s and don’ts to becoming a good YouTuber.

1. Find a unique selling point.

This is something you really ought to have nailed down before you even launch your channel, and it can be one of the most difficult things to do as a content creator. Basically, you need to think of something that makes your channel stand out from the crowd. For example, it could be some kind of relevant experience to the subject at hand.

Like, maybe you’re a military veteran with combat experience, and you’re going to use that knowledge to talk about battle scenes in movies or videogames, breaking down how accurate and realistic they are. That’s interesting for the average viewer, because you can bring a different perspective to this stuff than a regular old film reviewer, who’s never been in a situation like that.

Or maybe you’ve got experience working in the film industry and you can use that to discuss how movies are actually put together, or share interesting stories from behind the scenes.

Whatever it might be, anything that can make you more interesting than an average channel will really help to sell yourself – because that’s what you’re doing at the end of the day. Selling yourself. Which brings me neatly along to point 2.

2. Work on your presentation.

You’d be amazed the number of people who just sit there in front of a webcam and speak… with a flat, boring, monotone voice, like they don’t even want to be there. And if you sound like you don’t want to be there, then your audience probably won’t want to be there either. Ideally you want to come across as confident, engaging and interesting. You don’t need to be a happy clappy J-Pop star that’s just downed a gallon of Red Bull, but you at least want to sound like you’re passionate about what you’re talking about, so work on that. Practice. Record yourself speaking and play it back, then ask yourself honestly – “Would I want to listen to this guy?”

If the answer is no, then clearly you have some work to do. Being a content creator is a bit like being a writer, actor and director all in one, and all three aspects have to be strong if you want to do well.

Oh, and try to resist the urge to become Angry Shouty Man. Making lots of noise isn’t a substitute for being passionate and engaging, it usually overwhelms your audio equipment so it sounds like shit, and for most people its actually pretty off-putting to listen to. By all means, tear into things you don’t like if that’s what you want to do, but nobody really wants to listen to some fucking lunatic screaming at them.

3. Use scripted content.

It’s a rare individual that can plonk their arse in a chair, turn their webcam on and just start rolling, and manage to stay focused, articulate, insightful and on topic, so bear that in mind. Most normal people tend to revert to type when they’re on camera for too long. They stumble over their words, go off on tangents, make jokes on the fly that don’t land properly, they “umm” and “aaah”, they forget important details and information, and leave dead air while they try to remember. All of this stuff is the kiss of death for your average YouTube video, which is why most people should consider staying BEHIND the camera and working from a script.

Not only will this allow you to easily edit out mistakes and flubbed lines, but it’ll give you all the time in the world to think about the points you want to make, how you want to make them, and how to produce a concise, well structured video. And that brings me along to point 4.

4. Get to the fucking point!

As rare as it is to find a natural showman that can come up with smart, funny content on the fly, its even rarer to get a content creator that can produce hour-long videos that keep their audience engaged. Whenever someone watches one of your videos, they’re basically agreeing to give up some of their limited free time to engage with whatever you’ve made. You’re taking something FROM them, so not only should you give them entertainment in return, but you should do your best to take up as little of their time as possible.

Make sure your script is as slick and concise as it can be. Get your points across quickly and efficiently, and once you’ve made them, move on. Don’t waste your audience’s time with long, self-indulgent intros. And don’t go off on rambling, irrelevant tangents.

Your viewer is only ever one click away from leaving your channel and never looking back, so keep that in mind.

5. Pick relevant topics.

Probably the hardest thing to do on YouTube is to get that initial bit of momentum going, to get your first few subscribers who can start to share your work with others. When your channel first launches, you’ve got no subscribers and no content. So why the fuck should anyone take notice of a nobody like you?

Well, the fastest way to get noticed and grow your channel is to make videos on stuff that’s especially relevant at the time. I know that’s kind of obvious, but hey, sometimes it doesn’t hurt to cover the basics. Whenever some huge movie releases or some big controversy erupts online, you can pretty much guarantee it’ll be followed by a shower of reaction videos, all trying to ride that wave of interest. Whether or not you consider that to be a cheap and easy path to success, the fact is, it works.

In fact, its how my own channel first took off. The release of Captain Marvel back in 2019 generated a lot of controversy, and when I made a video discussing the hostile reception of the movie, I noticed it got like 10 times more views than normal. So I made another video about it which ended up going viral, and before you knew it, I had a million views and thousands of subscribers. Was I going to keep making videos about Captain Marvel for the rest of my career, trying to ride a wave that had already passed? Of course not, but now I had an audience to build on.

The point is, chasing clout like this can be a useful stepping stone that’ll get your channel noticed. But if you expect to keep people interested, then you’ve got to start producing good content they like. Which is why you should…

6. Have a focus.

One of the biggest mistakes that content creators make once their channel takes off is to try to diversify into too many different subjects, like a kid in a candy store that wants to take a bit of everything. A movie review here, a travelogue there, a book review, a video about working out or unboxing a new PC or taking their dog to the fucking vets. It might be interesting for you as a person, but for your audience, its frustrating because they never know what they’re going to get. People who want movie reviews are going to be turned off by all the other stuff, and people that are into travelogues will be pissed off when you review movies. The point is, find a subject area and focus on it. Build up your reputation for being good at it, and more people will subscribe to you. It’s really that simple.

And on the subject of simple advice, here’s some pretty obvious things to avoid if you want to succeed on YouTube.

1. Don’t Be a dick

This is probably the single biggest piece of advice I could give to anyone on this platform. The number of successful content creators that have self destructed by acting like total arseholes in front of millions of people, is just too big to count. Sometimes its because they got too big too fast, and their egos inflated along with their subscriber count, and sometimes its because they have prickly personalities that just can’t handle criticism.

Take Boogie, for example. He’s got like 4 million subscribers, but these days he struggles to break 50,000 views per video. Why? Because he’s got a long and pretty sordid track history of lashing out at critics even when they’re trying to help him, wallowing in self pity when things don’t go his way, insulting his own fans and generally… well, acting like a bit of a dick. And all of those things have gradually chipped away at his fanbase, to the point where nobody really gives a shit about him anymore.

Basically, you don’t want to be like Boogie. Putting yourself out there on YouTube means you’ll inevitably get criticized. And the bigger your channel becomes, the more criticism it attracts. And let’s be honest here, the internet’s not exactly known for being a place for polite good manners and reasonable discourse. A lot of this criticism is likely to be pretty fucking personal.

You can’t really control that, but what you can control is how you react to it. And by that, I mean most of the time you should do yourself a favour and just not engage with it. There’s plenty of smaller channels that have made videos about me, explaining in great detail why I’m literally the worst human being that’s ever existed, but I totally don’t give a shit and I’m not going to waste time responding to them. Why? Because then they’ll just make more videos complaining about how a bigger channel is picking on them. Ultimately all it does is give them exactly what they want – attention. And if you show attention to one person who attacks you, you’re just opening the door for everyone else to do the same thing.

Also, you should probably take some time to think about what kind of person you really are. And be honest here, because this is important. If you suffer from anxiety, low self esteem, insecurity or some other mental health issue, then YouTube is probably not going to do you any favours. You need to have a thick skin if you want to make it on a platform like this, and if you don’t, then you should probably save yourself a lot of heartache and not do it.

2. Don’t bring politics into your work.

Unless you’re an actual political pundit, you should probably do your best to keep your political opinions out of whatever you’re making. You don’t need me to tell you that we live in a pretty polarized world these days, and whatever side of the political divide you come down on, you’re just going to piss off the people on the other side. And why do it when you don’t have to?

Take Quinton Reviews for example, who was in the middle of a pretty bland, inoffensive movie review when he decided to awkwardly splice in a clip of himself ranting about how much he hated Donald Trump. This one clip did so much damage to his channel, and pissed off so many of his fans, and for what? So he could feel good about owning the Orange Man for a few minutes?

Like I say, if you’re a videogame critic, then people want to hear your opinions on videogames. Not the war in Ukraine, or civil rights protests in America, or the immigration policy of the UK. If they want that stuff, they’ll go somewhere else.

3. Don’t upload too often.

We’ve all seen channels that upload five or six videos a day, every day, because they feel like they have to maintain a constant stream of content or people will lose interest. And they’re usually quick, low effort content designed to be watched once and never revisited. And don’t get me wrong, some people are genuinely good at stuff like this, but the majority are absolute sludge. Just content for content’s sake.

Like Mike Zeroh, for example, who’s made about 7000 videos on Star Wars rumours with ridiculously sensational titles, that are basically nine minutes of generic, boilerplate nonsense designed to pad out the runtime and cram in as many keywords as possible, with maybe 30 seconds of unique content. Most of which is useless, false or out of date information lifted from old Reddit threads, or just made up entirely.

The point is, you should really aim for quality over quantity with your videos. And if that means only uploading once a week, then so be it. At least people will respect the work you produce, because they’ll know you had to put real effort into making it. You don’t want to get a reputation as just another clickbait clout chaser, churning out garbage content that nobody wants.

4. Don’t livestream too often.

As your channel grows in size, YouTube will gradually make more options available to you. One of which is being able to livestream. Now, I have to admit, there’s a definite appeal to this. For one thing, it allows you to interact directly with your fans, and for another, you can make some decent money from superchats if your channel’s big enough.

That’s great and everything, but its easy to get sucked into. And suddenly, the grind of scripting and editing videos seems like tedious work, when you can just turn the camera on, hit Go Live and watch that money roll in. But here’s the thing, not everyone cares about livestreaming. In fact, only a small percentage of your audience are even going to watch them, never mind donate to you. Shit man, I’ve got a million subscribers, and I’d be lucky to have even one percent of them tune into my livestreams.

The other problem with livestreams is that the replays end up cluttering up your channel, which is why you should always shunt them to a secondary channel and delete the originals. Otherwise its bad for the YouTube algorithm, which brings me to my final point.

5. Don’t release weak videos.

What the hell do I mean by this? Well, YouTube tracks the performance of every video you release. How many people watch it, how long they stick around for, how much they interact with it etc. It uses this stuff to build up a picture of how popular your channel is and how well your videos generally perform. All this information then gets fed into the YouTube algorithm, which decides which videos to recommend to which people. This is how most new subscribers discover you.

Release a string of videos on Marvel movies that perform better than usual, and the algorithm will probably pick up on it and start to recommend your content more often to people who commonly search for Marvel content. But the door swings both ways here, so if you happen to release a series of videos that underperform, the algorithm will begin to think you’re not as popular as you used to be, and so it’ll recommend you less often. This is the kind of shit that can put even big channels into a kind of slow death spiral, where their videos aren’t getting recommended as much, so they underperform even more, which puts them even further down in the algorithm. And well, you can guess where that ends up.

The best way to prevent this is to avoid releasing too many weak videos all at once. Like, you might be deeply passionate about Norwegian arthouse movies from the 1970’s. And that’s great, but it’s a pretty niche subject that not many people are going to look for today. So if you release a weak video like that, its clearly going to underperform. That’s fine, we all have videos that don’t do as well as we hope, and a single blip isn’t going to do your channel any harm.

But ideally, you ought to follow this up with a crowd pleaser that you know will get lots of views. That way, you maintain a decent balance of performance that keeps your channel healthy.

Now, obviously none of this stuff is going to guarantee success. There’s always an element of luck and chance to something like this, that no amount of planning and preparation can account for, but the point here is to give you the best chance possible and maybe help you avoid some of the mistakes and pitfalls that other content creators have fallen victim to. Maybe you’ll release just the right video at just the right time, and get catapulted into the spotlight overnight, or maybe you’ll have a longer road ahead of you.

All I can really say is good luck, either way. Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for today. Go away now.