The View from 100,000

Everyone who works hard on their Youtube channel wants 100,000 subscribers. Don’t let anyone lie to you; we all want to cross that line.

Does 100,000 mean more money? Does it unlocks special features? Nope. In practical terms, it means nothing. Youtube will send you a fake silver plaque, but so what. You don’t get anything of substance for hitting 100k.

But you get respect. 

I don’t know how 100k became a dividing line between the wannabes and the real-deal professionals, but it is. 100k is an invisible stamp of approval. It tells the world that you’re sitting at the grownup table. Viewers become more likely to subscribe. Other creators will treat you with more respect. We all pay attention to who has the most subscribers. I’ve shared a couple of meals with Jimmy Diresta and let me tell you, when that man says something, everybody else shuts up and listens. 

100,000 is like climbing Mount Everest. Starting the trek means nothing. Lots of people end up dead by the side of the trail.

When I started graduate school, it was daunting, but I always felt like I’d get to the end if I stuck with it. It took seven years, but I finished. The only ones who didn’t were the ones who quit. If you kept going, you eventually made it.

Youtube isn’t like that. Trying hard and sticking with it won’t get you anywhere. At the end of my first year of making videos, I had 1200 subscribers. If it took a whole year to barely crack 1000, how could anyone make it to 100,000? Surely, these people were magicians.  Creators with lots of subscribers were just…better than me. Numbers don’t lie.

Except they do.

Growth on the platform isn’t linear or predictable. It’s governed by a thousand mysterious variables and the dips and spikes of your career will come whipping past you like trees outside a train window. For a long time, I added 2000 subscribers a month like clockwork. The math was simple: I would hit 100,000 in about seven years. 

Sigh.

But crazy things do happen. I made a fancy bowl out of plywood and colored resin. The video took off. At the end of my second year, I had 20,000 subscribers.

Let’s stop here. Understand that for the person on the ground, 20K feels like its own little mountain. You’ve fought and scraped for every one of those subscribers and standing atop a nice round number like that, you are the king of all you survey. Until you look up and see the looming shadow of all those people who have hundreds of thousands or even millions listed under their names. Your mountain becomes a hill, and then it becomes a little bump in the road.

And in between your little spikes come months or maybe years of slow, uninspiring growth; numbers that tick up so slowly that they’re not even worth paying attention to. Last year was a good one, I went from 20,000 to 60,000, but most of that growth was slow. I desperately wanted 60k by the end of the year, but I barely snuck in under the wire.

At 70K, something odd happened. The ground shifted underneath my feet and the slope to 100 was suddenly downhill. It would happen. It was only a question of when. And then I found a picture of a junky old English workbench, and I built it, and I made a video.

Boom.

Last month, I added 26,000 subscribers. That’s more than I got in my first two years combined. My subscriber count climbed faster than I could hit the refresh button on my browser.

Last Friday, I sat with my wife and watched 99,999 roll over to the magic number. We got up and hugged and jumped up and down like teenagers. It wasn’t as special as finding out that we were having a baby, but it was a moment we’ll talk about for a long time.

Honestly, I never thought I’d get here. I talk a good game, but I’m no more self-confident than anyone else. I don’t believe that I’ll succeed. I often don’t think that I deserve to. I think most of us are like that.

But I’ll tell you something interesting. Last year, I saw the great Laura Kamph give a talk about how to be creative while building a business. The woman is a genius and she has about a zillion subscribers. Everyone listened to her very carefully.

She said that numbers are meaningless. She said that the moment she hit 100,000, all she could think about was how she wanted 200,000. She said it would be like that for us who were still on the journey. She said that any number we hit would only kindle within us the lust for a higher number and another unreachable peak where the air was even thinner.

But she was wrong.

I do not care about having 200,000. I don’t think about having 500,000. I have no plans at all about getting to a million. I no longer have subscriber goals because Youtube is not my job. My job is creativity and teaching and Youtube is merely the means of distribution. And if you confuse the road with the journey, then you’re in real trouble.

Truth be told, I don’t expect Youtube to last forever. Sometimes I think it won’t even last five more years. And even if it does, every channel has a life cycle of growth, peak, and stagnation. The data is very clear: even wildly popular channels tend to stop growing in their fifth or sixth year. Then their viewership either stays the same or even declines as the algorithm moves on to something newer and more exciting.

I’m beginning my fourth year. My channel is likely to grow for a while, but not forever. My peak and decline are out there waiting for me. And that’s completely fine because I am not a YouTuber. I am an artist and teacher and an entrepreneur and I’ve taken my eye off the mountaintop of 100k. Instead, I’m looking at the horizon. I am squinting at the undiscovered country where I will go when YouTube falls apart.

I will take you with me if you want to go.

Thanks so much for all your support.  Without the real and financial support of my Patrons, I never could have given my channel the attention it took to get here. My accomplishment is your accomplishment. Thank you.