3 Surprising Lessons Small YouTubers Teach About Growth

i studied over 1500 youtubers as part of a competition and i discovered something shocking smaller youtubers are doing things better than bigger youtubers and probably better than you too in fact what i came across meant that the video you're about to watch was not the video i set out to make as the three totally unexpected lessons i learnt on this journey are just so much more important so in this video i'm going to reveal to you

what they are and the one powerful thing a smaller channel does really well that larger creators often fall into the trap of ignoring but to help you understand we need to go back to the start of this story so a few weeks ago i made a video about a free app i'd created that could monetize any youtube channel and at the end i told the viewers i'd donate money to the users of it all they had

to do to get a piece was leave a comment below the video i was pretty excited to see how many comments i might get until over 1500 games flying it now you might think well that's great and it is but it meant i now had to click on every channel that left one watch their videos and then decide if they would get a piece of the 3 000 prize pool long story short i donated 100 to

10 different creators like this channel after that i went to pick two channels from the epic list to give five hundred dollars to and one to give one thousand dollars to and that's the moment that i realized i was making the wrong video and small channels can actually teach us a lot more than you'd expect so welcome to the video i ended up making and now i'm going to show you the three small youtube channels i

gave the big prize money to and the powerful thing they're doing that you should be too so the first lesson probably the simplest one ever what's amazing about it is when you do it in your videos you can actually release the feel good neurotransmitters dopamine endorphin and serotonin into your viewers brains and these things relax their bodies and lower their blood pressure see if you can guess what it is from this super short clip from our

hero valerie good for you like this is gonna be your detailed best friend in medical school just look at that big smile how welcome do you feel when you see that and it's been proven that when people smile at us we smile back and it's smiling that causes all of those feelings in us try it and i don't have to stand there all weird looking like this it needs to be natural but i'm telling you now

smiling is the fastest way to make a viewer feel good and it's backed by science so for that reason here's 500 to keep on smiling gallery he's not left a link to the app so i'm not gonna leave this comment on our latest video okay so i guess we'll have to wait for that so the next person who's getting 500 did something you just have to consider now so this is cam graham he has a music

production channel yo yo yo yo let me explain what the powerful thing he's doing that makes his content 10 times more interesting so here he could have made a simple tutorial video called how to make a good beat that rises but that's really boring so instead he presented his idea as a question and a challenge and called it can you make a good beat while the bpm rises constantly in his intro he then simply sets up

the challenge and gives it some stakes today i'm gonna make a bait but the bpm is rising constantly and stakes are really important for your attention but what's at stake in a video like this and how could you harness this too well the stakes for cam are not actually that high or terrifying but more along the lines of his time being at stake or maybe even his credibility because if his song sucks i could potentially reflect

badly on him but what i'd like to have seen can do here is to be a little bit more deliberate in upping the stake so one way he could have done this would be to set up that he would be asking his friends to then rate his final song at 10 and if the average score was under 5 he would have to do some kind of forfeit and this is where the extreme retention power comes in

let me show you what i mean so if cam had made this video and had no stakes to it the viewer has one maybe two questions in their mind that they want an answer to how do you do it or maybe can i make this too but when you position your content as more of a challenge and then up the stakes to include a forfeit look at the questions that suddenly appear in your viewers minds how

do you make the bpm rise constantly will it sound any good when it does is it something i can do too what will cam's final song sound like and the big one all his friends think of it and will he have to do the forfeit or not can you see the difference when you introduce stakes and these other elements you sew multiple questions into your viewers minds and you open up your content to be enjoyed by

a wider audience within your niche which can mean more clicks and your retention will get boosted so enjoy this donation camp for all of your smart thinking and now it's time for the 1 000 winner but first nope no reply from valerie so this was a really powerful wake-up call for me when i stumbled across this next channel because the lessons they can teach you is something i'd recently written off myself but it made me reconsider

because really this is what blows channels up and it's a solution to a very common problem so let me show you the first warning signs of this issue because there's a strong chance that you've witnessed this many times for yourself and you might even end up in the same position one day too i'm just gonna walk in silence and sit in this chair and hope no one notices the clickbait so i've been making youtube videos for

a while now and i've just decided that it's time to quit pandering to the youtube algorithm and now i'm just gonna make whatever i want when i want and then three weeks later look that content crate has gone back to doing the same old safe thing again hi guys welcome back to the channel and the 20th edition of what's in my backpack youtube has basically become a giant game of copy what worked over and over because

creators fear that anything new might flop and not bring in the views of the tried and tested ideas which is totally fair but as a result of this repetition creators enjoyment can fade and the content they produce then never really improves and this causes stagnation enter the solution to this problem and our one thousand dollar heroes the thompson brothers they're a future group of youtube superstars who are doing all of the things that make youtube potentially

life-changing they're messing about with creative camera tricks remaking their favorite films and pushing their ideas and that is what builds the creative skills that will over time blow them up in short they're doing all of the things so many channels fall into the trap of fearing and that's experimenting and taking more risks and do you want to know who else took this approach well actually i did and look at the difference it made but recently after

trying a string of new and different ideas in a row i was kind of down because a few of them just didn't work out like i'd planned so i thought well i'll go back to the tried and tested safe videos it's not worth the pain but seeing these guys reminding me that actually by pushing yourself to be more creative and trying new things even when a video flops you march into your next video a better creator

so really when you try new things you can't actually lose because you learn something from it now i'm not telling you to do what these guys are doing though what i'm telling you to do is to take elements of what they're doing to satisfy your creative itch and push your limit so you don't end up making one of those videos i showed you earlier and then mix it up with a safer strategy to improve as a

creator so every fifth or sixth video just produce a wild card video something you think your viewers will love but you can be courageous with the idea and bold and do the things that you've always wanted because it's what so many of the 1583 channels i looked at were actually doing that the more established ones seem to have forgotten about so i guess you're wondering did valerie ever reply well yes [Music] thank you so much i

thought you were a joke but now it's no longer a joke i have about 92 videos on my channel literally none of them have ever been monetized and today i was just praying like i could be i've lost my words like youtube is a never-ending game of fixing problems and even though these three things i've shown you will help you become a bigger and better channel they're kind of useless if you don't know how to come

up with more creative ideas to use in them and take risks with and it's why this is the video you want to watch next because it will teach you a system to do just that