Zoom is a powerful tool that you may be using for meetings, but did you know that you can use Zoom to live stream to YouTube, Facebook and other places as well?
Hello, I’m Alan Spicer, your YouTube certified expert, and I use Zoom all the time to do channel audits with vidIQ.
It’s a meeting platform where you host a meeting, they join in, you can video chat, you can even share screens, but did you know you could live stream that meeting or even use Zoom as your platform for you to live stream yourself, share your screen, do your own channel audits, maybe show your recipes, that kind of thing?
Using Zoom gives you the opportunity to screen share, show what you’re doing, share to the world generally how you’re feeling, maybe walk your way through a process, a tutorial or webinar.
Let’s go to the computer. You started the click new meeting.
At this point, you get to see my fluffy face. Now we get to go full screen, so you get to see my face. I’m talking to the webcam and this is Zoom.
Now, if you’ve never used Zoom before, that’s perfectly fine. Most people ever found it pretty much in the last month. Now you do.
If you go down to the bar down here, what you can do is have a look at what participants is in here.
You can invite people, you can control who happens to be in here.
So if there’s someone in the meeting, you want to mute them. If you just want to talk to yourself, then you can do so.
You can screen share by using the little button down here and you pick a screen.
This is available. You will see in this case, it moves me to the right-hand side of the screen and I can draw things, so anyone in the meeting will be able to see this.
Or if I have a screen open like Facebook, for example, or a browser, I can share that browser, and then once again, I am in the top right-hand corner, you can see all my tabs and stuff like that. You can see my channel analytics.
Now, one thing you can do is live stream. What you do is go into your settings, go to “Profile” and “View Advanced Features.”
Now in your settings, if you scroll all the way down to the bottom, just above the email settings, keep going, keep going, keep going. There’s an email notification and just above you see: “Allow live streaming meetings.”
You click over, you can choose what platforms you want to live stream to. Facebook, for example, or YouTube. You can do Facebook and YouTube, or you could do “Workplace by Facebook,” or you can use a custom-streaming service, which is here.
See, I’m going to click “Facebook” for this time and I click “Save.”
I’ll go back to the Zoom. I click “New Meeting.”
I enter full screen. You will now see under more options “Live on Facebook.”
So once you’ve got everybody in, you’ve invited them in, you are ready, you’ve got all of your graphics and stuff like that, you click “Live on Facebook.”
It will ask you to choose what timeline you want to share it onto, your timeline, a group, an event, share to a page that you manage.
I’m going to share on my timeline, then it connects Zoom to Facebook Live.
And if you use the new Live producer, when you click “Next,” you can use a key stream, you can use paired encoder.
Click “Next” and “Done.”
You will now see here, this is what I was talking about two or three seconds ago.
You can see here that the audio quality is 126.4 kilobytes per second. You can see the video is 2.1 megabits per second, and as you click on the arrow down here, you can have a look at all of the important coding settings.
My stream is in the bottom right-hand corner, and as you can see here, it goes.
What you would do on the left-hand side is fill in the name, the title and the description of the live stream.
You choose whether or not it goes to Friends or to Public, and where you want to share it to: Timeline, page you manage, or a group.
When you’re ready to live stream from Zoom to Facebook or YouTube, or anywhere else, you click “Go Live” and you are done.
Now, remember to subscribe for regular YouTube tricks and tips tutorials and business tutorials. Hit that notification icon to see every time a video goes live, and I’ll see you soon.
Good morning! Some of you may have woken up this morning already seeing this feature. It is the instant direct chat messenger that you can talk to a member of your customer support team.
Direct Chat with YouTube – YouTube Adds Partner Support Instant Messenger
If you’ve been on the platform for long enough, at some point you’ve needed to receive some form of email from YouTube, you know, “Congratulations! Welcome to the monetization team.”
You’re appealing a copyright strike or you’ve got a problem with your channel. You’ve accidentally deleted stuff, whatever it happens to be, and then you get hit with one of those automated response emails that are completely un-human, the guy running loose that take days to arrive.
Now this little icon in the top right-hand corner appeared in my dashboard today. So, I thought I’d be curious and nosy. I had a poke at it.
My friend Mark was very understanding at my curiosity and was able to tell me that this is for anyone part of the YouTube partnership program.
There doesn’t seem to be a limit on the number of subscribers and it’s a direct instant messenger, just like you’d expect on WhatsApp or Facebook.
I was able to natter to him for a period of time. It’s fairly instant and it means that if I have any problems, I can directly talk to a human being rather than trying to play email tennis with YouTube.
Now, I think that this is quite important.
Finally, there’s a human element. It’s the one thing that’s been missing from customer care for a very long time.
Is this something that you would love? Is this a feature that you would have used at some point in the future? Is it something that you feel is finally long overdue?
If you use this feature recently, is there a problem that you might even go to this chat system with?
I’m quite curious to see how this rolls out. Am I part of an open beta or has this gone out to everyone this morning?
Please let me know if you can see that little icon in the top right-hand corner.
And of course, if you’re curious about any other YouTube feature, I’ve got a playlist here and hit “Subscribe“ for more random breaking news videos like this when a feature appears on my dashboard.
Making money on YouTube with other people’s content is certainly possible, though, as you might expect, there are ethical considerations depending on how you go about it.
If you just re-upload someone else’s content wholesale, without any kind of modification, and pass it off as your own, there is no question that it is wrong in every sense of the word, including YouTube’s rules and guidelines.
So, not only would you be doing something generally unpleasant, but you would also likely fall afoul of YouTube’s policies, and lose any monetary gain you might have had.
That being said, there are ways to make money using other people’s content on YouTube that are entirely within YouTube’s terms, and you can do it in ways that won’t have the YouTubers whose content you are using wishing ill fortune on you.
So let’s dive into how to make money on YouTube using other people’s videos!
Stealing Content
There isn’t much more to say about this that we didn’t cover in the intro, but just to reiterate; taking another YouTuber’s content and re-uploading without their permission has very little going for it as a money-making tactic.
It will not make you many friends, you will be competing with the original video for views, and it will almost certainly be a short term thing as YouTube will eventually shut you down when they find out you are stealing content.
It’s best to steer clear of this method entirely.
Getting Permission
We’re going to discuss some methods here that, strictly speaking, could be done without permission from the YouTuber whose content you are using, but it’s always worth getting permission if you can, regardless of whether you need it.
If you can somehow get permission for it, even the above method of just taking someone else’s content and re-uploading it would be fine. We can’t think of many situations where the original creator would be okay with that, but it would be perfectly fine if they did.
But, as a general courtesy, it is nice to ask YouTuber’s if you can use their content, even if it’s only a small clip. And, who knows? They may even share your video.
Getting the permissions itself can be tricky, especially if the YouTuber doesn’t check their spam folder too often.
You should be able to find a contact email address for them in their channel’s “About” page (you may have to prove you’re not a bot in order to see it), though the existence of an email address doesn’t mean anyone is looking at the inbox.
You can also try pinging them on social media. What you want to avoid, however, is spamming them with a barrage of messages across different platforms.
Try to leave a little bit of breathing space between attempts to contact them, as waking up to dozens of notifications in different apps all from the same person may be a bit off-putting.
In your messages, be polite, and it can’t hurt to throw in a compliment about their content. After all; you are wanting to use it. Y
ou should also let them know what you are planning to do with the content you are seeking permission to use, and be honest. Nothing can burn bridges like getting permission to use someone’s content for one thing and then using it for something else, especially if the thing you end up using it for is something the original creator would object to.
Reused Content
As this post is talking about making money specifically, we need to address YouTube’s stance on reused content.
There is a lot of content on YouTube (and other parts of the web) that are fair game for you to use on your channel from a legal standpoint. Creative Commons content and content in the public domain being the main examples of this.
However, being legally allowed to use content does not mean YouTube will let you monetise it. Their monetisation policies specifically call out “reused content” as something that cannot be monetised.
What this means in practical terms is that even though you are allowed—both legally and under YouTube’s terms—to take a video that is licensed under Creative Commons (as long as you give full attribution) and post it on your channel in full, YouTube will not allow you to monetise it unless you have made sufficient modification to it. How these modifications might look is a significant part of the rest of this post, so keep reading.
What About Fair Use?
Fair use is a convention through which copyrighted material can be used without the express permission of the copyright holder or a licensing agreement to use the content in some circumstances.
The content you produce must be “transformative”, which can include commentary and parody, as well as some other kinds of content.
Fair use is often misunderstood to be some kind of shield to protect you against copyright strikes, but that is not how it works. Fair use is a defence—not a black and white policy—and it is determined on a case-by-case basis. That means that, even if you were entirely within the spirit of fair use, you would still have to go to court and make your case if you faced a copyright owner who is aggressive enough with their legal team to take it that far.
One of the problems with fair use on YouTube is their automated content recognition system, which has no concept of fair use and will flag your videos regardless if it recognises copyrighted material.
As sad a state of affairs as it may seem, it would generally make your life much easier if you steered clear of copyrighted content altogether.
How to Make Money on YouTube Using Other People’s Videos
Now that we’ve told you what you can’t do, let’s get into what you can do.
Here we are going to outline some different ways you can make money on YouTube using other people’s videos, as well as how you would go about it and any other relevant information.
Reaction Videos
Reaction videos are more popular than ever and are not limited to movie trailers. Just about any viral video can be good fodder for a reaction video, though it can help to stick within a particular genre or type of video.
For example, Stevie Knight is a popular reaction YouTuber who reacts to rap songs specifically. For the super famous YouTubers, reaction videos can be about anything because the audience is there to see them, whatever they are doing. But for us mere mortals, it’s probably best to find a niche and stick to it.
One of the critical aspects of reaction videos, as obvious as it sounds, is reacting. If you sit and watch a nine-minute video, pulling the occasional face and barely saying anything, you’re not going to make much of an impression.
And you may fall afoul of YouTube’s reuse policy, as they could deem it not to be sufficiently different from the original video.
Needless to say, this type of video is more suited to YouTubers with a lot of personality.
You are banking on people wanting to see you. They can go and watch the original video easily enough, or check out one of the other reaction YouTubers covering this video, and if you are bland and unentertaining, they may do just that.
Be yourself, as well.
Being a reaction, YouTuber will quickly fall apart if you are putting on a persona. Try not to worry about pleasing everyone; it’s an impossible task.
Just be yourself and be consistent with your videos.
Breakdown Videos
Breakdown videos are very similar to reaction videos but a little more technical in nature.
Where a reaction video is all about the… well… reaction, breakdown videos go into detail about the content itself. In fact, the YouTuber we mentioned above, Stevie Knight, would be a good example for this kind of video as well, as he doesn’t just react to rap music, he breaks down the lyrics.
Breakdown videos are also common for political and social commentary, as well as movie trailers and speeches. The aim of a breakdown is either to respond to things in the video or to give your unique insight to the viewers.
If you decide to go down this path, you make sure you have something to offer.
Unlike reaction videos, where a lively personality and a bit of comedy can be enough, a breakdown video needs to add something to the conversation. If you are breaking down the latest Marvel movie trailer, make sure you are well-versed in Marvel lore, so that you can spot things that regular viewers may miss.
Clip Videos
Clip videos can be on a range of topics, such as “Top 10” videos, or “This Week In…”. An example of this can be found on GameDevHQ’s channel, where they have a weekly series that lists off some of the most interesting projects being developed in the Unity game engine.
This kind of video is very appealing to those more camera-shy YouTubers out there, as it doesn’t require you to be on-camera to make content. It would typically take the form of a series of clips with voice-over narration saying something about each clip.
In these cases, as long as the clips are not too long, you can usually claim fair use with regards to your use of the clip, however, as we stated above, fair use, even when used correctly, is no guarantee that you will be free to use the content.
It would be best to get permission from the content owners first, but if you keep the clips short, you should be okay.
Become a Music Content Aggregator/Promoter
This one is a little less conventional, but you could become a channel for promoting unknown musicians.
The idea here would be that you are putting the music videos out on a channel that has more exposure—benefitting the artist—while you run advertisements on those videos.
Whether or not you cut the artists in on the revenue would be up to you, although it will undoubtedly be easier to get artists on board if you are going to pay them.
The main problem with this kind of channel is that it is challenging to get off of the ground, as you need a significant number of subscribers to draw in more popular artists.
One trick could be to use Creative Commons music in the beginning. You would not be able to monetise these videos due to YouTube’s reuse policy, but you wouldn’t be able to monetise in the beginning anyway due to the requirements for joining YouTube’s Partner Programme.
The goal would be to build the channel’s reputation and following up to the point that you can entice up and coming artists to release music through your channel, and hopefully reach a point where all of the content you publish is original.
You can even use cover songs to get your foot in the door and leverage attention. If you need help in making money from cover songs then check out my deep dive blog where I break down the legal points, the fast traffic tips and some great tweaks you can use to get the maximum impact for minimal impact on your pocket.
Mashup Videos
This one requires quite a bit of ability with audio editing software, but you could make mashups of existing music videos.
These tend to be popular when the original videos are from contrasting genres, making the final result something of a novelty that will interest fans of both genres.
One of the most well-known examples of this kind of video is an interesting mashup between Justin Beiber and Slipknot. The less similar to the original songs, the better, or you may get hit with YouTube’s Content ID.
It should be noted that there are legal obligations when using copyrighted music, even if it is only small samples.
You probably won’t end up in a courtroom if you get caught—it is far more likely you’ll get a copyright strike or your ad revenue diverted to the copyright holder—but the possibility is always there when you break copyright law.
What we’re saying here is, strictly speaking, you should get the proper licensing sorted with any copyright holders before creating mashups video. This blog does not endorse doing anything that breaks the law.
You may have noticed that there is still quite a bit of work involved in these various methods.
Unfortunately, there is no way of making money on YouTube with other people’s videos that is simultaneously allowed by YouTube, legal, and does not require some effort on your part.
However you could always try stock video content (for example I use storyblocks for all my b-roll) to pad out your creations and all you have to do is talk over the clips – you wouldn’t even need to show your face.
Here we go. Hello, I’m Alan Spicer, your YouTube certified expert and I know that it’s really hard to get started on YouTube. It’s hard to think of ideas.
When you first get started, you might barrel into ideas. You might have a load in your head. You might have a notebook to get started, but sooner or later, it might just dry up where you get a bit of writer’s block, you’re stuck.
The core problem here happens to be that you want to be creating content that is searched, and being searched for right now, because it’s okay to throw up a video about your travel, it’s okay to throw up a video about your new hair dye or to seat there reading a book, but if you truly want to get caught by search, you need to make sure that you’re actually making content, that people are searching for.
I use this all the time. It’s called the “Alphabet Soup Method.”
If you already know what this happens to be, then fine, please bear with me, right?
I’ll explain why it’s important. But if you have no idea, I’m just about to explode your brain.
YouTube is the second largest search engine on the Internet. The only one that beats YouTube is Google who owns YouTube. So, they’ve been doing this for years. They’ve got 10, 15, 20 years worth of experience of learning what humans want to know, or find, and they understand our searching habits.
This means that you finally get that shortcut to understanding how people find your videos. I do channel reviews for my clients and I did possibly hundreds over the course of the last few months with vid IQ.
So many people make this mistake. Well, you look at their video and they have a fantastic done now, but the title of the video is the name of a series or “Wow, look at this!” or “Yummy cupcake.”
At least “Yummy cupcakes” is a searchable term, but “Wow, look at this!” and “This is a wall” or “We went here.” Nobody is searching for “We went here,” or “I dyed my hair.” Nobody is searching for really obscure Wow titles.
The only reason you get away with Wow is if you’re Casey Neistat or Jake Paul or Logan Paul or Cody Wanner, people who already have an inbuilt baked audience.
For a small YouTube channel, you need to stop pandering to either suggested traffic by uploading a ton of content or search by being smart aboutnhow you title content and how you think your things that you will create. There is no point in making a video that is so ultra niche that the only person that’s going to search for it is you and your mom.
That’s why you can’t just do, “Here’s what I did on my day in my house with my brother” because nobody else cares about that other than your brother.
So, what you do is you go to the search bar and dependent on your niche you start typing your way through search suggestions.
Let’s say I want to do something about cake, so I type in “Make a cake” and you’ll get your search results. But here’s the important thing: “Make a cake a” and it gives you suggestions.
Then, “Make a cake b” and “Make a cake c,” these are your search terms that humans have actively searched for.
So it could be “How to make a cake without eggs, how to make a cake with chocolate, how to make a banana cake, how to make an almond cake,” these are search terms that people have searched for.
And if it doesn’t auto complete, it’s likely that people haven’t gone to look for it.
You could also do this in Google, you type in your keyword or key-search term, “How to make a cake.”
And then you scroll all the way past the results down to the bottom, to the related terms. These are also video topics that you can make.
As you keep clicking through, you can get ultra niche. So it could be, “How to make a chocolate cake with cherries, how to make a chocolate cake with fudge icing.”
The ABC method will give you an unlimited amount of ideas that you can deep dive into. Also, if it was to just do the search results, that’s what I did here to start with: “How to make a YouTube,” and then it was “Playlist, channel, video, end screen, end card, outro.”
You will never run out of topics and you can always cheat by adding a little asterisk as well.
So, “How to * cake?”
What this does is it tells YouTube,“Okay, I want it to be about cake, but I don’t know what it is.”
So it could be, “How to proof a cake, how to ice a cake, how to make a fudge cake brownie.”
The little stars are wild cards and YouTube will auto fill it. And if it auto fills it for you, you’ll see that those are words and phrases that other humans have searched for in such a regular basis, that it becomes a search term.
If you pair that up with something like vidIQ search tool, you can see the competitiveness and the volume.
What you need is low competitiveness and high volume, which means there are so many people searching it, but not enough content to service that need.
YouTube has added new chapters inside your videos, where you can bookmark certain areas within your content to make it easier, to jump to. A fantastic way to pack in keywords and possibly win that snippet on Google search results.
Now, these chapters on videos help break up the video and hopefully help it index in Google search.
As you will see, each one of them have a mini subheading and a scrollable bar along the bottom.
As you jump to specific places, the chapter subtotal total changes next to the time stamp, and it’s a good way to cram in some keywords.
But, if you don’t have them, it’s one long bar that you just scrubbed through slightly blind, and there is no subheading underneath, next to it.
So, you can see the one could be very helpful.
To get started, from your homepage, you click on your avatar and click on “YouTube Studio.”
You go to “Videos” and you find the video that you want to add chapters to.
What I’m going to do is deliberately add chapters to this video, so you can see the difference.
I’m going to take the name of the video. I’m going to search it here. We’re gonna to click “Edit,” and it loads you into the “Video details” page.
The important thing that you need to know here is those chapters are set by time stamps.
Now, I’m going to write, “Timestamp” here, but you don’t have to. The most important thing is starting the time stamps from 0:00.
The next step is to use the mini player here, scrub through the video and make time gaps.
Maybe at the start, I’m talking about how I got to VidCon, maybe in the middle I’m talking about my experience with VidCon, and at the end, maybe I’m wrapping it up.
So I could make time stamps like this.
Now, these can be much more keyword rich. Obviously, if you’re doing a tutorial, it could go through just like a blog. That could be your subtitles.
If I click “Save,” and then I load the video from the link here or any other link for that matter, you will see immediately, the chapters are now added like instantly.
You can see that I can scrub through, each one’s got a mini subheading and it’s ready for you.
Compared to the original one, which once again, didn’t have those chapters.
Final Words
For more helpful YouTube features, there’s a playlist here. Or if you want to know how to self-certify your YouTube videos, let’s say for ads on YouTube, there’s a video here.
If you’re new to the wide and wonderful world of YouTube—or working with any kind of video for that matter—you might have heard of video codecs.
Or perhaps you’re not so new, and you’ve heard of them, but you don’t really understand what they are or what they do. If you are either of these people, this post is for you.
Video codecs are the software and method that is used to compress video. In the case of YouTube, codecs are employed to reduce the size of the video before it is streamed by millions of people across the globe.
It is an essential part of transmitting video, and there are a variety of different flavours available. But what are they? And why are they so important? Read on to have YouTube codecs explained in full.
What is a Codec?
In short, codecs are compression. They are the software and method used to compress a large video file into a smaller video file using clever algorithms that strive to achieve the most significant reduction in size at the expense of as little loss of detail as possible.
Video is an incredibly large medium in terms of raw data—which we’ll get to shortly—and few people who don’t work with video appreciate just how much information is involved. Of course, anyone who edits video in any capacity will be fully aware, and anyone who has ever attempted to edit 4K video on a computer that, while powerful, was nevertheless not up to the task, will appreciate the struggle that video can present.
If you need help in deciding between 1080p and 4K – maybe you are lost and don’t know the difference – check out my deep dive blog on 4K and it could take YouTube by storm!
Codecs don’t typically help with editing, however, but they make life a lot easier on your Internet connection, and given how far our Internet speeds have come in recent years, the fact that there are still effort to improve compression and shrink video files further should serve to highlight how big video can be.
How do Codecs Work?
In the simplest terms, codecs compress information into a smaller size by replacing it with a different set of data that represents the original information.
To give a very simplified example of this, imagine you have a still frame of 1080p video where the top half of the screen is entirely black. Each pixel on the screen has to be accounted for in the data for that still frame, which means there are 1920×540, or 1,036,800 pixels. That’s a lot of data.
However, we don’t need to store every single pixel in our data. Knowing that the next million pixels are the same, we can just say that and be done. Saving the data equivalent of “Black: 1,036,800 times” is a lot more efficient than actually listing black over a million times.
Of course, there is much more to it than that, but it should serve to give you a basic grounding in how codecs do their job. Compression can be taken to extreme levels, of course. Video can be compressed until it is little more than a pixellated blur of what it once was—albeit is a pixellated blur that takes up considerably less space than it once did. Many ingenious techniques are employed to preserve information, but as a general rule, the more compressed a video is, the more of that original information you lose.
“Why is information lost?” we hear you asking. In the above example of a frame that is half black, no information would be lost. The entirety of that black half of the screen would be stored fully intact in the dramatically reduced space we outlined. Real-world applications of compression are not so simple, however.
There are very rarely large portions of a frame that are the same colour in a frame of video, especially a film or TV show. Furthermore, there may not be any smaller areas that are identical. When you consider the depth of colours available and things like film grain, it is entirely possible to have frames of video where there isn’t a single collection of pixels adjacent to each other that are identical. In those cases, the simple compression method we detailed above would be useless.
This is where the information loss comes in. Codecs employ algorithms to decide what is compressible. If you have two pixels that are ever so slightly different shades of blue, they would technically be different but probably not different enough that the human eye could distinguish between the two.
The compression algorithm may count both of these pixels as the same colour, allowing it to reduce the size of the frame slightly.
And, when the video is decoded, it will still look good to our human eyes, but the information of that slightly differently shaded blue pixel is lost, and cannot be recovered from the encoded video.
This is why high-resolution footage with a lot of film grain is hard to compress, because you either can’t get much of a size reduction from the compression, or you lose a lot of that fine detail.
This should hopefully also go some way to explaining why there are so many codecs available. It is not a simple matter of which codec reduces the video size the most, there are preferences to take into account.
Some codecs are more aggressive, others don’t achieve the same degree of size-reduction. Depending on what you are doing with your video, different codecs may be suitable.
Why do we Need Codecs?
Computers are getting more powerful, and Internet speeds are getting faster, but at the same time, media is growing in fidelity.
There was a time not too long ago when our only means of watching video was the equivalent of a 640×480 screen, in what would retroactively be called 480i. For comparison, 1080p—which is considered the bare minimum these days and is even drifting slowly into obsolesce—is 1920×1080. That’s three times more information than the standard definition video we used to watch.
In keeping with this trend, 4K—which is well on its way to replacing 1080p as the defacto standard—is four times larger again. It should be noted that the “4” in 4K is not down to the fact that it is four times the size of 1080p, but rather the fact that the horizontal resolution is nearly 4,000 pixels across.
But 4K itself already has a replacement on the horizon, with 8K screens creeping onto the market. As you might have guessed, 8K is four times larger again than 4K, though we are far from 8K being commonplace in our homes, so we wouldn’t hold off on purchasing that 4K television just yet.
So what does all this mean? It means that despite computers getting more powerful and Internet speeds getting faster, the size of the media we are trying to play is getting similarly more substantial. Exponentially so, in fact. And this is just taking video files into account; there is also game streaming to consider, which Google is getting into in the form of their Stadia service.
And, while this is a gaming platform, it ultimately boils down to streaming live video to your screen, and will likely be a big part of YouTube if it succeeds.
Two players playing video games on TV at home
To illustrate this point, here is a list of some resolutions and their typical data rate in megabits per second (Mbps). This is the amount of data that is being transmitted per second, whether that is from a Blu-ray drive to your screen, or from a distant server and over the Internet.
Compression Type
Resolution
Bitrate
YouTube @ 60FPS
1080p
4.5-9 Mbps
Blu-ray
1080p
20-30 Mbps
H.264 50Mbps
1080p
50 Mbps
No Compression
1080p
3,000 Mbps
YouTube @ 60FPS
4K
20-51 Mbps
X264 Codec
4K
100 Mbps
Blu-ray
4K
82-128 Mbps
No Compression
4K
10,000 Mbps
We should mention that all of the above compression methods are to a degree where the video is still kept to a high quality.
Of course, it would be possible to significantly reduce the bitrate further with more compression, but that would compromise the quality of the video to the point where it would affect the viewing experience.
Hopefully, that table will illustrate the importance of codecs. Even looking at the raw, uncompressed 1080p bitrate, it is sixty times more data than the typical bitrate that 4K video streamed over YouTube requires. Bearing in mind that 8Mbps is equivalent to 1 megabyte per second, a raw, uncompressed 4K stream would require data transfer rates of over a gigabyte per second.
This would present serious problems for Internet delivery, optical bandwidth in disc drives, and even if you were pulling the information directly from a high-speed solid-state drive, your computer would still need to be up to the task of processing that much information.
Audio Codecs
We’ve been focused on video codecs so far, but the audio is a critical part of the process as well, and the two do not necessarily go together in the compression process. When you encode video, the file name at the end (often .MP4) is little more than a wrapper. For the most part, you can mix and match your video and audio codecs to suit your needs.
As for the audio codecs themselves, there are nuances to compressing audio that differ from video, of course. For one thing, the smaller size of audio means that audio bitrates are typically measured in kilobits per second (Kbps) rather than megabits per second (Mbps).
But the broad strokes are the same as video codecs. They work to reduce the size of the audio by compressing it, often at the cost of some of the information stored.
The Best Codecs For YouTube
The answer what the best codecs for YouTube are is quite a short one since YouTube themselves openly tell us. YouTube prefer you to upload your videos in MP4 format, encoded with the H.264 video codec and AAC audio codec.
As we mentioned above, the file format and the codec are two different things, and YouTube is open to several different formats, such as MOV, AVI, MP4, WMV, MPEG, WebM, 3GPP, and FLV.
What Happens When I Upload Video to YouTube?
If you are already uploading videos to YouTube, you will be familiar with the “processing” phase of the upload process. During this time, YouTube is converting your video to a number of different resolutions.
When you select a different quality in a video—or when YouTube changes the quality automatically due to bandwidth issues—YouTube is not doing that on the fly. All the available quality options on a video are pre-processed and exist as their own video files on the YouTube servers.
Obviously, the capability to upscale your video to higher resolutions than the one you uploaded does not yet exist to the degree that would be feasible to use in this manner, but YouTube will create lower resolution alternatives. The standard definition is typically the first one to be created, though we would generally advise waiting until at least the high definition option has finished encoding, as that will be the most in-demand version.
YouTube has a preference for the codec you upload your video with because the fewer incoming codecs they have to deal with, the more they can optimise their platform and reduce the time it takes to process new video.
Not all codecs are free; however, the most popular ones that are used today do not cost money to use. While we are on the subject of free codecs, it is worth pointing out that codecs can be dangerous in the same way that downloading an executable file from an untrustworthy source can be.
Codecs can be used to get malicious software onto your computer, or they could just cause serious problems when attempting to playback media. So take care when downloading them, and make sure you are downloading from a verified source.
Summing Up
So, now you have had YouTube codecs explained, why you need them, and how they work (in simplified terms).
Remember, the world of codecs is not static, and new developments happen all the time, especially with new video formats and resolutions popping up from time to time.
It’s worth checking in with YouTube’s help resources occasionally to make sure there haven’t been any developments you should know about.
Top 5 Tools To Get You Started on YouTube
Very quickly before you go here are 5 amazing tools I have used every day to grow my YouTube channel from 0 to 30K subscribers in the last 12 months that I could not live without.
1. VidIQ helps boost my views and get found in search
I almost exclusively switched to VidIQ from a rival in 2020.
Within 12 months I tripled the size of my channel and very quickly learnt the power of thumbnails, click through rate and proper search optimization. Best of all, they are FREE!
2. Adobe Creative Suite helps me craft amazing looking thumbnails and eye-catching videos
I have been making youtube videos on and off since 2013.
When I first started I threw things together in Window Movie Maker, cringed at how it looked but thought “that’s the best I can do so it’ll have to do”.
Big mistake!
I soon realized the move time you put into your editing and the more engaging your thumbnails are the more views you will get and the more people will trust you enough to subscribe.
That is why I took the plunge and invested in my editing and design process with Adobe Creative Suite. They offer a WIDE range of tools to help make amazing videos, simple to use tools for overlays, graphics, one click tools to fix your audio and the very powerful Photoshop graphics program to make eye-catching thumbnails.
Best of all you can get a free trial for 30 days on their website, a discount if you are a student and if you are a regular human being it starts from as little as £9 per month if you want to commit to a plan.
3. Rev.com helps people read my videos
You can’t always listen to a video.
Maybe you’re on a bus, a train or sat in a living room with a 5 year old singing baby shark on loop… for HOURS. Or, you are trying to make as little noise as possible while your new born is FINALLY sleeping.
This is where Rev can help you or your audience consume your content on the go, in silence or in a language not native to the video.
5. Shutterstock helps me add amazing video b-roll cutaways
I mainly make tutorials and talking head videos.
And in this modern world this can be a little boring if you don’t see something funky every once in a while.
I try with overlays, jump cuts and being funny but my secret weapon is b-roll overlay content.
I can talk about skydiving, food, money, kids, cats – ANYTHING I WANT – with a quick search on the Shutterstock website I can find a great looking clip to overlay on my videos, keeping them entertained and watching for longer.
Okay, that’s not really the end of the post; we’ll dive into this topic as we do with all things YouTube, but if you’re looking for the quick answer to “am I too old to start a YouTube channel?”; – No. You are not too old to start a YouTube channel. Whatever your age. As the saying goes, “It’s never too late to start something new”.
It is, however, perfectly natural to worry about being too old to jump into something that, from the outside, looks very much like a young person’s game.
There several reasons why you might think it’s not for you, and we’re going to lay the biggest ones out for all to see, and then tell you exactly why they shouldn’t stop you from starting up your own channel.
Let’s Talk Numbers
It can help to get over your fear of being “too old” for YouTube if you know some of the numbers around age on the platform. For example, even though YouTube is thought of as a very young person’s platform, you might be surprised to learn that the average age of a YouTuber is closer to thirty. Twenty-seven, to be exact.
Of course, that’s still pretty young, but remember; that’s the average age. That includes extremely popular YouTuber’s that are as young as 16. And, though not strictly in keeping with YouTube’s terms of service, there are YouTuber’s like EthanGamer, who started his channel at seven years of age and had hit a million subscribers by the age of ten!
We realise that highlighting these incredibly young YouTubers may seem counter-intuitive to the point of this post, but remember, we’re discussing the average here. YouTuber’s like Ethan—who even now is only fourteen years old, bring that average age down considerably. For the average to be up around twenty-seven years old, there has to older YouTubers to balance it out.
YouTubers like ThePianoGuys—one of whom is over fifty years old—and Adam Savage—fifty-three years old—prove that you don’t need to be a baby to get going on YouTube. And those are just popular examples. ThePianoGuys rank inside the top 100 YouTube channels (discounting organisations like VEVO), and Adam Savage has over five million subscribers.
There are YouTubers like Gamer Grandma who has a much more modest—yet still very impressive—410k subscribers for her gaming channel. She is ninety years old. And there are many more YouTubers like her who, while not as successful in terms of subscribers counts, are nevertheless enjoying plenty of popularity in a wide range of niches, such as Peter Oakley, an eighty-six-year-old autobiographical vlogger.
It’s also worth noting that YouTube’s reputation as a platform for younger people stems from the earlier days when it really was a platform for younger people. But YouTube has been around for a while now, and those more youthful people have grown up. For example, YouTube veteran, Philip DeFranco, started YouTubing at the tender age of twenty-one years old.
These days he is thirty-four years old and still going strong. To illustrate this, we’ve picked out a few YouTubers from the top fifty channels by subscriber count. Obviously, we’ve left out the large organisations and YouTube channels for big celebrities. Nobody should be looking at T-Series, Eminem, or Ed Sheeran for examples of how to succeed on YouTube.
Who?
Age
Subscriber Count (2020)
PewDiePie
31
106 Million
Knondzilla
31
58 Million
HoySoyGerman
30
41 Million
Filipe Neto
32
39 Million
Fernanfloo
27
36 Million
Luisito Comunica
29
33 Million
So, let’s get to those reasons why you might feel too old to start a YouTube channel, and why you shouldn’t let them stop you.
Personality Clash
As we get older, we tend to become more conservative. Not in a political sense—well, actually, in a political sense as well—but in the sense that we become more introverted as time goes on.
It’s perfectly natural, and it happens to most of us, but on a platform full of bright-eyed, cheerful souls all gleefully welcoming viewers to their videos with bubbly optimism, it is easy to feel intimidated by the prospect of joining that world yourself.
Fortunately, there are many ways to put your videos together, and there is absolutely space for more introverted YouTubers. Many successful channels feature quiet, reserved personalities, people who don’t show themselves on camera, even videos where the YouTuber in question never features at all!
The main ingredient to a successful YouTube channel is providing content that people want to see, and the way you deliver that content is the seasoning. Your particular seasoning maybe to some people’s taste and not to others, but it is the main ingredients that will be the primary determiner of success. So, focus on those main ingredients, and don’t worry about whether you come across as cheerful enough.
And, besides, putting on a personality that just isn’t you is a surefire way to burnout and lost the desire to make videos altogether.
Viewer Demographics
Even if YouTubers themselves are trending older, the people watching YouTube are still young, right?
One of the key aspects of building an audience is being able to appeal to that audience, and there has always been a natural culture-gap between younger and older people.
Not an insurmountable one, of course, and as we mentioned above, the main content of your videos is a more significant factor than the way you deliver it, but it is there nonetheless.
It is certainly not impossible to appeal to people outside of your age bracket, but you might be surprised to learn that 35+ and 55+ are two of the fastest-growing demographics when it comes to people watching YouTube.
Again, it is not impossible to appeal to other age groups than your own, but if you are firmly locked into your own age demographic, there are plenty of viewers for you attract.
Topics
Another reason older people might be dissuaded from creating a YouTube channel is the lack of ideas for engaging content.
Some of the most popular videos on YouTube involve young, handsome people dropping heavy things onto trampolines from a great height, or makeup tutorials, gaming videos, or any number of other things that are decidedly younger in scope.
It can be very easy to look at these videos and think that you have nothing to offer.
However if you need some guidance I have pulled together a list of “older” youtubers within the silver surfer bracket that command huge audiences and prove that age is merely a number and not a road block.
The first point of order here is that you should not let arbitrary limitations hold you back. We’re not saying start-up a parkour channel at the grand old age of eighty-five, but anything you are physically capable of doing should not be considered off the table. Grandma Gamer, who we mentioned earlier, is a prime example of that.
That being said, even if you don’t want to tackle something that might be considered a little young for you, there is no shortage of topics and ideas and niches on YouTube. We mentioned earlier about the growing number of older watchers, and those older YouTube viewers have interests that are similarly skewed.
Don’t get bogged down trying to appeal to a younger audience if what that audience wants isn’t something you are interested in. YouTube viewers span a broad spectrum of interests, from gaming channels to life hacks, from keyboard modding videos to reviews of historical military rations.
Finding Your Place
We have talked about not getting held back by misconceptions of age on YouTube, and what kind of content you could make, but how do you go about finding your voice and choosing your niche on YouTube?
The first thing to address is why you want to make content in the first place. If you have no clear motive, you will struggle to maintain any kind of momentum in your YouTube career. It would, of course, be immensely helpful if that motive aligned with your own interests.
Not only are you far more likely to stick at it if you are genuinely interested in your content, but you are also more likely to make more engaging content in the first place.
Now, there may be other factors in play as to why you are starting a YouTube channel. Perhaps it is a companion channel to something else, such as a blog, a podcast, or a business. Unfortunately, not every venture is a labour of love.
And even if you are making content around a subject you are passionate about; it might sometimes feel like hard work, but there is no sense in making life harder for yourself than it has to be.
There are also people who just enjoy the act of making YouTube content itself, and perhaps you are one of them. People like this often end up vlogging because talking about yourself is a subject we can all be experts in. However, combine a simple desire to make YouTube content with the introverts we mentioned above, and you have a recipe for internal conflict.
If it is the process of making content that appeals to you, but the thought of sitting in front of a camera and talking about yourself a few times a week is unappealing, consider making your videos about something you like, even if you are not an expert in that thing.
YouTube viewers can be very forgiving as long as you are honest with them. And, if you are open about your lack of expertise, you may even find viewers helping you out from time to time.
It can help to do your research before getting started. If you have a particular type of content in mind, find successful channels that are making that kind of content and see what they are doing. Of course, you shouldn’t be looking to copy anyone, but if you see common themes across different channels in your desired niche, there may be a reason for it. That being said, don’t blindly copy themes just because you’ve seen them crop up a lot.
Always try to understand why people are doing what they are doing before using that method yourself.
And, since age is the focal point of this post, it may help to study channels by other YouTubers your age, and see what they are doing. Do they have a young audience? And if so, how are they engaging that audience? Or, if their audience is more on par with their own age, how are they approaching things differently to the younger content creators?
YouTube may still be young, but has been around for a long time in Internet terms, and there it is full of examples of success from all walks of life.
Also, while we would never advocate you starting a channel on something you don’t like, if you do like something that might be considered a typically younger interest, there is plenty of clout to be had in the novelty factor of older people doing younger things, as people like former Vine star and current YouTuber, Jason Nash, have shown.
Jason has essentially made a successful career out of being “too old”, and now has a very popular channel, as shown by the three million subscribers he currently has. In this case, Jason’s age has not only not held him back, but it has also played an active part in his success.
Embrace Your Age
Growing older is a natural part of life, and one we all have to come to terms with eventually.
However—continued advances in medical science, not to mention a much better awareness of health concerns in the workplace and at home—have led to us not only living longer lives on average but living fuller lives in our later years.
People are increasingly taking up—and excelling at—new professions in their forties and fifties. Pensioners are discovering new hobbies in their retirement. And we’ve already talked about the eighty years and up YouTubers who are enjoying great success on the platform.
The paradigm of working your whole life so that you could enjoy a few nice holidays in your retirement are long past, and lots of people are finding fulfillment in their golden years.
If you suspect YouTube could be part of that fulfillment for you, don’t let any stigma about your age get in the way.
So you want to record in 4K and you want to do it on your mobile phone at 60 FPS.
You don’t have to have a DSLR nowadays. You don’t have to have a powerful, stupid webcam. You can record fantastic footage, even in 4K on your mobile phone.
How To Record 4K 60 FPS Video on Your Mobile (iPhone & iOS Devices)
Now, most people will be focusing on 1080p right now, and there’s no real difference in uploading to 4K just yet, but maybe you want to get ahead of the curve. Maybe you want to record at 60 FPS to slow it down at certain points.
I get that 4K video can be confusing – I have deep dived into 4K vs 1080p for YouTube in my blog. We look at resolution, bit rate and even look into whether is does better on YouTube in search.
I’m going to show you how to do it on this phone.
Now you get out your phone, you hit the “Settings” menu and you scroll all the way down to “Camera.”
In here, you’ll see your QR code settings, your grid, whether you’re recording in HDR or whether you’re recording in Slow-mo.
But the most important setting is your video record and mine is currently set to 1080p at 30 frames per second.
But as you click through, you’ve got a choice of settings here: 720 at 30, 1080 at 30, 1080 at 60, 4K at 24, which is normal for talking heads. Then 4K at 30 frames per second, which is normal if you’re just chatting like this, and 4K at 60 frames per second, most efficient.
Now you’ll also see on the screen that it will break down roughly what this means to you.
You’re looking at 720 if you’re going for small file sizes, 1080p at 60 frames per second if you’re looking for normal and smooth video.
4K at 24 frames per second is the movie look, and 4K at 60 frames per second, it gives you more leeway, a little bit more flexibility, the ability to slow the footage down if you need to.
Why do you want to slow it down?
Well, the human eye is used to seeing things in cinemas and on games at 24 or 30 frames per second, these are the things that you normally see on TV.60 frames per second is what you’re used to maybe on PC and stuff like that and 60 frames per second gives you the chance to do slightly slow movie shots.
But if you really want to go for slow-mo, try 240 frames per second on the iPhone. I’ve done a video here and if it’s not there quite yet, I’ll add a link in the description when it arrives.
Final Words
But if you really want to go for slow-mo, try 240 frames per second on the iPhone. I’ve done a video here.
Getting more views on YouTube is the ultimate aim for all YouTubers.
More views equal more money from the YouTube partner program. So you should seek out ways to get an edge over your competition and get more views for your content.
One way to get more views for your channel is to get the YouTube algorithm to recommend your videos. YouTube attempts to keep viewers on its platform by suggesting another video on the same topic to keep the user watching.
One way to assist YouTube in understanding your channel content topic is by adding keywords (tags) to your YouTube channel.
This article explains what YouTube channel keywords are, how you can choose the best ones for your channel, how you add them in YouTube Studio.
YouTube Keywords – Video vs Channel.
You probably already know that when you upload a video to your YouTube channel, it’s good practice to add some tags or keywords. YouTube uses these keywords to help it understand the topic of the video content.
For example, I made a video all about adding tags to YouTube videos. I made sure to use the keywords ‘YouTube video tags for search’ and ‘how I tag my YouTube videos’. These are potential keyphrases people might type in the YouTube search bar.
As for the tags, I took those keyword phrases and mixed them up to use as a start point for my video. Here they are:
As you can see, video tags get very specific about the content of the video. And I make my videos with a singular focus on purpose, so that they provide educational information on a narrow, niche, subject.
It helps viewers to find my videos and get the exact information they need.
So, What Are YouTube Channel Keywords?
For YouTube channel keywords (tags), you need to be painting with a much broader brush. If you make videos about cooking pasta dishes, then your video tags may contain words like ‘penne’, ‘farfalle’, and ‘linguini’, depending on the recipe you are cooking.
But your channel keywords need to communicate the overall topic of cooking pasta dishes. So you should use broader keywords like ‘cooking pasta’, ‘Italian food’, and ‘Italian cuisine’.
This also highlights the importance to you of focusing your YouTube channel on one general topic. There is no point on uploading a video on cooking pasta one day and one on growing tomatoes the next day. Those are two separate topics.
Uploading content for a number of topics to your channel will confuse YouTube. It works against how the algorithm operates when it suggests videos to viewers to watch next.
If you want to create videos on a different topic, create another channel. You can easily set up a second channel under the same Google account.
How to Choose YouTube Channel Keywords
OK, so now you understand that your channel keywords should be broad–how do you find YouTube channel keywords?
If you have access to a keyword tool, then you can perform a search to come up with ideas for keywords to use. But, you don’t need to over analyse selecting your keywords. You’re telling YouTube what your channel is about, not trying to rank a page in the search engines.
Browse similar channels to yours and pick up broad keywords, create a list, then add in others that you can think of.
Next circle the ones that best describe the overall topic of your videos.
Seriously, don’t overthink this.
How Many YouTube Channel Keywords Should You Use?
Don’t go overboard on the number of keyword tags you use for your channel either. Choose 5-7 keywords that are most appropriate for describing the overall topic of your channel.
It has been suggested that the more keywords you choose the more this dilutes the effectiveness of each individual one. In the example below, the channel owner has used too many diverse keywords to describe their channel.
Is the channel about music, massage, yoga, or even fresh air!? Keep your keywords on message, so they communicate the central topic of your channel.
So now you know what to put in YouTube channel keywords, next we’ll look at how to add them to your channel.
How to Add YouTube Channel Keywords
Make sure you have logged into YouTube with your Google account and select the icon in the top right-hand corner of the screen.
From the drop-down menu, select ‘YouTube Studio’.
When the YouTube Studio screen loads, select ‘Settings’ at the bottom of the menu on the left.
In the window that pops-up select ‘Channel’.
In the next screen, you will find the box to add your keywords. Add your 5 – 7 chosen keyphrases by typing them in and hitting enter after each one.
Once you have entered them all, hit save, and you’re all set.
If you want to check on, or change, your YouTube channel’s keywords, simply navigate back to the above screen to repeat the process.
YouTube Channel Keywords Tips Conclusion
Entering some YouTube Channel tags, or keywords is best practice. The tags help YouTube understand your channel topic, which should make it easier for them to suggest your videos to viewers.
Most of the videos watched on YouTube are as a result of the YouTube suggestions. So if you want more views, and more Partner Program earnings, set your channel tags today.
Here is a handy summary of what you have just learned.
Keep your channel tags/keywords broad and on topic.
Only use 5-7 keyphrases so as not to confuse YouTube or dilute effectiveness.
You can use a YouTube keyword generator, but it is not necessary.
Now, this is one of those questions that many people ask. It’s just they have no idea. If you’re jumping onto the YouTube platform right now, then there are many legacy features that have been around for literally over a decade now that used to be much more specific for this platform that has slowly got less and less important over time.
Categories specifically put you in buckets based on what content you create, how to, style, business, money, food, finance, people, education.
I’ll be honest, I’m not totally sure what the list is anymore, mainly because it doesn’t matter.
Back when the platform was in infancy, you highlighted specifically what your content was about. If yours was comedy, then there would be specific areas on the site. You could go to only comedy videos and there would be specifically only people videos.
The way the YouTube algorithm currently works, it doesn’t matter. What you need to focus on is the title, the descriptions, kinds of your tags, and then the audience that it pushes out to.
There is no relation to the category you are in to the views that you get. If I was to switch this video from educational to gaming, I’m not going to get more gamers watch these videos.
Now, there might be something way back in the legacy algorithm that specifically recommends you against specific things, but it’s highly unlikely nowadays.
This machine is very powerful and very clever. So you shouldn’t be homing over the fact that what I do, ‘how to videos’, am I an how-to in style or am I an educational channel?
What you need to focus on is the content you create on a regular basis. If you stick to one niche and you’re not doing cooking on Thursday, knitting on Friday, and then skydiving on Sunday, followed by car repair on Tuesday, as long as you’re niched, then YouTube knows that’s your niche.
Because over time you have a hundred videos and those hundred video tags, all points into that kind of direction that say a hundred of your videos are all about cars. All of those tags would all be automobile based, and old cars, spark plugs and repairs.
It is very highly unlikely that out of those 100 videos, you’ve tagged it like a knitting pattern tutorial.
That’s one of the reasons why focusing on a niche can be so important and powerful mainly because it establishes your niche in your viewers’ mind, rather than YouTube in itself.
It’s just one of those questions that nags at you, because it’s still there. It’s still in the system and it hasn’t been removed.
Final words
It’s just like people saying, “Do you get paid for likes?”
I’ve got a video here, and if you’ve got a question about anything, no matter how small or weird or stupid, leave it in the comment section and subscribe, so you get to see the answer.
You’ve seen a million YouTubers doing it—”please like and subscribe and ring that bell!”.
Whether it’s a verbal reminder at the end of the video, a graphical popup part-way through, or something else, it seems every YouTuber on the platform wants you to like their video.
But why do YouTubers ask for likes? Likes play a significant role in the success of a YouTube channel. Likes, comments, shares and even dislikes are a form of engagement and is a positive sign that plays into the youtube ranking algorithm.
Reason 2 – Simple validation would be a sensible enough explanation. After all, social media is largely predicated on the fact that people are constantly seeking external validation.
Now, we’re not saying that those YouTubers who ask you to like their video aren’t still seeking that juicy external validation—they very well maybe—but that’s almost certainly not all there is to it.
Well, actually, yes. But, as always, we’re not going to just skim the surface of this topic, so let’s dive a little deeper.
Do Likes Make YouTuber’s Money?
It’s reasonable to assume that, if asking for likes is not purely a vanity thing, it must be a monetary thing. The truth about this aspect of YouTube is a little fuzzier than you might think. We can say, quite clearly, that likes do not make YouTubers money.
Kind of.
When you click like, the YouTuber you are watching doesn’t get a few cents dropped into their Adsense account.
However; you are improving the standing of that channel in the eyes of the almighty YouTube algorithm, and that makes their channel more likely to succeed financially going forward. To understand how this works, it helps to understand what YouTube looks for in its content creators.
Engagement Is King
YouTube is in the business of watch time and engagement.
Even a rudimentary understanding of online marketing will tell you that having a smaller number of engaged fans/viewers/customers is far better than a more significant amount of disinterested ones.
This is why business owners are willing to pay extra for targeted advertising—because they know a hundred ad impressions with the right people are more valuable than a thousand ad impressions with random viewers. Those hundred ad impressions are far more likely to yield leads because the people watching the ad are already predisposed to want the thing you are advertising.
YouTube think along the same lines when it comes to viewers. Now, at the end of the day, an ad impression is an ad impression. YouTube get paid if someone watches an ad regardless of whether that viewer was engaged.
But they place far less value on viewers who are not engaged than they do on ones who are. In short, it is the engaged viewers that YouTube are looking for, and it is the channels that create those engaged viewers that YouTube likes to promote the most.
How Do Likes Help With Engagement?
Simply put, a like is an engagement because it is an extra action that the viewer takes that they didn’t have to.
Sure, it’s not a particularly intensive action—it doesn’t take much effort to click a button—but it does take some effort, and that effort shows that the viewer is more engaged than the millions of viewers who don’t click like.
Also, a significant amount of viewers just don’t think about the like button when they are browsing. It is not a statement on the content they are watching; it just doesn’t occur to them to like the video.
When, like YouTube, you are dealing with two billion users a month, even small changes in the percentage of users that like videos can represent a ridiculous number of people.
Do Dislikes Hurt a Video?
The next question that usually follows this discussion is, if likes are so good for a video, are dislikes bad for the video? And, actually, no. At least; not inherently.
Sure, if someone dislikes your video, closes the tab, and never comes back to YouTube, that will reflect poorly on your content, and YouTube’s algorithm will factor that in. However, the action of disliking a video when considered in a vacuum is still engagement.
That means that if your viewers give your video the thumbs down, but then go on to watch more videos, it’s all good as far as YouTube is concerned. They still see that as engagement, and, as the viewer stuck around, there’s no downside.
Where it could be considered detrimental to a channel to dislike a video, however, is in your personal recommendations. Those videos YouTube put down the side when you’re watching something; they’re based on a lot of data, including your likes.
If you repeatedly like a particular kind of video, you will see more of that kind of video. If you like a lot of videos by a certain YouTuber, you will see more videos by that YouTuber.
Naturally, if you dislike videos, you are less likely to see that kind of video in future, or the YouTuber behind it. How much an individual dislike affects a video’s overall recommendation is unclear, but it certainly affects whether or not it will be recommended to you.
Watch Time Matters
Of course, there’s more to it than merely liking and disliking videos. YouTube wants to see that engagement, whether it is liking, disliking, or leaving comments, but watch time is the ultimate gatekeeper to a YouTuber’s success.
You see, it is watch time that is YouTube’s endgame metric when it comes to measuring success.
The more time people spend on YouTube, the more opportunities there are to serve those people advertisements and the more money YouTube makes.
Watch time is the single, most important metric in the YouTube algorithm’s decision-making process.
This is why we specified that dislikes are not harmful in a vacuum. There is nothing inherently damaging about getting a thumbs down, but there may be damaging implications.
If a viewer dislikes your video and then leaves the site altogether, the fact that they left YouTube from your content will count against you in the eyes of the algorithm, even if the thumbs down itself doesn’t.
Why is Engagement Important?
So, if watch time is so important, why does engagement matter at all? Well, it’s true that watch time is the significant metric that YouTube covets above all, but engagement is still an important part of their decision making processes.
Engagement shows that a YouTuber is not just drawing in casual, disinterested viewers, but active viewers who are involved in the platform. These viewers are far more likely to pay attention to advertisements and, as a result, click on them when they see one they like.
It is also the case that engagement is only possible from a signed-in YouTube account. YouTube does count views and watch time from anonymous viewers, but it is considerably more challenging to provide relevant advertisements to these viewers.
And, as we covered earlier in the post, it is the highly targeted advertisements that companies prefer to pay for since they yield better results.
If you want to know how to book that yield and get better cpm advertising rates, helping you make more money from your videos, check out my deep dive blog into how to increase youtube video cpm.
High levels of engagement are an indication that your videos are attracting logged-in YouTube users who can be served relevant ads based on their preferences and watch history, and that makes YouTube happy since targeted advertisements are both worth more and more likely to be clicked.
It Works
All of this is digging a little deeper than most YouTubers are thinking, however.
While there are plenty of YouTubers that are fully informed about the intricacies of YouTube’s algorithm, there are far more that don’t concern themselves with that level of detail, but nevertheless know that likes are a good thing for their channel.
And, of course, a good number of YouTubers that are purely after that external validation we mentioned earlier. So, for those YouTubers, why bother asking their viewers to like the content?
Quite simply; because it works. YouTuber after YouTuber has experimented with asking viewers to like a particular video as a way of testing if it makes a difference, and they invariably find that it does. It may be because a lot of viewers simply don’t think about liking until they are prompted, or that they didn’t think liking was that important to this particular YouTuber.
Whatever the reason, asking viewers to like a video has been proven time and time again to be effective. So regardless of why a specific YouTubers wants those likes, they know that asking for them will usually get them.
Tips on Asking for Likes
As silly as it might sound, there is something of an art to asking for likes in a YouTube video.
Doing it incorrectly most of the time will just be ineffective; however, there is also a chance you could actively put viewers off of liking your video or even watching future videos.
One of the first recommendations we would make is to avoid asking people to like (and subscribe, for that matter) right up top. In the case of subscribing, at least wait until you’ve introduced your channel, so the viewer knows if your content is the kind of thing they would even want to subscribe to.
In the case of likes, however, it is often seen as presumptuous to ask your viewers to like a video they haven’t even seen yet. This can create a sense of resentfulness and may even result in viewers refusing to like the video even if they did find the content useful or entertaining.
It is good practice to wait until approximately halfway through the video before considering using any visual cues, such as a “like and subscribe” graphical popup, and to wait until the sign off to verbally ask your viewers to like the video. By this time, your viewers will know whether they do, in fact, like the content.
Another tip is to ask, rather than tell. If you just say, “like the video” once again it can be seen as a bit presumptive. Instead, say something like, “if you liked the video, consider giving it a thumbs up”. That way, you are merely giving your viewers a polite, gentle reminder that the like button is there, but leaving it entirely up to them to decide if they think you have earned it.
Which brings us to the final suggestion we can make for getting those likes; earn it. All the YouTube science in the world won’t help you with subpar content. Before worrying about reminding viewers to click the like button, make sure you have worked out all of the major kinks in your videos. Your content doesn’t have to be perfect—few YouTube channels are—but any glaring problems should be addressed before you start asking people to give you a thumbs up.
Conclusions
There was a lot to cover there, but the basic theory behind likes can be summed up easily.
Likes are a significant metric that YouTube uses to determine which content to recommend to people, though they are by no means the only metric. They play a vital role in personal recommendations.
That is, if you like a particular type of video a lot, YouTube will endeavour to show you more of that kind of video. Dislikes can also play a positive role in your channel’s exposure, as can comments (regardless of the content).
All of it is as seen as engagement that your content is creating, and YouTube likes to see plenty of engagement.
All of this is secondary watch time, however. The longer people spend on YouTube, the better. And if they happen to be spending vast amounts of time on your videos, that will reflect very well for you in the YouTube algorithm.
Finally, don’t be presumptive about your viewer’s opinions. Ask them to like your videos, don’t tell them to. And only do so at a point in your video where there has been enough content for your viewer to judge if they do actually like it.
None of this guarantees you likes, of course. The only thing that can do that is quality content. But by knowing how the system works, you are better placed to leverage that quality content when you make it.
Top 5 Tools To Get You Started on YouTube
Very quickly before you go here are 5 amazing tools I have used every day to grow my YouTube channel from 0 to 30K subscribers in the last 12 months that I could not live without.
1. VidIQ helps boost my views and get found in search
I almost exclusively switched to VidIQ from a rival in 2020.
Within 12 months I tripled the size of my channel and very quickly learnt the power of thumbnails, click through rate and proper search optimization. Best of all, they are FREE!
2. Adobe Creative Suite helps me craft amazing looking thumbnails and eye-catching videos
I have been making youtube videos on and off since 2013.
When I first started I threw things together in Window Movie Maker, cringed at how it looked but thought “that’s the best I can do so it’ll have to do”.
Big mistake!
I soon realized the move time you put into your editing and the more engaging your thumbnails are the more views you will get and the more people will trust you enough to subscribe.
That is why I took the plunge and invested in my editing and design process with Adobe Creative Suite. They offer a WIDE range of tools to help make amazing videos, simple to use tools for overlays, graphics, one click tools to fix your audio and the very powerful Photoshop graphics program to make eye-catching thumbnails.
Best of all you can get a free trial for 30 days on their website, a discount if you are a student and if you are a regular human being it starts from as little as £9 per month if you want to commit to a plan.
3. Rev.com helps people read my videos
You can’t always listen to a video.
Maybe you’re on a bus, a train or sat in a living room with a 5 year old singing baby shark on loop… for HOURS. Or, you are trying to make as little noise as possible while your new born is FINALLY sleeping.
This is where Rev can help you or your audience consume your content on the go, in silence or in a language not native to the video.
5. Shutterstock helps me add amazing video b-roll cutaways
I mainly make tutorials and talking head videos.
And in this modern world this can be a little boring if you don’t see something funky every once in a while.
I try with overlays, jump cuts and being funny but my secret weapon is b-roll overlay content.
I can talk about skydiving, food, money, kids, cats – ANYTHING I WANT – with a quick search on the Shutterstock website I can find a great looking clip to overlay on my videos, keeping them entertained and watching for longer.
When you start out as a YouTuber, you are trying to achieve many things at once.
Most of your time is spent on thinking about content ideas, filming it, and learning how to edit it into a great video. With, perhaps, a bit of time dreaming about what you’ll spend your YouTube earnings on too!
But, eventually, you get to a point and think ‘hang on, how do I promote my youtube channel?’
You’re working from a standing start. You don’t have the budget for ad buys or an existing following from another platform to leverage.
Well, to get the ball rolling, and the subscribers racking up, you’ll need to spend a little elbow grease. Do some hard work. Because at the start you need to do all you can to get your name out there.
This means cross-promotion on social media networks. You need to be your own distribution network at the start, and create a spiderweb of content to catch your viewers. Then, well, it’s down to the quality of your content to then turn those initial viewers into long-term subscribers.
This blog post covers the big-four social media platforms you should be cross-posting your content on, how often you should do it, and what kind of material to publish.
Let’s get going.
A Brief Word of Caution.
The following tips won’t work unless you are a consistent YouTuber.
You can undertake all the promotional activity you like, but if you don’t regularly upload compelling content to YouTube, then your channel is set for failure. Mr Beast uploaded content for five years before his channel took off. Five years!
The content you’ll post to Twitter has a very short shelf life, in most cases, only a matter of hours. So it’s fine to post out lots of links to your content.
Look for a few popular hashtags that tend to trend frequently, rather than one-offs that happen to be trending at any particular moment. Don’t copy spammers and use hashtags that are not related to your content. You’ll only end up annoying Twitter users.
While following hashtags on Twitter is not possible, people do have favourites that they regularly look up so they can see the latest.
If users see your content under that hashtag, and it’s excellent, then you may get a new follower. Once you gain followers, then you can post out links to your channel and invite them to watch your content over on YouTube.
Think about what you tweet, though. Before you tweet, think carefully about what you’ll write – ask yourself ‘why would people care about this tweet?’ You have to engage people.
Look at the example below, posted with the phrase ‘New Vlog is up!!!’. Who cares!? Maybe his mother, but not anyone else.
Instead, give the Twitter users a reason to click on your link. The illustration below is much better.
Also, make sure to separate your link from the hashtags. Both are hyperlinks. So if your content is next to the hashtags, then fat thumbs can mean you could miss a potential viewer.
Promote Your YouTube Channel on Facebook
Two excellent places to share your new content on Facebook are on your own Facebook branding Page and in Facebook groups.
Create your own brand page. You won’t have any followers, to begin with, but post your videos there anyway. It won’t help your video to rank on YouTube but can help your video to rank for Google searches
The best part is that Facebook has already niched down the audiences for you. Whatever topic area you make your videos around, there is a place for you to share them on Facebook.
Tips for Promoting Youtube Content in Facebook Groups
When searching for groups to post your content to, make sure it contains enough people to engage with. There are plenty of groups with only a handful of members; keep searching until you find a large one.
For some Facebook Groups, activity drops over time. So, even if there is a large membership for a group, check the frequency of posts to make sure that it is worth your time to engage with it.
How you act in a group, once you have joined and been given access, matters. You have to engage with the group and be helpful. There is no point in joining a group to spam a link to your videos every once in a while. Instead, participate in the conversation, be helpful where you can, and when it’s appropriate, then share a link to your content. If you don’t, you’ll likely end up banned from the group.
Promote Your Youtube Channel on Instagram
Instagram is an ideal place to help build your YouTube audience.
Depending on the type of content you make for YouTube, you may be OK with using your existing Instagram account. If you don’t want to mix up your content with your personal Instagram usage, then create a new one specifically for your channel.
But it’s up to you. If you are the main focus of your YouTube channel, and ‘behind-the-scenes’ content might be valuable to followers, so use your existing account. If your YouTube channel is in a niche where you don’t show your face, then set up a fresh account.
Use Instagram to build up a following in your topic area. Spend some time browsing relevant hashtags to get an understanding of the type of content that is popular, then set out to emulate it.
Create Youtube Teasers
One of the best uses of Instagram to promote your YouTube channel is to create short 15-second teaser clips. Teaser clips can intrigue and draw Instagram users over to your YouTube channel.
A teaser is different and operates like a film trailer made by the big Hollywood movie studios. You intrigue and invite your potential audience to watch the full thing.
You can use your video editing software, or even better use a tool like Placeit to produce a compelling teaser. Placeit lets you quickly create teasers for Instagram (and other platforms) with handy templates and stock graphics.
Promote Your YouTube Channel on TikTok
The new kid on the block. Tik Tok divides opinion, some love the brash new social sharing platform, others criticise child safety and privacy issues. But, no-one can deny its reach.
It’s the new Vine, the platform to share short snappy videos, and there is a massive audience on this hot fresh platform.
TikTok has experienced incredible growth since its launch in 2016. The TikTok app has been downloaded over 2 billion times and now has over 800 million active users.
Use TikTok to post 15-second teaser clips like the ones you made for Instagram. Make sure to add a link to your YouTube channel in your bio, and direct people to your bio in your teaser clip.
Once you become as popular as Mr Beast, you can forget the profile link and afford to be sassy instead.
Conclusion
When looking for ways to promote your YouTube channel, don’t overlook the free options. Yes, it can be tempting to spend money you don’t have on ads and try and spend your way to success.
But YouTube is a long-term undertaking. You have to do the right things, regularly, to make a success of your channel. You’ll run out of advertising budget before you attract enough followers to make your channel a cash earning machine.
Look instead to the big social media players. There are millions of daily active users on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. Get strategic and make promotional content for your channel to post on those platforms.
And make sure to do it right. You can spot spam posts yourself, so make sure not to post spam for others to ignore. Become a part of the conversation, help out other users, and when it’s right, direct them to your channel on YouTube.
Very quickly before you go here are 5 amazing tools I have used every day to grow my YouTube channel from 0 to 30K subscribers in the last 12 months that I could not live without.
VidIQ helps boost my views and get found in search
I almost exclusively switched to VidIQ from a rival in 2020.
Within 12 months I tripled the size of my channel and very quickly learnt the power of thumbnails, click through rate and proper search optimization. Best of all, they are FREE!
Rev.com helps people read my videos
You can’t always listen to a video.
Maybe you’re on a bus, a train or sat in a living room with a 5 year old singing baby shark on loop… for HOURS. Or, you are trying to make as little noise as possible while your new born is FINALLY sleeping.
This is where Rev can help you or your audience consume your content on the go, in silence or in a language not native to the video.
Your TV and any other thing that you normally watch, like films and things, are normally at 24 to 30 frames per second. That’s what our eyes comfortably see.
When you skip to 60 frames per second, that gives you the chance to slow things down a little bit, but 240 frames per second allows you to do mega slow mo on footage without it looking jittery.
Basically what this allows you to do is in theory, slow it down to 10 times slower than 24 frames per second, because it takes 10 times more frames, 240 frames per second.
So how do we do this?
Well, you open your phone, you click on settings and you scroll down to “Camera.”
In here you have all of your settings for your grid, your recording format, whether or not you’re being efficient or not, your resolution in which I’ve talked about, whether or not you want to recording 4k or 1080p, there’ll be a video severing the codes up here.
But what you’re looking for is the “Record Slow-mo” setting.
Mine is currently set to 720p and 240 frames per second, but you can have 1080p at 120, 720 at 240, and 1080p at 240.
So, how does it affect you?
Well, the smaller, the resolution and smaller the frame rate, the smaller, the file, the higher the resolution, the higher the frame rate, the larger the file, and will take longer to edit with or render out, or it takes up more memory on your phone.
Slow-mo footage can be fantastic. It gives you that little bit of flexibility, just like recording in 4K.
If you need help in understanding the difference between 1080p and 4K footage I have a large deep dive blog that will drill into the benefits and flaws of both formats.
Final Words
If you want to know how you can record in 4K at 60 frames per second on your iPhone and any latest device, there is a video right here where if it’s not quite uploaded yet, there’s a playlist here on how you can make better videos.
Doing anything online these carries with it an inherent amount of risk, whether it is risk in the form of identity theft or risk in the form of abuse and harassment.
YouTube is a fantastic platform, but it is not exempt from these dangers.
Indeed, anyone who has spent enough time in a YouTube comments section could be forgiven for feeling that YouTube might be one of the worst examples of online dangers. At least when it comes to abuse and harassment.
The dangers a platform like YouTube poses are not only varied by their intent, but also by the person using YouTube. For example, an eleven-year-old child faces a largely different set of risks compared to an adult.
Is it dangerous to be a YouTuber? As with many things on the Internet, all but the most sinister of dangers can be mitigated by or avoided entirely by your behaviour. To borrow an example from email etiquette—you can’t get a virus from an unknown link if you don’t click on unknown links.
In this post, we’re going to look at the various ways in which YouTube can be dangerous, explore what YouTube do to prevent this, and look at how you can keep yourself and your loved ones safe.
Is it Dangerous to be a Child YouTuber?
We’re starting with children because, despite the sensitive nature of online safety for children, this is actually the most straightforward aspect of this topic to cover.
Firstly, children under the age of thirteen are not allowed to have a regular YouTube account under YouTube’s terms of service.
The only way a young child could be a YouTuber (without breaking the rules) is if they are YouTubing with an adult, such as their parent.
The child could appear in the adult’s videos, or the child could entirely run the channel while the adult manages things from behind the scenes. Either way, there will be an adult there who can guide the child through various Internet pitfalls they might otherwise have fallen down. Most social media platforms have similar rules regarding age, meaning you shouldn’t have to worry about your child being exposed to the less savoury denizens of the web.
They could lie about their age, of course. Sites like Twitter don’t have any kind of age verification, how you handle that will be down to your own parenting style.
Once your children are older than thirteen, however, they are allowed to sign up for a wide range of platforms, like YouTube and Facebook. However, they will still be a minor under your care, and you would still be legally within your rights to prevent them from doing so.
If you choose to allow your child onto the Internet, you must prepare them for what they may find. Have a real conversation with them about the risks, and about how people on the Internet can be less than pleasant sometimes.
Give them a thorough grounding in the basics, such as not giving usernames and passwords out, and how to spot a shady site. These are all things that your child will need to learn regardless, so getting a head start can’t hurt.
Is it Dangerous to be an Adult YouTuber?
The dangers of being a YouTuber as an adult are not much different from the general dangers of being on the Internet. Things like identity theft, fraud, and general mental well-being are all things to look out for.
If, however, you become a famous YouTuber, you should be prepared for the responsibility that brings. A person with a few thousand subscribers can make an ill-advised statement or be rude to someone, or let a bit of personal information slip out, and the world will keep turning.
A YouTuber with perhaps a few hundred thousand subscribers may see significant consequences from such behaviour. And a YouTuber with a few million subscribers could make mainstream media headlines from it.
While we understand the desire to rush to success, building a following as you would have with a successful YouTube channel is best done slowly for several reasons, not least of which is it gives you time to grow and adapt to your newfound popularity.
Another way in which being a YouTuber can be dangerous is in the real world implications of your content.
Granted, this probably won’t affect someone who is making inoffensive life hack videos, but if you have opinions of a controversial nature, and you are voicing them in your videos, it could have harmful side effects. In today’s reactionary world, your job could literally be at stake. And, while we might all have the dream of going full time with our YouTube channel, most of us still have to work a day job in the beginning.
What Can YouTubers do to Keep the Negativity Away?
Beyond simply ignoring negative comments, there are things you can do as a YouTuber to keep yourself, your channel, and your community as safe as possible.
Obviously, shutting down comments entirely and not having a presence on other social media platforms will all but eliminate the opportunity for bad faith actors; however, it will also hamper your ability to grow as a channel since community involvement is crucial in the early stages of your YouTube adventure.
So, with that in mind, we’re going to assume that you don’t plan to lock your channel and social media down altogether.
Set the Tone From the Start
Think of unwanted audience behaviour like a bad habit. It is much easier to cut it off at the start than it is to deal with once it has had time to take root and become ingrained. If you make it clear from the beginning that particular behaviour will not be tolerated, and enforce those standards wherever you can, it will be far less likely that you will have a problematic audience when you start to grow as a channel.
Of course, what one channel considers unacceptable may be fine for another channel. Swearing is an example of something that can be fine depending on the channel and the community.
The point is that by setting the tone early on, you’ll have less to deal with as you grow. You may even reach a point where your community polices itself.
If it is established that you do not allow profanity in your comments section, your audience will likely start letting newcomers know when they are behaving in a manner that is not in keeping with your community.
This also applies to behaviour that, while perhaps not offensive in nature, is nonetheless a bad precedent to set. For example, while getting involved with your community is a great way to grow your audience early on, it’s important to establish boundaries.
If you make yourself too available—beyond any reasonable expectation your viewers should have—you set the expectation that you will be similarly available in the future. And, as your audience grows, it will become more challenging to devote enough time to these kinds of interactions. This can lead to a negative reaction from your viewers, who feel they are being snubbed.
Separate Your Online Life From Your Real Life
Being a YouTuber can sometimes lead to problems in your real life. Those problems may be small, such as mild embarrassment over a family member seeing one of your videos, or very serious, such as your employer seeing you say or do something controversial that leads to your firing.
You may not feel like you have anything to hide from your real life, and you may be entirely correct. However, it can still sometimes be good practice to separate your YouTube personality from real life if possible. You can do this using a pseudonym, or being virtually faceless on your channel (though this can have longer-term branding implications).
You can also keep the two separate by not sharing YouTube things on your personal accounts, and not linking personal things to your YouTube account. A common practice is to have a private Facebook page where you can communicate with friends and family online, reserving places like Twitter for your “YouTube persona”.
Take Extra Care With Your Personal Data
There is a myriad of ways in which sensitive personal data can find its way into the public domain. For example, did you know that when you register a domain name, the details of the owner are publicly available unless you pay extra to keep them private? What’s worse is this data typically includes your address.
Another example would be giving out your address to receive packages from viewers, or sending a package to a viewer and having your home as the return address.
It is also worth putting a little extra effort into making sure your videos are free from any sensitive information. For example, if you do an unboxing video, make sure the packing label is removed or covered up before you start filming.
Preparing Yourself Mentally
While the material risks of being a YouTuber are very real, many dangers are less obvious and can creep up on you if you are not prepared for them.
Lack of Privacy
It may seem silly to think that a lack of privacy could be an issue for someone who chooses to put themselves online in a very public way, but as we mentioned above, there should be boundaries.
Still, even with firm boundaries in place, you are putting yourself out there, and there is an unavoidable degree of vulnerability about that.
Criticism
Following directly on from that, there is the criticism. There will always be a negative contingent online who are looking to say unhelpful and hurtful things. As a YouTuber, you need to become proficient at recognising the line between criticism and insults.
Legitimate criticism should be taken on board, as it can help your channel grow, whereas insults and general hurtful behaviour serve no purpose. If a person is looking to hurt you and nothing more, you won’t gain anything by attempting to mollify them, and their words should be dismissed as they have no objective merit.
Or, to put it another way, you wouldn’t ask a friend who hates Chinese food for recommendations on where to get Chinese, so why would you listen to opinions about your YouTube channel from someone who just doesn’t like your channel.
Lack of Understanding
While YouTube has become huge over the last decade or so, and made many people very rich and very famous, it is still covered by the shadow of scepticism when it comes to people who do not spend much time on the Internet. Unfortunately, for many of us, our families and friends will include a certain number of these sceptics.
Explaining what you do and gaining the understanding of people like this can be difficult. This is especially the case if you are hoping for a supportive reaction from your friends and family if you decide to move into YouTubing full time.
The best you can do in these situations is explain things as honestly as you can, let them know how important it is to you, and then try to move past it if they refuse to take it seriously. Try not to hold grudges—YouTube is relatively new, and the idea of a YouTube career is even newer. It’s not entirely unreasonable of them to have a little skepticism about it.
Lack of Patience
Unlike the last one, this one is on you. Succeeding on YouTube takes time. Attempts to cheat the system and speed things along usually end in YouTube redressing the balance—sometimes by deleting your subscribers—so there is no quick fix to success.
If you do not have the patience for the YouTube long haul, there is a very real danger that you will run out of steam and quit.
It can help to visualise your goals, but never be anything less than brutally honest with yourself about the rate of growth you can expect. That way, you won’t be disappointed when you aren’t an overnight success.
A whole generation of kids are growing up with YouTube for the first time in history. Remember, there was no such thing as YouTube as little as fifteen years ago.
So while being a professional YouTuber may seem like an unusual and exotic career choice for those of us born… let’s say “a little earlier”, it is an established industry for today’s children. It makes sense, then, that kids might aspire to become a YouTuber.
At the same time, it is perfectly natural for you, the parent, to have concerns about the safety and legalities of setting up a YouTube channel for your child. The Internet has proven to be a very useful tool for those who are prepared to harm children, be it through written or verbal abuse, or something far more sinister.
If you find yourself asking, “can I create a YouTube account for my child?”, then you’ve come to the right place. We’re going to give you all the information you need about this topic. Unfortunately, we can’t give you a clear cut answer up top—something we like to do whenever possible—because the answer is yes… and no. It depends on the child.
Can I Create a YouTube Account for My Child?
Most people would agree that a thirteen-year-old is a child—they certainly are in the eyes of the law. YouTube may not see a thirteen-year-old as an adult, but that is the age where they deem a child old enough to have their own YouTube account, though they still require parental permission up to the age of seventeen.
So, yes, you can create an account for your child—if that child is over the age of thirteen. This applies regardless of whether your child will be just watching YouTube, or actively making videos.
If you are only looking to set up a YouTube account for your child so that they can watch content, all is not lost. YouTube Kids is designed specifically for this purpose.
As a signed-in parent, you can create a kids profile that will allow you to set viewing preferences and recommendations, which is great for families with more than one child. YouTube Kids profiles are not merely about keeping inappropriate content away from young eyes—though that is an important part of it.
It is also about COPPA (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule) regulations, and not storing specific data about underage users. That is why YouTube will not allow you to set up a full account for your under-thirteen child, even if you were willing to disregard any safety or privacy concerns that might arise. This also extends to the YouTube browser experience.
If your child is signed in and attempts to go to youtube.com, they will be told that they can only access YouTube Kids. They will also be told that YouTube Kids is not available in-browser, which can be irritating for some parents who don’t necessarily want their child staring at a tiny phone screen for too long.
If, on the other hand, you do want to set the account up so that your child can make videos, you will have to wait until they are over thirteen, as YouTube Kids accounts cannot upload video.
We wouldn’t advise lying about your child’s age to open an account early, as that could lead to the account being banned if you are found out.
Are Their Loopholes?
There are plenty of YouTube channels that do—or have in the past—featured under-thirteens. Depending on the situation, there are varying degrees of risk to these potentially grey areas.
The Sidekick
The first example we are going to use, and probably the safest in terms of running afoul of YouTube rules on underage YouTubers, is that of Andy Schrock. In this case, the channel is unquestionably Andy’s. The content revolves around him and his business, and there is no ambiguity that the channel belongs to an adult.
However, a good deal of the content on Andy’s channel involves his young children. In this manner, his children—his eldest son in particular—have been able to experience making YouTube videos entirely within the terms of YouTube’s rules on children.
This way of introducing your child to YouTube allows you to fully control your child’s exposure, while also being there with them to guide them as they get to grips with being on-camera.
The Family Model
Our next example is HobbyFamilyTV, formally HobbyKidsTV. The channel has been around for several years now, and features a range of video types involving the “HobbyFamily”, but as you may have guessed from the previous name of the channel, the focus of the videos used to be the children primarily.
In this case, the channel did not belong to the children, but the children nevertheless were the stars of the show.
The method of allowing your children to become YouTubers has the advantage of you being there to essentially chaperone their journey, while still giving them the independence of making their own content.
The Hands-Off Model
Understand that, when we say “hands-off”, we are not talking in a literal sense. If you have a YouTuber child, whether they are old enough to do it alone or not, we recommend maintaining a watchful eye over them, both to protect them from the unpleasantness of the Internet, and prevent them saying or doing things they might later regret.
Our example for this kind of YouTuber is EthanGamer, formally known as EthanGamerTV. Though he is now old enough to have his own YouTube account, Ethan joined YouTube at the astoundingly young age of seven years old. Clearly, that violates YouTube’s current rules on underage accounts.
The way Ethan’s parents handled this was to be hands-on in the management of the channel (along with any other social media) while leaving the actual content of the channel to Ethan. This allowed Ethan to essentially run the channel as though it were his (we can’t say how much editorial control his parents exercised) while technically not violating YouTube’s under-thirteen policy, because it wasn’t his.
Now, we class this one as a bit of a grey area. It clearly worked for Ethan, who is now a very successful YouTuber with over two and a half million subscribers, but YouTube’s rules were not so strict throughout most of his YouTube career. We can’t say with confidence that a similarly run account wouldn’t be shut down today.
Guidance Is Critical
However you choose to approach letting your child become a YouTuber, it is critical that you don’t leave them to do it alone.
The Internet is seemingly filling up with stories of influencers getting “cancelled” after some poorly judged joke or insensitive comment from when they were a lot younger surfaced. Children, by their very nature, are not good judges of things like proprietary.
They are still learning and need guidance as they learn. They should be allowed to make mistakes, but on camera in front potentially millions of people is not the place to make those mistakes.
YouTube Restrictions
Like any good parent, you’ll want to be fully informed about letting your child travel down the YouTube path, and that includes knowing how monetisation works for these kinds of channels.
Unless the content being produced by or with your child is being made for adults, it will likely fall afoul of YouTube’s COPPA restrictions. This means several things, among which are disabled comments and no targeted advertisements.
YouTube is not allowed to keep data on children, which means they cannot serve personalised advertisements to them. This, in turn, discourages advertisers from running their ads on these kinds of videos, since they want their ads to be as laser-focused as possible. After all, the more relevant the audience, the better the chance of their ads generating leads.
The restrictions on advertising do not mean your child’s channel cannot be monetised, but the potential revenue that monetisation can generate is significantly reduced when compared to a channel whose content is not aimed at children. There are other options for monetisation, of course, but that is a substantial topic in its own right.
Keeping Your Child Safe
The dangers of the Internet as it pertains to young children is well known, and it is no different for YouTubers. There is also emotional wellbeing to consider, as YouTube is notorious for having many commenters who are not exactly positive and full of praise.
As it turns out, YouTube’s policies do a lot to mitigate this kind of problem by disabling comments on content aimed at children.
However, if your child is on other social media networks, you should consider keeping an eye on the interactions they have through those channels.
Naturally, you’ll want to ensure your child’s safety against online predators, but there are no YouTube-specific measures to take in that regard. All of the good practice and common sense that is recommended for other parts of the Internet apply here.
Is it dangerous to be on YouTube? – Check out my deep dive blog into all the things you need to thing about when becoming a YouTube.
Tip for Starting a YouTube Channel for Your Child
If you decide to let your child start their own YouTube channel, either with a full account as they are over thirteen, or using one of the methods mentioned above for under-thirteens, we have some tips for getting started.
We assume you’re not trying to get picked up by a TV network here.
But don’t feel like anything you film has to be put online.
Watch your content back as objectively as you can before it ever sees a YouTube upload box. Get close friends and family to cast their opinions on it. If you’re not happy, go again and try to fix the things that weren’t working.
If your child is going solo, insist they do the same.
Many people have had to learn to live with the stuff they put on the Internet when they were younger without fully understanding the implications; you don’t want your child to be one of them.
Talk About It
Perhaps one of the best things you can do if you intend to let your child use the Internet in any form, especially as a YouTuber, is to have a conversation with them about the risks and dangers of being online.
If your child is not yet at a point where they can grasp the things you need to talk about, it may be a sign that they are not yet ready for this kind of step.
Create a Plan
Things invariably go more smoothly when there is a plan guiding the process, and there’s no reason to think things work any differently when creating a YouTube channel.
If your child wants to do their own thing, have them develop a plan of action first. If they are too young to do it without your help, make the plan with them.
Talk about things like how often videos will be posted, who the intended audience is, what kind of content they plan to make. How will they go about learning the necessary skills to create, edit, and upload content by themselves?
If equipment is a factor, talk about money. Will you be helping them buy the equipment, and are there stipulations? If not, how do they plan to afford what they need?
Having a conversation like this not only ensures your child knows exactly what they are getting into, it also tests how much they really want to do it.
Find Your Balance
One of the hardest things to do as a parent of a YouTuber child—and in parenting in general—is finding the right balance between protecting your child and letting them spread their wings.
As they get older and more comfortable with their life as a YouTuber, you need to find a healthy balance between keeping an eye them as they continue to develop and letting them grow and explore without your presence bearing down on them.
It can be challenging to step back, but your child must gain a sense of independence as they grow, and that applies to YouTube as much as it does to life in general.
And, when they’re old enough to go it alone entirely, you will have prepared them as best you can.
Top 5 Tools To Get You Started on YouTube
Very quickly before you go here are 5 amazing tools I have used every day to grow my YouTube channel from 0 to 30K subscribers in the last 12 months that I could not live without.
1. VidIQ helps boost my views and get found in search
I almost exclusively switched to VidIQ from a rival in 2020.
Within 12 months I tripled the size of my channel and very quickly learnt the power of thumbnails, click through rate and proper search optimization. Best of all, they are FREE!
2. Adobe Creative Suite helps me craft amazing looking thumbnails and eye-catching videos
I have been making youtube videos on and off since 2013.
When I first started I threw things together in Window Movie Maker, cringed at how it looked but thought “that’s the best I can do so it’ll have to do”.
Big mistake!
I soon realized the move time you put into your editing and the more engaging your thumbnails are the more views you will get and the more people will trust you enough to subscribe.
That is why I took the plunge and invested in my editing and design process with Adobe Creative Suite. They offer a WIDE range of tools to help make amazing videos, simple to use tools for overlays, graphics, one click tools to fix your audio and the very powerful Photoshop graphics program to make eye-catching thumbnails.
Best of all you can get a free trial for 30 days on their website, a discount if you are a student and if you are a regular human being it starts from as little as £9 per month if you want to commit to a plan.
3. Rev.com helps people read my videos
You can’t always listen to a video.
Maybe you’re on a bus, a train or sat in a living room with a 5 year old singing baby shark on loop… for HOURS. Or, you are trying to make as little noise as possible while your new born is FINALLY sleeping.
This is where Rev can help you or your audience consume your content on the go, in silence or in a language not native to the video.
5. Shutterstock helps me add amazing video b-roll cutaways
I mainly make tutorials and talking head videos.
And in this modern world this can be a little boring if you don’t see something funky every once in a while.
I try with overlays, jump cuts and being funny but my secret weapon is b-roll overlay content.
I can talk about skydiving, food, money, kids, cats – ANYTHING I WANT – with a quick search on the Shutterstock website I can find a great looking clip to overlay on my videos, keeping them entertained and watching for longer.
In fact, if you have a question that you’d like answered, leave it in the comment section of the video, and I’ll make a dedicated response just to that, just for you. And of course, anybody else that wants to hear the answer.
YouTube is a weird platform. It’s all based on engagement. So based on who watches, how long they watch and how they interact with you. No doubt, many of times you’ve sat there and you’ve watched PewDiePie or MrBeast, or you’ve watched people like Graham Stephan, and they’re always like “Smash that like button, help me in the YouTube algorithm.”
They’re not too far off the truth if I’m honest, but there’s not a monetary value.
You clicking on that like button down there, you know, just test to see how the button works.
You clicking on that little button down there and turning it blue hasn’t made me any money. That won’t directly pay me 10 cents, that won’t give me coffee or an ice tea at the end of the day. But what it does do is show YouTube that I’m engaging enough to warrant some kind of emotional response, whether it’s a like, or a dislike, whether it’s a comment, whether it’s a share. And that engagement is very good for a YouTuber.
Let’s say that this video is 10 minutes long. I hope it’s not, but let’s say this video is 10 minutes long and you watch it for nine and a half minutes, and then you leave a comment, and then you click on another suggested video that I’m talking about at the end or on the right-hand side.
Well, that shows YouTube that I was able to bring you in, engage you for long enough to care to leave a comment, and then leave based on the suggestions that I’ve given you or the suggestions they have on the right-hand side.
You may have flipped off to one of my videos, or you may be on a video IQ,, or you’ve dived into a PewDiePie video.
YouTube doesn’t necessarily matter where you disappear to just yet. They like the fact that I’ve brought you in, engaged with you, kept you happy enough to want to watch more on YouTube, and then disappear.
So that Like, it’s kind of a small endorsement of that video, but, and this is where people get it twisted. So there’s a Dislike. Is that engagement enough that you felt that what I’ve communicated with you is either right or wrong, where you agree or you disagree, or you’re leaving a downvoting some way shape or form?
Maybe, I’ve asked, “If you like cheese, click vote up, and if you hate cheese, click vote down.”
That’s what you need to bear in mind. It’s an engagement. You’ve made people feel something enough that they’ve not just ignored the video and bounced away after 30 seconds, they physically had to go out of their way to press something on their screen or click something on their computer.
It’s this engagement that then YouTube evaluates.
So, let’s say this video gets 10,000 views and there is 8,000 likes and 2,000 dislikes and hundreds of thousands of comments.
YouTube looks at that and goes, “Okay, 8,000 likes 2,000 dislikes, that’s 10,000 like dislikes, and then there are hundreds of thousands of comments. Okay? So this is clearly engaging enough that people want to ask questions and have a conversation compared to another video where there are 10,000 views, but no likes, no dislikes, no comments. Nobody cares enough to engage. Nobody cares enough to comment or question or build some kind of discussion.”
So the video with likes, dislikes and comments will always rank over the one that doesn’t have any engagement.
What you should be focusing on is audience retention and engagement, and not have to worry about, “Oh, if I click on that, he’s going to get paid.”
Yes, if a video does better in search, and gets more views because of it, then maybe more people will see the adverse place against it, and then they will get paid.
Or in the case of some channels, it’s not about the adverts. Maybe they’ve turned off adverts entirely. What they’re trying to do is engage enough to build the brands, that in the long run, you trust them to buy coaching from them or some kind of thumbnail pack in which you want to improve your thumbnails, and maybe there’s a link in the description, and if there isn’t, keep checking my website in the future.
So that Like in itself, that individual click that you’re just about to leave on this video… No, doesn’t pay me directly, but in the long run it could help me make more money and that’s the same with any other YouTuber and any other video online.
Final Words
Now, if you want your question answered directly and in depth, leave it in the comment section below. I don’t care what it is. It could be as stupid or as simple as you think it needs to be. I can clarify it for you, and then maybe we can make a habit out of these frequently asked questions deep dives, or you can binge this video right here and this playlist on how to make better videos.
YouTube will be adding mid rolls to eight-minute long videos at the end of July.
I’m going to show you how you can turn this setting on, so you can get the most out of your YouTube channel, boost your CPM revenue, making a little bit more money, especially just before Christmas and all of this US election stuff.
Add Mid Rolls To 8 Minute Videos on YouTube [From July 2020]
Now, for some of you that already have videos over 10-minutes long, you know how this works. You can either automatically place things in based on the YouTube algorithm, and it will generate adverts in seemingly the best places, but it’s not always perfect. Or you can add them yourself using the video editor.
I did a video on how to add to your own mid rolls. I’ll put it in the info cards up here.
Now, all it’s doing is moving from 10 minutes to 8 minutes.
So now there’s more videos that are relevant. It may even be that they’ve noticed on the platform that people are just under the 10-minute threshold.
How many videos have you seen recently that are nine minutes and 30-odd seconds?
So, this moves it a little bit down and four minutes with a mid roll seems about right.
What you need to do is go to your Monetization page and you will see a warning.
You can click here to see more information, which basically says that we’re going to be readjusting them for eight-minute mid rolls.
You don’t always have to use the mid rolls if you don’t want to, but there’s also this option setting where you can now choose between: “Yes, I want to opt in. No, I don’t want to.”
If you opt in, it will help you set all of your future videos from eight minutes on, and even retro set the old ones for you as well.
Final words
If you want to know how these mid rolls work, once again, there’d be an info card here, or if you want to make money outside, I’ve done a play list and a video that you can see here somewhere on this screen.
I highly advise against this and this isn’t the stereotypical thing. I’m going to twist it in a different angle, right? Because everybody knows that it’s annoying, right?
You may be growing your numbers. You may do fantastically well. Your name may be Tom or Tim or Ten, and if you know who that is recently and who can, he’s gone.
But sub for sub hurts you. It inflates your number. It makes you feel egotistically brilliant. Wait, but what it actually does is it means more time you publish that video, that sub or that person who’s not watching your videos doesn’t engage with your content.
And YouTube goes, “Oh, okay. He just got 20 new subscribers. None of them watched, maybe their content is not good enough. Maybe we weren’t right.”
You put out a video and it’s not engaged with. You don’t get that comment or that like, or any form of shares, so they are zombies, they are hopeless.
And if you choose to push out your content to a random percentage of your subscriber base, and you’ve inflated that subscriber base with a hundred really fantastic people at a million really crappy zombies, and 10% of that will go to mostly zombies that do nothing.
That’s a fantastic video, but nobody cares, so then YouTube’s going to go, “We don’t care either.”
It’s all in your heads, what you should focus on is the 10 or 20 that really focus and really care about you, than the 50 that aren’t real.
It’s a metric for vanity, only.
Final Words
Now, if you want to see the full interview, click on this video here, remember to subscribe for regular tips and tutorials, and I’ll see you soon.
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