How I Almost Killed My YouTube Channel

Last year I made a mistake that almost killed my entire YouTube channel...and it was all because I tried to use a new feature that YouTube rolled out to creators. 

🎙This week's mic:
Warm Audio Wa-87jr
 https://geni.us/tN4J (Amazon)

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——————————— CONNECT ———————————
Electronic Mail: tom@enthusiasmproject.com
Main Site: https://himynameistom.com
Social Medias: @sodarntom

——————————— PODCAST GEAR ———————————
•Rodecaster Video: https://bhpho.to/3Ub88j2 (B&H)
•Rodecaster Duo: https://geni.us/ULKDFkp (Amazon)
•Elgato Prompter: https://geni.us/elgatoprompter (Amazon)
•Mic Arm: https://geni.us/zc7hAbW (Amazon)
•Elgato Stream Deck Plus: https://geni.us/EzyY6o5 (Amazon)
•Headphones: https://bhpho.to/3JNacqg (B&H)
•XLR Cables: https://geni.us/bluexlr (Amazon)

S15E05 | Series Episode 189
 
Podcast Artwork by Kevin Ramirez
Original theme music written by Patrick Boberg and performed by Mike Alvarez

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:32

Hello and welcome. My name is Tom. This is the Enthusiasm Project Season 14, Episode 5. The show is still alive on an unscheduled schedule. I am actually very excited about today's topic, which is why I wanted to share it with you, because it's something that it's almost like a unique discovery I feel like I have found that was very painful and frustrating in terms of you know being a YouTube creator, but also something that I hope will actually be helpful to share and potentially even point out what might be considered an issue with YouTube, or at least one of the features on YouTube, if anybody is thinking of using this feature. And of course, what I'm talking about is the course feature. So what I want to share today is how that almost killed my YouTube channel. And then through a happy series of events and semi-accidents, ended up really helping the channel. It's kind of bizarre. Before we dive into that, I do want to jump into you know what I'm using this week because last time I was talking about this microphone, and I was like, oh, if I'm talking about it, I should be using it. This is the Warm Audio WA87. No, wait, is it the 87? Yeah. Sorry. It's the WA87 Junior. They have a 47. I forget which is which. This is Warm Audio's uh, it's essentially their like $300 Neumann microphone. They have another one, it's not the junior version. I believe it's about $600. And that is the like maybe a more I shouldn't say a more direct because it's it's trying to go up against like a three or four thousand dollar microphone. So obviously there's a few differences there. But I really like this microphone. I've had it uh, I don't know, maybe upwards of a year at this point, close to that. And uh, you know, they sent it out last summer and you know to check out, and I really, really enjoyed it. It sounds awesome. It's a condenser microphone. I don't have a Neumann. I probably never will, not that I wouldn't want one, but the budget is a thing that I definitely don't have that budget for a microphone. But um I really like using this microphone. I really like the way that it sounds, it's been a lot of fun, and it's to me for the price, it sounds absolutely fantastic. So it's a large, you know, diaphragm condenser microphone. It does have some different pickup patterns, so you can use the cardioid one that I'm using now, but it also has a bi-directional and an omnidirectional pickup pattern. You have a negative 10 decibel pad, you have uh high pass filter, so you've got all you've got um, you know, you've got some really cool flexibility built in there. It does have uh what was the most annoying shock mount to put together. I had to put like the little bands in the shock mount, and for some reason that was like really frustrating and difficult. So uh that setup part of the process was annoying. Otherwise, the microphone's been absolutely fantastic. So that's what I'm using now. It's running through the Rodecaster duo just on the generic condenser setting. Uh, if you want to hear what it sounds like and turn off any processing. Now, this is the unprocessed sound of the microphone. Doesn't sound that much different, except without the noise gate, you can hear like you know, the air conditioner and probably my PC a little bit. And if I turn on the processing, now we've kind of like, you know, changed some frequencies just a little bit, and that noise gate is doing a lot of work to keep things nice and quiet, which is fantastic. So uh yeah, that's the microphone that I'm using. And now let's jump into this situation. So, YouTube, content creation, that whole world is very, very different. In March, I celebrated my five-year full-time YouTube adversary, which is awesome. And very, very exciting. Not it's uh sorry, I shouldn't say that. It's my yeah, full-time anniversary. In June, it will be nine years of starting the channel, but in March of this year, it was five years of doing it full-time. It has changed a lot. It is definitely like um more volatile than ever, I'll say. Definitely like a feast or famine situation, and you know, like tech companies just love to change algorithms and change things all the time. And last year on YouTube was exceptionally difficult, and I was getting frustrated, and then I was seeing you know, huge channels, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of subscribers, millions of subscribers describing the same thing. And a lot of what was happening, you know, had to do with changes YouTube was making. It went into stuff like um they essentially implemented implemented something that if you were using if someone was using an ad blocker, the views just didn't count at all. Uh so that you know, if if a large percentage of your audience, which if you're doing a tech-related channel, you probably have a higher percentage than normal of people who are you know using ad blockers, uh, none of those views were counting. So, you know, there's there's sort of this thing, it was like in August of 2025, so many channels like overnight just took a total dive in uh in viewership and in performance. And then YouTube also did this thing where on they did it on mobile, they did it on TVs. The like thumbnails are really big now. So if you go to like your your homepage, thumbnails are large by default a lot of the time, which in a way, like, hey, cool, I can see that, you know, I can see that video. But if you think about it, you know, where you used to have like 12 videos to choose from, now you have three. And so the reduction in real estate for the chances of your videos actually being shared was cut down a lot. So it's it kind of became it just it really, really hurt performance and channel. And then if you're if you're in a niche like uh, you know, like I I've never felt like I actually belonged in camera YouTube, but I'm kind of camera YouTube adjacent. And that is just a niche that is definitely like not as popular as it was a number of years ago for a lot of reasons. You know, cameras just uh are as has been said by many people, they're all very good now, so it's like the products have matured. I think a lot of people, you know, like they've kind of learned what they need to learn. Like, I don't know how many more videos about you know ND filters people really need. And, you know, the there's it really seems like the split with lower and higher end cameras is almost bigger than ever. You know, it was kind of a thing where people didn't want to use their phones for a long time because obviously, like a real camera, quote unquote, would be better than a phone. And it still is, that's still totally true. But phones are so good, everyone has phones with them, even smaller cameras, you know, something like the DJI Osmo Pocket or a GoPro or whatever, like those can look amazing. So to make the leap to you know, a mirrorless camera, what people would call a real camera, is it takes a lot more for someone to want to do that, to invest the money, to invest the time learning it, and then you know, carrying around a big camera versus the phone that's in your pocket all the time, especially now you grab a $60 Holly Land wireless mic, and now you've got good-looking video, great sounding audio that's just with you all the time and super easy to use. Very hard to convince a lot of people to just move on from that. So, camera YouTube's in a weird space. All that to say, towards the end of 2025, it was kind of like my channel was just was one of many channels that was not performing as well as it normally would have. And if, you know, that was the beauty of doing this part-time was you wanted everything to do well, but if it didn't, it didn't really matter. So it's like, you know, I wanted to make the videos, I wanted people to watch them. If they didn't, it was okay. When livelihood depends on that a little bit more, then it's uh, you know, it's a lot more, it's a lot more stressful when things don't go well. So that was the thing that was happening. The other thing that was happening was uh looking at my, and this is all connected to how I essentially like gave my channel a near-death experience, uh, was looking at my online courses, of which I have three. So I have the podcaster playbook, which is like a production guide, I have the podcaster idea book, which is like a podcast ideation guide, and then I have the uh Rough Cut to Final Cut, which is you know, Final Cut Pro editing tutorial. And I'm so proud of those courses. I really love them. And they they have been like a very nice bit of supplemental income. It's hard to, you know, some months nobody would sign up for the courses, and then other months you'd have like 10 people sign up. So um, you know, the the two bigger courses, the podcaster playbook and rough cut to final cut were $300, and the shorter, smaller one, podcaster idea books, was was a hundred dollars. So, and there's you know discounts if people sign up for more than one course at a time and all that kind of stuff. So uh that's that's pretty good. If you imagine suddenly now five new people are signing up for a $300 course a month, that's that's nice when your channel dips and you got ad revenue or whatever. But courses, I guess it depends on your topic. So when I um got really into playing bass a couple of years ago, I want to do a whole episode on this because it was just I encountered the best teacher I've ever encountered, which is uh if you want to learn bass, uh check out the bass buzz YouTube channel. And if you really want to learn it, uh Josh, who runs that channel, has a course called Beginner to Badass, and it is fantastic. It is $200, I think, for you know, lifetime access. And so I signed up for that course uh four years ago when I got my like really nice bass, and I really wanted to, you know, like learn more music theory and all the stuff I've neglected for a long time. And you're just such a good teacher. And it was like the course at the time was I think it was from 2016, and I was using it in 2022, and it, you know, it's still we're talking about music theory, so it's like that didn't change over the years, you know. I'm sure you know he changed, he was years older now. He was you clearly using like a 1080 camera versus like a fancy 4K camera or something, but it was it was just such a good way of teaching something, and courses like that are significantly more evergreen because they don't depend on a specific piece of technology or a specific trend or anything. It's like music theory is music theory. Um, and it was actually when I took that course, I the first time I loved it so much, and I love the way he explained things. That's what inspired me to do the Final Cut course where I was like, I want to very clearly teach something that I that I know how to teach. And Final Cut's not as evergreen necessarily as that is, but the editing process is kind of close. Like the tools change, the interfaces change a little bit, but the basics, the basics of uh you know, manually editing something kind of do stick around and stay the same. So that is actually that was very helpful. That led to my final cut course. And then um I have been trying to update my courses. So I did like a the idea book is probably my least or my most evergreen course, I guess I should say, because it's it's about ideas, it's about ideation. It doesn't it that can kind of stick around. It's based on stuff I did with my students for a long time. The playbook is production based, it doesn't get into a lot of specific tools, but it kind of does. And I also made it before video podcasting became a huge thing. I did a big refresh on it maybe two years into it, where I did kind of like I did like a George Lucas remaster of a lot of things and added in some lessons and added some supplemental video podcast stuff. Uh, but I noticed last year, Josh from the beginner to badass thing, he had redone his uh his bass course after nine years. I guess it was nine years old at the time. He totally redid it. Basically, the exact basically the exact same course, but just produced better. You know, he had learned from he had hundreds and hundreds of people go through his course, so he kind of learned where people were getting stuck and sort of adapted those lessons. And of course, now everything's in 4K and the audio quality is better. You know, it's much improved uh just from a production standpoint, but he just redid the course and I was like, Oh, you know what? This is so nice. I I love that he did that. I think I should remake uh redo the podcaster playbook because especially with video podcasting becoming such a thing, I don't want it to be an afterthought. I want it to be like incorporated into the production of it, and I wanted to redesign the course in a way where it addressed both workflows. Like, you know, here's lessons for everybody to watch, here's some lessons if you're doing audio only, here's some lessons if you're doing video. Like I wanted to kind of accommodate both, and then of course, you know, improve my own production. Like I have, you know, it was in 1080 before I wanted to be in 4K. I wanted to, you know, just have it match, you know, my current studio setup and stuff like that. So I adjusted and rewrote and reproduced and re-reproduced and did reproduce the uh I did the first half of the course, and the thing with courses, if you want them to be good, they are so much work. And I don't know exactly what it is. I guess you know, you know people are paying for it, you know it needs to be super clear, it needs to be out like they just take so much work to create. And I was really, really happy with how the playbook was coming together. But the other thing with courses, and this is, you know, at least with mine, but it's in line with what other people have said, is the number of people who make it through the end of an online course is very, very small. And so what happens a lot is a lot of people, you know, sometimes late at night, they're you know, they're feeling motivating, they're like, Oh, I want to make a change, I want to do something, I'm gonna go for it, I'm gonna buy that online course, I'm gonna sign up for that thing, you know. Like we've all done things like that. I'm gonna sign up for the gym, exercise every day. Like, you know, we've all kind of had those moments. A lot of times with online courses, people have that moment. They go on, they sign up for the course, and maybe they do one or two lessons, and that's kind of it. And that is not just for me. I think that is the statistic for the vast majority of online courses. Just buying the course and knowing that you can access it almost like scratches the itch for a lot of people. And that's kind of a bummer. Because I know in the case of a gym, right, the gym's ideal thing is you sign up for a membership and you never go to the gym, right? They get your money and they never have to deal with you being there. They never have to clean up, you know, sweat or you don't wear out the machines or anything. For me, as like a former teacher making online courses, yes, I want people to sign up for them because I that's a source of income, but I actually want people to go through them. Like I want people to complete them. It always meant so much when people would go through and complete them and share that with me. But I can look at the statistics and see, you know, where people drop off, how they drop off. Uh, and you know, it's the fact of the matter is, like, most people aren't watching the entire courses. And it's just like part of me then felt that a couple things kind of converged there. One is that I was putting so much work into uh redoing this course, and the the fact was I was like, it's fun that I'll be able to market it as like version two, totally redone, yay! Nobody's gonna see these videos. Like, I'm breaking my back, spending months on these things, and you know, I I mean, I think like statistically, I think I had 120 people sign up for the podcaster playbook total, uh, which is great, but I think it was literally like 12 of them finished every single lesson. Some people got a couple to the end, some people never opened any, some people did one or two, some people kind of like poked around, whatever. But literally, and so it's like you can imagine uploading a video to YouTube and it gets 12 views, right? Like that's and and you spend a ton of time on it, it doesn't feel great. And I know it doesn't matter in terms of the money because it's like you know, they pay for the course whether or not they use it, but I don't like that. I want you to buy the course because you're going to use it. So a while back, YouTube had announced that they were gonna do, they were gonna add a course feature to YouTube, and I thought that was really cool. They had been rolling it out throughout 2025 to kind of like select channels, and I had been waiting and waiting and waiting. And finally, in the summer of 2025, maybe it was early fall 2025, they added it, they added the course feature to my channel. I was like, this is perfect because this means I can put my courses on YouTube. So uh back in the summer of 2025, I actually stopped enrollment of the courses so that way, like no one was gonna sign up and then it was all gonna get they'd still have access, obviously, if it moved to YouTube. But I would be upset if I signed up for a course and a week later it was now free on YouTube. Like, I went like that. So it's like I stopped enrollment, I let everyone know hey, these are gonna be here uh till February, because that's when my hosting ran out for the course platform. Um, and you still have access to everything. And after that, you still have access, but it's gonna be on YouTube. And so for the next few months, you'll have exclusive access, and then everybody will have access. So I try to make it as fair as possible for people who did sign up. Uh, and then the other thing was that hosting part of it was the hosting platform I was using for the course was just like it never had all the features I wanted, and I was using it for so many years, and it just seemed like it kept adding some things, but it never quite got to where I wanted, and it kept getting more expensive. So it was like over a thousand dollars a year to host all the courses, and it's like, okay, cool, you know, my first four or five course sales every year just go to pay for hosting. Yay! And it's like I didn't want to spend another thousand bucks. I was like, okay, that hosting's gonna go away in February. I want to have everything moved over to YouTube before then. YouTube gave me access to this course course feature, so I'm gonna upload the courses there, test it all out. And it is cool. I love that courses can be on YouTube. If you go to a YouTube channel's homepage, like if you go to my YouTube channel's homepage, there's a course tab. The courses are all there. I changed my website, so everything just links to YouTube. I think that's great. I think having them there is awesome. Uh if I look at them right now, um, obviously, like they're not videos that people are gonna watch. You know, some of them have well, actually, it looks like the lowest viewed ones have like 80, 70 views, something like that. Um, some of them though did kind of pop off with like 2200 views, 1700 views. So it sort of depends. Like a lot of the video podcasting stuff in the podcast of Playbook got a lot of views. Um yeah, 1500. I mean, the lowest views is I think 79, which is literally the last video, one of the last videos in the final cut course. So it kind of makes sense that people would skip that. Uh, that is the least viewed thing. None of the videos in any of my online courses that have been up for years had 79 views, much less hundreds now at this point. So even the least viewed video of these courses now has way more people have seen it than ever saw it when it was paid. And I think that's really cool. And I love that that you know, putting the courses on YouTube, you can put them into um you know YouTube's algorithm, right? They can be searched and recommended, and then people can find them and realize, oh, this is you know, video six of 18. Like, what? There's a whole course here. And so it just seems like a really cool thing. I like that they're free. And then also what's really cool for someone who, you know, when the the course information is timely, like for me, you know, it it's you know final cut doesn't change a ton, but you know, 18 months, 24 months, like some things change. It's like, oh, I should really update that, or you know, I should really redo the podcaster playbook. You know, I want I want to make sure people sign up. They if they pay their money, they open the thing and it feels current and it feels up to date. To be honest, if the courses are free, I don't care about that. Uh the information is still good, but it's like you you didn't pay anything for it, so I don't really feel the pressure to constantly update everything. You can kind of I feel much more comfortable letting people fill in any gaps if there are any. And you know, and so that just and I I don't know. I I I was very, very happy with that. So I uploaded the courses. Now, that's why, and and then that's what killed my channel. So I'm super excited about this. I'm uploading the courses, I'm putting them all together. Essentially, the way YouTube currently does it is your courses are just playlists, but they're marked as courses, which I think throws them into some different tabs in YouTube, kind of similar to how YouTube handles podcasts. It's like, what is really the difference between a podcast and a playlist or a course and a playlist? It's just a different type of playlist, but it does kind of get thrown into a different part of YouTube. It gets thrown into a different tab on your channel. It's a little bit easier to share. They did, this wasn't available when I uploaded mine, but they did just add the ability to add files. You can put like quizzes, you can add attachments and files, which would have been you know really fantastic, and it kind of lets you turn it into a more you know all encompassing course or lessons if you want to do that. Which is awesome. The thing is, though, I have three courses. I'm uploading all those videos. I don't want to bombard people with uh that comes out to 44 videos. I don't want to bombard people with 44 subscription notifications and things. Like it would just be a little bit crazy. So what I did when I uploaded those, I also didn't want them to be unlisted because then they wouldn't be able to, you know, half the point putting them on YouTube is take advantage of the YouTube algorithm and recommendation and all that kind of stuff. So I just published them but did not publish them to the subscription feed. So they became public, but nobody was notified of it. And I thought that would be a great way to not disturb anyone. And that's what killed the channel. So I'm telling you this because it's if you create an online course, there's a very good chance that your online course contains a number of videos, right? And if you publish those, YouTube does not currently differentiate between a video that's in a course and a regular video. And so in my case, what YouTube saw was oh, your last 44 videos, nobody watched those. Because even if I had published them to the subscription feed, they won't have like been, you know, straight to the trending page or anything. Like they're they're niche course videos, so they're not going to get a ton of views anyway. But if also because I didn't publish them to the subscription feed, then way less people watch them. And so YouTube was like, you have uploaded your last 44 videos, nobody was interested in. It didn't matter that they were uploaded in the same day or two. It didn't matter that they're parts of courses, they're not regular videos. But basically, what YouTube did after that was like obviously no one likes your channel, and it just stopped recommending anything. And I can see that in my channel analytics. My channel lytics prior to uploading the courses, you know, doing uh camera stuff. I can see, you know, there's videos with anywhere between five and fifteen thousand views, twenty-four thousand views, seven thousand. That's to me like quite good. If if I can regularly get that on videos, that is fantastic. And then if I scroll through my videos, you can see this for yourself. You go to the video page on my channel. There's the chunk of all the course videos, and then after that, I guess now it's been some time things have picked up, but after that, there's videos like a video about the the newest iPhone, which is typically something that would do pretty well. Currently, seven months later, has 2700 views. I was at a point where the let's see, one, two, three, four, five, like really, like the the six weeks after I uploaded that, the six videos I uploaded afterwards would struggle to hit a thousand views in the first week. And normally for my channel, which is, you know, uh at the especially seven months ago, I think it must have been in the hundred and seventy, sixty, seventy thousand subscriber range. Typically, um, the way I kind of looked at things, like I'm not I'm not a huge analytics person where I'm like paying attention to retention charts and all this stuff, but I would notice hey, if a video gets 2,000 views by lunchtime, it seems like that thing is crushing it. And so, and when I say lunchtime, I mean like it comes out on Thursday morning. So by the time I check in during lunch on Thursday, 2,000 views, yay, video's doing great. So to then go an entire week and not crack triple or track, not crack quadruple digits, something is weird. And even when it's topics that I know, like, okay, I'm doing, you know, streaming videos, I'm doing iPhone videos, I'm doing, you know, Opsbot videos, like stuff that's like typically these are videos that do pretty decent on my channel because they're right with within my niche. Nothing, nothing is happening. And to me, that was pretty obvious that like YouTube just like stopped recommending my channel after uploading the course videos, which was such it's such a bummer because it's like I'm I was waiting for that feature for so long. I was even shifting, because keep in mind now, shutting down paid courses and moving them to YouTube for free, that is taking away an income stream, right? Like, so that is losing income every month to make the courses free. And then on top of that, it hurt the channel so much that then it lost more income because the channel's not doing well, which then conversely is like if someone does want to sponsor a video, well, okay, it's a little bit harder to negotiate rates when it's like nobody seems to be watching your videos currently. So it's like hurting everything. And I was very frustrated that it's like I felt like I was getting punished by YouTube for using a YouTube feature. So the reason I'm telling you this whole story, there's two reasons. One is I think that's something worth pointing out. And I really think that when if we want to talk about what's differentiating, you know, videos in a course list from videos in a regular playlist or a regular upload, I really think that there should at least be an option to like remove course videos from your channel's analytics. Like, I like don't have those count as your last recent 10 videos where the analytics are all you know metrified and stuff. Like just have them be course videos. It doesn't matter if one person watches it or a million people watch it, they're just your course videos. And that way you can upload, because I don't know what I don't like. I would love to actually make more courses, but right now I have no idea how to do that because imagine I make a course and it has 15 videos or something as part of it. I definitely don't want to upload 15 videos at a time because I know it's gonna hurt the channel, and so I guess a way around that is to like to upload one video a week for 15 weeks and make it like a supplemental upload every week, but then that doesn't seem to really do a big service because people are gonna want to go through the course and now it's like I can't even get all the videos for 15 weeks. Like, what do I it it just doesn't seem ideal to have to do it that way? So I really do want to point that out, and I also want to do that as a warning to anyone who's using YouTube's course feature that hey, that's a thing. I don't know what would have happened if I had published them all to the subscription feed. I think it would have pissed a lot of people off because they wouldn't want to uh they wouldn't want all of those notifications, especially all at once, and they won't want their subscription feed, like you would literally have to go pages into your feed to see somebody else's videos. That doesn't seem right either. So just be aware of that. YouTube has this course feature, it is super cool. Now that the courses are up there and they are, you know, like kind of buried under videos since how many videos have I uploaded? I don't know, I've uploaded quite a few videos since then at this point. 40 videos, 50 videos since the courses. So that has helped quite a bit. The downside, though, is like be feeling like you're being punished for using a YouTube feature. So just be aware of that. I don't have a solution. If you have more knowledge than me or you have a solution, tell me. But if you want to make your courses free on YouTube without hurting your channel's performance, I just I kind of got big old question marks. Like it's a hit you're gonna have to take, or you're just not going to be able to share the courses on YouTube. And I think that hurts creators, and obviously it hurts YouTube as well because they made this course feature, it seems like they want to use it. You you if anything, incentivize people to use it, like promote courses, you know, don't hurt channels for publishing courses. So that basically killed the channel. But it led to the channel having like a resurgence in a really cool way, which is not well, okay, it is it is because of YouTube, but it's also like yeah. So anyway, the channel was dead. This also coincided. Uh, you know, a few weeks of that had been happening. I'm super super, you know, frustrated. I don't know what to do. But also, my 3D printer broke. My uh old 3D printer just broke one day. I was like, dang it. So I was doing some shopping. I bought a new 3D printer, you know, last November. Uh got the bamboo P2S, which I really like a lot. Um, and I got the printer and I was like, you know, I'd love to do an unboxing video of this, and I will put it on my second channel because my channel's, you know, I have some of my earliest videos are 3D printing videos, but I haven't really talked about 3D printing in a long time. So I'll put this on the second channel. And so I filmed a, you know, an unboxing and initial setup video of the P2S, which is really, really fun. And I actually had like so much fun putting that video together. And and that kind of happens when you make stuff for the second channel, is like there's a lot less pressure because it's like I don't care about the performance. I care about the videos, and like I don't care about making something high quality, but I don't care for the most part about the performance. So there's kind of like that freedom, which then I d I do think translates into videos that you can kind of feel that, which is kind of it's not a bad thing. And so I made the video, it was really nice. I liked I liked the video a lot, and I was like, okay, I'm gonna upload this on the second channel. So I did, and you know, I rarely upload on my second channel, and you know, not a couple videos have like popped off over the years on there, but for the most part, not really. And a little bit of time went by and I kind of looked, and like it was literally like 12 people that watched the video, and uh the couple who had commented were people who like also comment on my main channel, like Gil and Bailey and stuff. So I was like, wait, okay, this is on my second channel, but everyone who's watching it are people who do watch my main channel. So, like my main channel, I and I really liked the video, like I worked really hard on it and I really was happy with how it came out, and I thought it was a a really fun video, and so because the channel was just in the toilet, I was just kind of like, you know, I think I'm actually just gonna move this to the main channel because at least then more people will see it. I'm not doing the thing where I'm making the course and putting all this time into it, and 12 people are gonna watch it. Like, at least, you know, even if the video does poorly, it's gonna get more people seeing it there than on the second channel. So I just popped it onto the main channel. I was like, whatever. I know this is totally unrelated, but everything is just in the red anyway, so who cares? And for some reason, that video completely took off. Uh, it is currently sitting at 186,000 views, uh, which is insane because it it was it got like 10,000 views in the first day, which is not a thing that happens on my channel. And what was so interesting about that was it was pulling in new people to the channel, but there was so much overlap. Like, there were so many people who normally watch the channel, normally comment on the videos that were saying they were shopping around for 3D printers, or they just got this same 3D printer, or they were thinking about this printer. Like, I was genuinely shocked at how uh at how many, how much overlap there was. It was just kind of crazy. And I was like, okay, cool, that's really fun. And you know, I just published the video kind of on a whim. I was like, well, maybe I can make you know more 3D printing videos down the line as I learn more about this printer. And having taken such a break from 3D printing, the world totally changed. Like I mentioned, some of my early videos, and some of my earliest videos actually did well were 3D printing videos, but back then in like 2017, I made like nine videos, eight or nine 3D printing videos. And I think the channel could have become like a 3D printing channel at that point, but that was the extent of everything I knew about 3D printing. Like I was I exhausted my knowledge. And back then, almost a decade ago, 3D printing was so incredibly like tinkery. And so, if you wanted to get into a 3D printing channel, that meant you're gonna be doing a lot of like building your own printers and calibrating printers and all the stuff that I really had no interest in. And then trying to design stuff, you know, stuff was really limited, like what you were able to do with 3D printers. Jumping back into 3D printing in 2025, it was like almost starting from scratch again because it was so different. Everything was so much more advanced, so much more user-friendly, so much more refined. There's room to tinker if you want, but also like if you don't want to, you just want to kind of set up printers and just have stuff print. Like you can explore like the world of 3D printing instead of just like printing stuff to fix your printer, which feels like an exercise in futility after a certain point. And so I was having a lot of fun with that, and that was kind of my thought was like, well, I'll I can share videos about 3D printing sometimes. So knowing that there's you know, there is audience overlap, but that kind of brings in two audiences, but the channel is also kind of dead, so just go with it. Uh, my plan was like just stick to my normal Thursday uploads, and then uh I I uploaded my printer video on a Saturday, so I was like, Oh, that seems kind of fun. Like, 3D printing is a hobby. A lot of times people, you know, engage with their hobbies on the weekends, so I'll just do like a Saturday upload, and then it's like you can have a printing video on the weekend, like a hobby video on the weekend, but no pressure. Like, if I don't, you know, if I miss a Saturday, it's no big deal. Um, yeah, you know, I didn't want to like double my workflow, but I kind of did that, and it it is it is sort of crazy because the the next video, I guess the next printing video I did, well, this was a couple weeks later. Yeah, so I put that video, I didn't know what to do with it. A couple weeks later, I had used the printer a lot, and it was funny because Heather was actually, she's like, Oh, you should do like my first hundred hours with the printer. And I was like, Yeah, I should. And so then I went in and I just made a video that was like, here's what it's been like, my first hundred hours using this printer. Like, literally, she gave me that idea in the morning, filmed the idea, you know, that late morning afternoon, edited it, put the video up the next day, and it is now at 222,000 views, uh, which is absolutely crazy. But I think I mean 3D printing is very popular right now. The printers I was using are very, or the printer at the time I'm using very, very popular. And the P2S, I mean, like, it had just come out, so there's a lot of like searching about the P2S, and it's just it was just a popular thing. And I do think there there is something about the like just a person sharing their experience with 3D printing. Like, I think that did stick out with people instead of kind of the more like tutorial-based, and you know, the same thing in camera YouTube, like oh, I've seen 4,000 printers, and maybe this person feels a little bit jaded, and now we're getting into the you know, like uh niche arguments about highly technical things and stuff like that. Um, so it was kind of fun to just do that, and it was after that where I was like, I've done two 3D printing videos now, and they both have been my best performing videos in a long time, and those videos together brought in over 3,000 new people. So it's like now there's a there is an overlap in audience, but there is also now a new audience, so I don't want to have people join the channel and then never give them anything interesting to watch again. So uh that's when I was like, you know, this kind of alternating thing about my normal videos, my 3D printer stuff, which kind of have been wanting to sort of broaden the channel because even before the course thing, like I mentioned, you know, the audio video niche, I think there's room for it to be very successful or very, you know, interesting and engaging, but I think it needs to broaden out, you know, like people looking for specific technical details on high-end and mirrorless cameras, very, very small number. People looking for you know, like simple podcasting setups, simple streaming setups, like how does a webcam compare like more approachable technology? Way broader appeal. But then does that go out into things kind of beyond that? And I that's why I'm glad I've never been like part of like camera camera YouTube because I feel like I've always kind of then been more in that like one-person production flow sphere of like you know, podcasting and streaming and stuff like that, which just sort of made it a little more natural to explore that other technology. And then 3D printers show up, and in my mind, that then kind of opens things up to like I don't know what I call it creative technology, but technology that enables creation, which is my media program that I started when I was a teacher was Impact, which is the Institute of Media Production Arts and Creative Technology. So just bringing that CT, that creative technology to my YouTube channel is kind of a natural fit, and I think 3D printing is a really good bridge to that, and and it's also just really fun. Having tons of fun with 3D printing, and so that's what I've been doing for the most part is alternating and doing usually two videos a week. Sometimes I don't have a printing video. There have been a couple weeks where just because life is life, I have just done a 3D printing video as my Thursday upload. No one has complained, but it's very obvious, like looking at the analytics, the printing videos are the ones that people are overall most interested in currently, which is fine. If I'm having fun making them and people want to watch them, you know, that's cool there. But I also want to continue making not just I don't want to be pigeonholed into then the 3D printing channel, and I also don't want to then overlook or abandon the entire audience of people who helped me build my channel over the past nine years either. So it's been like kind of a really fun thing to explore, but I wanted to share that whole thing because it's also been like this incredibly like painful process where it really only happened because I would have only uploaded the initial 3D printing video because the channel was doing so poorly, it was like, who cares? There's nothing to lose, and the channel was doing so poorly because I I took advantage of a new feature that YouTube offered, which was like so frustrating. So that that is kind of my story there. And then the thing that I'm navigating now, having tons of fun with printing, but it is a weird situation because I had 3D printing videos do pretty well on a channel that has you know 180,000 subscribers. The 3D printing companies took note of that really quick, and it's like after a couple videos, they started reaching out the same way that like camera companies do, and it's like, oh no, I don't like this. Is this fun, this is casual. I don't, I don't want to like there's a big there is a difference. And I understand that there's a difference between someone who's like, hey, I bought this printer, check it out. This is what I think about it, and hey, company sent a printer, let me tell you about it. That has an inherently different vibe. Um and Bamboo, the company that I bought my printer from, they reached out and offered to send their I bought their, it's not their cheapest printer, but it's like it's one of their more, it's one of their cheaper printers. It's like essentially-ish, their cheapest, fully enclosed, looks like a mini fridge kind of printer. Um, and I had talked about some things about it in a video where it can change colors, it can change filaments, but and when it does that, it creates these little bits of waste. And you know, it can, depending on what you're printing, it can create a lot of waste. So that's just something to be aware of. And they reached out and they're like, Oh, we'd love to send your send you our flagship printer. They saw the ethics statement, they were totally on board with that. And they're basically like, we think this will address all the issues they have with waste, because the way that printer is set up, it it sort of changes things more efficiently, and it's specifically designed to do multimaterial, multi-color in a really efficient way. And, you know, they're like, no obligation to do anything. Like, we just really think this would, you know, like um kind of address the problems you were not even a problem, but the thing that you brought up with that one. And I told them no. I was they were super polite, super cool. And I was like, you know, I'm really enjoying the printer. I'm really enjoying, you know, connecting with my audience just through this hobby. And I'm I I also like I'm still learning about this printer, which is pretty basic. So I don't know that I'm ready to jump into like the super advanced printer. I don't know that that would be the best thing for me to do. And they were like, okay, yeah, no problem, no problem. Um, and then I was kind of thinking about that, and a couple months went by and I felt more capable with my printer, and then I was also then starting to have questions where I was like, you know, that that other printer would be kind of cool. Can it do this? And I was like, okay. I actually did reach out to them and go like, you know, now I'm comfortable with my P2S. I am starting to have some questions. I would totally be open to checking out the H2C, which is their higher-end printer. Um, but no big deal, you know, if if the offer is not there anymore. And I still can't promise any content in return. Like it's literally just uh, I'll give you feedback if you want it, but that's it. I'm like, okay, cool. And they like sent it right away. Um, and so I did a video on that. And the way, the way I kind of looked at it too was like I had the lower end printer and had questions about the high-end printer. It's expensive, it's $2,300. So like a lot of people aren't going to and and buying a printer, it's almost like buying, we just had to buy a new mattress for the first time in many, many years recently. And we we bought one locally because you can buy mattresses online, but wow, what happens when you need to return it? Like it's you kind of it's a hard thing to like pack up and ship back. Printers are kind of the same. Like, yeah, you could buy a high-end printer and you could return it if you need to, but it's a process to unbox a printer, much less than like pack it back up and make sure it ships safely so it doesn't break. Like it, it's it's not as easy as like you know, a small thing on Amazon or even a camera or something that's like super easy to put back in the box. Like, so that is to say, I figured like, well, I'm curious about this printer. If I have the chance to get it and check it out and sort of answer some of these questions for myself, I could also then be a proxy user, a proxy tester for people who watch the channel. If other people are curious about it, you know, I can answer their questions, I can test things out for them, I can be like the proxy user. And I was like, Oh, that's kind of fun. So that that's sort of what made me more comfortable than and bamboo has since sent uh since sent another printer that came out, which again, my Whole thing that was the X2D, which is like a it's a comparable printer to the first one that I bought, but a little more advanced and a little more expensive. And that one, it's that one was one that I was like, it's not that I need, but I there were some strong opinions going around online. And I my point of view there was that uh I shared my opinions. I had my opinions, but if I can literally have both printers side by side and just use them and then form my actual real-world opinion based on experience and not just conjecture, that would be probably that would be good for me and probably helpful for people to watch as well. So that's why I did that. And then luckily, I uh I spoke at a career day at a middle school a couple months ago that just happened to have like this really cool 3D printing program that was based largely around bamboo printers. So, like, I don't want a ton of 3D printers. I do like comparing them, I do like answering questions. It is helpful to have a couple of 3D printers. It just I think anyone who's gotten into 3D printing discovers that like you can be really efficient and it is really nice to have a few. Um, but the current plan is that the printer, if I get if the printers that are sent to the channel, if I don't have a use for them after a certain point, then they can be donated to the school's 3D printing program. So um, and again, that's that that makes me more comfortable about accepting them because either I'm going to be using them regularly or they're going to be sent to you know a place where they're going to be used and appreciated and helping people learn more about 3D printing. So um I think that's a pretty cool setup and a pretty cool way to kind of like hopefully be a win-win on all levels, even though, of course, you know, there's always the people who are upset if you you accept anything for free, but I'm guessing those people have not uh been in a situation to even understand the nuances of it themselves. But that is, you know, if I I thought it'd be fun to share this because if you've been wondering, like, why is I I got so many messages from people in camera YouTube that were like, wow, you're doing this really cool strategic pivot, and I've seen what you're doing with that. I'm like, there's so no strategy. The strategy was the channel was dead, so I'll just upload whatever, and this is what I'm interested in. Like, that is the extent of the strategy. And since then, let me tell you, the number of camera YouTube channels that I've suddenly seen with 3D printers in the background, which is cool. Like, I know there's there's overlap of interest, but I I do think some people have maybe misunderstood and been like, oh, camera YouTube is hard, and and Tom has some 3D printing videos, and people seem to be watching those, so we should all do 3D printing videos. It's like, don't do that, definitely don't do that. What you should do is videos that you're interested in, that's what you should do. And I think that's you know, 3D printing. I did stumble into what is a popular topic and I didn't realize how popular it is, but it's also like I think there is something the same way that like cameras and audio video tech and microphones are things that like I personally am able to just be interested in for my whole life and talk about a lot and and really care about, and that that comes across, you know, when you're able to create content about something that you actually care about and are interested in, that is very different than creating content about something that you think will be popular or get views, and so um I think that is a good lesson. And I don't know, like I this is also like what do you do? You know, if I get tired of 3D printing content, but now there's a whole audience there. What do I do if there is this? You know, I've had people say, like, hey, have you thought about just doing a second channel for 3D printing? Because I like your videos, but I'm not really interested in those. And I like being notified when you upload, but I'm not interested in half the videos you're uploading. So, like, what do I do? And and my answer is I just I'm way too tired to like I don't mind having a second channel just throw like I want to make a hockey vlog or something, like I'll throw that up there. But like to strategically maintain multiple channels is just a thing. I no, I have no interest in doing that. Uh, it totally makes sense. Like, every YouTube, you know, coach or advisor in the world would probably tell you to do that, but uh no, it sounds so unfun. And with the way everything is just so so incredibly strange right now. I don't know what advice is good advice or no advice. I think the best advice is to make the stuff that you're really interested in and excited about and make it the best that you can, and then hopefully it connects with other people. I don't know why. The the mystery I have with this is my channel was dead, right? I uploaded the course videos, then I uploaded my normal videos that were all completely underperforming, but then I uploaded the 3D printer video that completely overperformed. And so it's like, okay, obviously the channel's not permanently like shadow banned. I don't know what's happening in YouTube if like the course videos, because those are topically similar in subject to my regular videos. Like my regular videos aren't courses, but they talk about audio video production, podcasting, streaming. The courses talk about audio video production, podcasting, streaming. Maybe YouTube was just like, yeah, when you talk about that stuff, nobody wants to listen. But then I uploaded a video about a totally different topic, and YouTube is like, alright, we'll try it, see if people are interested in this. So I don't know, I don't know why like certain topics almost seem to be like not shadow band isn't the word, but like uh you know, stomped down a little bit, and why this topic wasn't. Uh but I think this it did help because when people started watching those videos, then YouTube seemed like it wanted to recommend other videos, and now I mean to this day, like the 3D printing videos are currently still outperforming my non-3D printing videos, but my non-3D printing videos for the most part are kind of back to where they were-ish. Actually, they're they're pretty low as I go and look through this. I mean, some of them have like 2,000 views, but there's some that are getting up of you know 8,000, 13,000. So they're kind of around where they were prior. And some of that is on me. Like, it's not like like I gotta make the topics interesting, I gotta make the topics relevant, and you know, like you can't just, you know, just because you make a video, I know it doesn't inherently make the thing interesting. But I, you know, I always try to do that. I always try to keep people in mind, so I don't know why things work and why things don't, but I can definitely see, like, you know, I did a lens review recently that currently has 3,200 views from a couple months ago. Um, whereas a video switcher review has 7,500 views, so more people are interested in that. Rodecaster, uh like re-review, 20,000 views. So, you know, I think I had one about like a like yeah, the Rodecaster Core has 22,000 webcams kind of go up more in like the 10,000, 12,000. So I can just see here that the things at least the people who watch my channel or the way YouTube is recommending my channel, the things that people are more interested in are less the high-end gear and more the like solo production gear, the things that let you do a multicam stream with webcams, the things that let you, you know, do good audio as one person or as part of a setup. And I think that ties in ties in with where things seem to be going in the content creation world, and you know, that stuff is you can you can buy a couple webcams and a roadcaster and some nice microphones for the same price or even less than like a fancy mirrorless camera setup. So I understand why people are like, I'll just do that. And you know, it might not have the super shallow depth of field bokeh backgrounds, but it's still going to be crisp and clear and under control and easy to like, you know, easy to put together, and it doesn't really I don't I don't know. I I don't know where things are going. This is obviously a huge transition in the space. I'd definitely be curious to know what anyone here thinks. So if you have thoughts about that, please feel free to share them. But also if you're curious about YouTube courses, I think it's a cool feature. I think being able to make that stuff publicly available. I think they're gonna make a way to make courses paid at some point on YouTube, but having you know uh intentionally educational content freely available on YouTube, I think is hugely powerful and awesome. And I just wish it didn't have the potential to really hurt channels when it's uploaded and shared with just the intent to help. So it's definitely something to consider if you have other insights or other experience with that. I'd also love to hear about that as well. So, all that said, I hope you enjoyed this episode. It was nice to kind of catch up for a bit. Feel free to reach out anytime. I hope you have a safe, happy, healthy rest of your day. And I'll see you next time.