At this point I think I’ve sorted out my Final Cut Pro issues – I’m using MoviePro on my new iPhone SE set to 48 kHz for audio, and Logic Pro X set to 48 kHz. I just posted a tour of my home studio, and on posting that video I hit another small benchmark – 200 subscribers. In the world of YouTube, 200 subscribers is beyond tiny, but to me it’s twice as many as 100, which is where I was a while ago. One step at a time. For anyone reading this and thinking about starting a YouTube channel, the best time to start is 10 years ago. The second best time is now. You just have to keep making videos on a schedule – for me, it’s once a week. There are pros who do YouTube for a living who do one video per week. They put 40 hours of work into that video, though… I probably put about 4 hours into my videos. Sometimes more.
At 1,000 users you can start to include ads on your channel. At around 50,000 users you can do product demos for pedal companies. At 100,000 subscribers you might be able to make a living at YouTube, and at 1,000,000 subscribers you can make a great living at YouTube. My goal is 1,000 users, which is very modest but will still take a couple of years. I could get there overnight if I wanted to spend money on advertising, but users you get from advertising are not the same as organic users. You end up with a lot of people subscribing and never coming back. You will sometimes see a channel with 12,000 subscribers put up a video that gets 200 views. That’s a good sign that they did a bunch of advertising. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s not for me.
I’m grateful to the 200 people who subscribed to my channel. I will continue to make the best videos I can, and I hope they like them. In about 7 years I will be 62 years old, and I’ll be retired from my job as a web developer. At that point, I’ll have to decide what I want to do. I wonder if I’ll still be doing my YouTube channel. I’m pretty sure I’ll still be doing this website, unless it blows up one day and becomes worth money and I sell it for big money. Ha! Probably not. Probably still have the YouTube channel. Tony will never age, damn him, but I will. I’ll be this crazy old dude talking guitars with other crazy old dudes. There are worse things.
