The first year on YouTube as a software engineer (with stats)

It's time to celebrate my YouTube channel's first anniversary, share all the stats and discuss future plans.

In August 2023 I got an idea to start a YouTube channel.

Time flies, the whole year passed and it’s time to celebrate the first anniversary and sum up the results.

During the year I’ve learned quite a lot of new skills:

• how to plan and prepare videos

• how to set the environment (recording tools like OBS), camera settings, lightning

• basic video editing (thanks for a great free DaVinci Resolve software)

• making video thumbnails with Canva

• video recording process and talking to the camera (there is a lot to improve here)

The journey was extremely exciting and I’ve learnt a lot. I think the most important lesson is to be consistent and optimize the process. Videos are obviously not my main job so I need to fit that somehow into my already quite busy life. The lesson I’ve learnt is not to pursue perfection, and not to spend a lot of time editing. It’s really hard to stay motivated when you put a lot of effort into a video and still get low numbers of views, but it’s a marathon, not a sprint.

In the end, I’ve really streamlined the recording process and spent minimum time editing — that really helped to stay consistent and release content.

To be honest, consistency could be better at some periods — that’s something I’ll try to fix this year.

Let’s move to current stats:

• 3012 subscribers

• 154000 total views

• 9500 watch hours

• 75 uploads

In addition, I’ve got a Substack publication with 103 subscribers, grown my LinkedIn to 900 followers and my Telegram channel is growing as well!

Path to monetization

One of the goals I had when started was to try to get to a YouTube partnership and achieve monetization on the channel. If you are not familiar with the terms — your channel needs to reach some milestones to be able to get part of the revenue from ads. Frankly speaking, the requirements are not easy:

• 1000 subscribers

• 4000 watch hours (total time your video was watched on YouTube)

So it was quite challenging. I was reading some stories about getting to monetization on the internet and depending on a niche and channel-specific both cases are valid: for some people, it’s easier to get 4000 watch hours (some entertainment or viral content) but it’s really hard to gain subscribers, for others it’s opposite. In my case, I’ve reached 1000 subscribers much faster than 4000 watch hours.

I got 1000 subscribers in November, but 4000 watch hours only in mid-February. So the entire journey to monetisation took 5 months (from mid-August to mid-February).

For most people, the total revenue will be an interesting topic I believe and I would say you won’t get rich with a small channel and videos that are not getting tons of views and not going viral.

The total from ads is £151 since monetization was enabled and it’s less than £1 a day.

To be honest, YouTube ads revenue wasn’t the only source of income from my blogging this year. I’ve got a bunch of donations on the Buy Me A Coffee resource and a paid subscription here on Substack. Those two together are a bit more successful compared to YouTube gains. It’s also a great feeling to receive donations with kind words and see that people are grateful for some videos. I really hope some of the topics were really useful!

The most unexpected experience was a request for a sponsored video.

Final thoughts

I’d like to say thank you to everyone who watched my videos, subscribed to the channel, left comments and made donations! That was a constant source of inspiration during the year.

Also if you were thinking of starting a blog or a channel, I highly recommend just starting it, it’s not that scary and you don’t need any planning or preparation! It definitely has a lot of benefits and is a constant source of motivation to learn new things.

Looking forward to the second year on YouTube!