My technology YouTube channel has been the channel I have devoted most of my attention to over the last several years, however I also have two other channels.
My gaming channel is brand new, so it will be a while before anything comes of it, however my other YouTube channel has been online since early 2016.
The channel was originally launched as a companion for Rise Forums.
In the first few years, it focused on website development, marketing, WordPress, making money on the internet and more, however I started actively covering cryptocurrency in 2017 as I was mining cryptocurrency from home and getting more involved in the crypto community.
This led to the rebranding of the channel to “Kev’s Crypto Channel”.
For 18 months or so, I uploaded content to the channel regularly and established a loyal bunch of subcribers, but I began to publish content less regularly when I stopped cryptocurrency mining.
From a financial standpoint, the time and energy I devoted to the channel in 2018 and 2019 was not worth it. The channel made no money, yet I devoted thousands of hours to creating content for it.
Whilst I am happy that I managed to take the channel to over 4,600 subscribers, I was concerned by the fact I could not make money from the channel in the way I wanted to and I had lost the passion I used to have for maintaining the channel.
Something had to change.
Why It Wasn’t Working
Establishing a YouTube channel takes time and a lot of hard work.
You need to be driven to make it a success. This drive pushes you to work long hours to produce content and edit videos, but it also leaves you little time to take a step back and look at the bigger picture.
Due to this, it can take time to realise why something isn’t working correctly.
I speak about this in the video below.
I will speak about the financial frustrations of running the channel in the next section, but I first want to explain some of the other reasons why I stopped producing content for the channel so regularly.
One reason was my tech YouTube channel.
The unfortunate side-effect of spending so much time updating my cryptocurrency YouTube channel is that I left little time to update my technology YouTube channel.
Without doubt, my tech channel would be much larger today if I put all my focus into it in 2018. I had always had plans to change my focus and make more time for my tech channel again, however I wanted to establish my cryptocurrency channel first.
Over time, it became more and more difficult to justify spending so much time working on a channel that had less subscribers and less views.
2019 was a bad year for cryptocurrency too.
As less people mined cryptocurrency and the prices of cryptocurrencies dropped, I slowly, but surely, saw views on my channel decrease.
Or to put it simply, less people were interested in cryptocurrency anymore.
It took me a long time to realise that I was one of those people.
I had stopped mining cryptocurrency as it had become financially unviable to continue. It took me a while to realise that by doing this, I was giving up the main catalyst behind my channel.
Cryptocurrency mining was the driving force being the channel.
Every day, I was spending time managing my cryptocurrency rigs and this experience helped me produce crytocurrency tutorial videos.
Crypto mining also forced me to research new coins, actively read cryptocurrency news and review what coins were profitable to mine and which were not.
So when I stopped mining, I was not plugged into the world of cryptocurrency anymore.
I attempted to keep things going by doing more news videos and discussions about other cryptocurrency issues, but I just did not have the same drive as I did before.
As a content creator, each video stems from research, reading news and thinking deeply about topics i.e. these topics are always on your mind.
When you become less involved in that world, producing content for it each day feels forced.
Trying to Monetise the Channel in an Ethical Way
I always struggled to monetise my cryptocurrency YouTube channe. This aspect of running the channel was frustrating.
I refused to do what other YouTubers were doing and take money behind the scenes to pump coins and sing praise on projects I had no involvement in.
Unfortunately, cryptocurrency projects were reluctant to sponsor channels like myself unless we gave them 100% glowing reviews.
As soon as projects realised I would just call things as I saw them, they backed away.
I spoke about these frustrations in the video below.
Cryptocurrency is still the wild west.
When it comes to advertising and transparency, everyone just does what they want.
The reaction to being transparent in my own videos still baffles me. Only three videos out of hundreds were sponsored and at the start of each video, I explained that the company paid for an honest review.
Yet I received negative comments saying that I was a sellout.
The irony is that many other YouTubers were taking huge payments from these same companies, yet never actually informing their viewers about it.
I was being punished for being honest.
Don’t get me wrong, I never let the trolls and haters get to me. You would not get far in the world of cryptocurrency if you did, but it is bizarre that honesty and transparency was always met with conflict and negativity.
Returning to My Roots
It was clear that something had to change.
I was concious of the fact that I was spending less time updating the channel and that I could end up losing viewers and undoing all the hard work I put into it.
One option was to sell the channel.
This probably would have been profitable, however I thought selling to someone else would have been unfair to the people who chose to subscribe to me.
You never know what will happen in life, so I am not going to say that I would ever rule out selling any website I own or YouTube channel I manage, but it would be a last resort.
So when the penny dropped that I had to do something, the obvious path was to expand the topics I covered.
The obvious path was to return to my roots and start covering WordPress, making money online, products and services I use, my experiences in YouTube and more.
The channel would still cover cryptocurrency too, but it will be more in sync with this blog, covering similar topics.
This change also allows me to incorporate more of my videos into articles here.
Final Thoughts
Whilst I do not know exactly how my channel will perform in the future, I have no doubt that changing the direction of the channel is the right thing to do.
I can now cover dozens of business related topics that are interesting to me. These are topics that I could not discuss previously as I did not have a platform to do so.
There is still one thing for me to decide……the name.
I need to start brainstorming some ideas on what I can actually call the channel as “Kev’s Crypto Channel” clearly won’t work moving forward.
It could be something generic again like “Kev’s Internet Marketing Channel” or I could adopt a business name such as “Online Success”.
I will be sure to let you know what I choose in a future blog post.
Thanks for reading.
Kevin