In October 2024, I’m not sure I could have felt more optimistic about my future as a YouTube content creator. Over the previous nine months, my channel had nearly doubled its total view count to the coveted 1 million mark — in half the time it took to get the first 500,000. My subscriber base was over 5k and growing, and I was in the process of successfully expanding my niche from music to broader arts and entertainment fare, a tricky feat. I began having dreams (delusions) of building a media empire.
Then, the channel hit that magic 1 million number, and…everything came crashing down.
Views plummeted, particularly for non-music related videos, and subscriptions slowed. At first, I thought it was me. I had done something. The commentary was stale. My choices of video subjects weren’t as interesting as I thought. My base had gotten tired of the same basic format. My thumbnail and audio improvements weren’t really the improvements I thought they were. Or I had done something else I wasn’t even aware of.
Then, I noticed something strange: no matter how many videos I posted in a week, no matter how many views any individual video received, over the course of a few days, the daily total channel view count would average to 1,000 per day, +/- a couple of views. This pattern held consistently over weeks, then months.
I’m no mathematician, but I’m pretty sure that’s statistically impossible to occur randomly.
Then, I took a closer look at the channel analytics.
While viewership had dropped significantly, the click-through rate remained roughly the same, meaning that YouTube’s algorithm was showing fewer people my videos.
After some experimentation, I finally found a way to break the pattern: uploading shorts. I found that if I uploaded a short here and there, the average total channel view count would rise to ~1,500/day. Apparently, whatever criteria my channel needed to hit for YouTube’s algorithm to start pushing it towards shorts, it hit those criteria at 1 million channel views.
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I suppose this discovery could have helped my feelings, except shorts 1) aren’t the kind of content I want to make, 2) don’t convert viewers to subscribers like longer videos do, and 3) don’t generate enough revenue to offset the cost of producing them, certainly not if they’re clips of longer videos, as mine were.
With so many other things going on in my life, fighting an algorithm war that I was likely ill-equipped to win seemed like a poor use of my time. Thus, in the spring of 2025, I reluctantly decided to reduce production. After a few weeks, the average daily view count began to drop below 1,000.
It was sad to see the channel that I had built over the previous three years slowly decline, but what else could I do?
Toward the end of 2025, with some personal things off my plate, I decided to turn greater attention back to YouTube. I remembered a second channel that I had started in 2023 as a separate channel for a podcast. I had only posted to the channel for a few months before opting to move the podcast to the main channel. I decided to re-brand that dormant channel as my personal artist channel and begin posting new content.
To my surprise, this 23-sub, two-year-dead channel began packing on a few subs a day, with some video view counts in the 100s.
As an experiment, I began posting the same videos on both channels at the same time. (I don’t necessarily recommend this, as it could possibly run one afoul of YouTube’s “duplicate content” policy.) Shockingly (although not really, at this point), the algorithm was pushing out the videos on the second channel to more viewers than it was on the main channel, despite the main channel boasting 40x the subscriber count (8k vs. 200), with a base built specifically for the music reaction videos I was now posting to both channels.
After watching several other YouTubers to get a handle on what this might mean, I can confidently say that most of us are out here “best guessing” our way around a sophisticated digital ecosystem, the workings of which we will likely never understand without transparency from Google. One thing I do believe, however, is that, in 2026, YouTube is indeed more likely to boost start-up channels than established-but-small-to-middling channels.
Considering this fact, I decided to develop and implement a strategy that might allow me to produce the content I most want to produce, while saving my old channel from oblivion:
Today, I launched a third channel and accompanying podcast.
Called Film Nerd by Night (with YouTube forcing me to merge “Film” and “Nerd” into a single word for some reason), the channel will focus on movies and TV, while I will attempt to set my original channel, Randomine Records, back to a niche of music-related videos.
While it’s too early to tell whether this strategy will work, I will be monitoring the new venture closely. (In the meantime, if you’re a film fan, you can go subscribe to the new channel and monitor a bit yourself. Yes, I did insert a shameful promotional plug here.) Regardless, I remain hopeful for success and intend to update readers on my experience on Medium and my website. Stay tuned.
Cole Powell is an arts and media commentator, and award-winning singer/songwriter from. Jayess, Mississippi, USA, with degrees in computer technology, liberal arts, and theology. https://colepowell.net