Market Conditions Impact YouTube Success

If you’re wondering why your YouTube tech channel is on the slower side when it comes to revenue and traffic, here’s a hint from this CNN Business article on Samsung’s 95% sales decline:

“Samsung Electronics flagged a gradual recovery for chips in the second half of the year after its semiconductor business reported a record loss on Thursday, driven by weak demand for tech devices.”

Over the years my YouTube channel has proven to be a window into where consumers are at in a particular space. 80% of my traffic comes from search and recommendation vs. subscribers and I cover a variety of gear that stretches across the consumer electronics industry. I just have to look at my analytics to learn what the market wants.

There is therefore a direct correlation between where consumers are at and how well I do as a creator. It’s very clear consumers are buying less stuff but are very interested in saving money with the gear they already have. What they are looking to purchase are products that have a direct return on investment.

My top 10 videos for this year are driven almost entirely by consumer-focused content: Cord cutting tops the list along with content about ISP alternatives. Other consumer focused topics I’ve experimented with are doing much better than product reviews at the moment.

YouTube and some of its orbiting “experts” will tell you to pick one tiny topic and focus on it. This IMHO is a mistake in a market that is is constantly changing based on consumer demand.

Developing a diverse set of topics within the space you cover will help find the pulse of what the market wants so you can deliver based on those needs.

How Are YouTube Shorts Doing for Me So Far?

Not great. I earned 26 cents on 5,000 YouTube Shorts views since monetization began – a $0.05 CPM. This is WAY below the typical YouTube CPM (cost per thousand views) on long-form content both for ad & Premium viewers.

My Shorts did pick up 83 new subscribers since I started posting shorts so there is some value there, but certainly not on the monetization side of things.

New Shorts don’t take much time to create but I don’t think there’s any value in spending time repurposing older longer-form content as Shorts. The same number of views from long form videos generated significantly higher CPMs even in saturated content verticals like gaming.