Sooo....
I panicked. I've closed the new author channel I started about six months ago and I've gone back to my old YouTube channel. I started the old one back in 2013 and did absolutely nothing with it. I uploaded a few unlisted videos for friends and family and the occasional random clip about Rwandan dancing or weird insects.
I started a new channel to post more consistently and talk about writing.
Turns out, that was totally the wrong thing to do. A brief survey of Twitter confirmed this.
My old channel had about 230 subscribers - again, from posting nothing, ever - whereas my new YouTube channel had only 50 subscribers after about six months. Also, despite putting up a video telling everyone I'd moved, and changing all the endscreens and sub buttons to the new channel, people kept on subscribing to the old one! It was bizarre. The harder I worked on the new channel, the more people subscribed to the old one...
 |
| New Channel |
 |
| Old Channel |
+26 subscribers in the past month for doing... again, nothing.
Go figure.
So, you can see the incentive really isn't there to try to build up subscribers from scratch on a new channel. Fifty wasn't bad, and those who subscribed to the new channel seemed more engaged in liking and commenting, but I felt I really needed to call it before things went too far. Sadly, you can't merge channels. If you take down old videos and upload them to another channel, there's no way to backdate them so they appear in date order, new uploads will always display as top of your recent releases list.
It was a tough call to make. One video I made about the Nyarigongo volcanic eruption back in May got over 2,000 views and 49 likes, but the two most-viewed videos on the old channel include one about traditional Rwandan dance, at over 34,000 views and 178 likes, and one rather shaky video of a Congolese music group, 9,000+ views and 133 likes, so as uncomfortable as it feels, time is better spent on the old channel.
I've also just invested in an Insta360 One x2 camera and an Acer Nitro 5 laptop, which is the quickest thing I've ever seen. You press a button and it's instantly booted up and ready to rock. I've never had a nice laptop before and the difference is startling. It walks through DaVinci Resolve like a strole in the park. I can't wait to get back to Rwanda and start shooting some beautiful footage. Well, I can wait a little bit, I'm rather enjoying all the food and bubble baths in the UK at the moment...
But, yes. It's something to look forward to.
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