My biggest struggle on YouTube after 5,005 days is that there's no message you ever get telling you, "Well, this is enough views." Think about school. When you take a test and you score high enough, it tells you that you got 100. After 100, it doesn't really matter, right? So what if you get 110 or 120? If you somehow started getting 200, you really wouldn't care at all, would you? But with YouTube, I've constantly struggled with feeling like no matter how many views I get, it's never enough.
I show up hating how few views some of my channels get. And then when my channels do blow up, I hate that people only want to watch certain videos. Even when I enjoy making the videos, the success just becomes a new normal. When I was doing my gaming streams on Facebook, 100,000 views became the new normal, and any stream below 100,000 views I thought totally sucked. To me, this is the biggest difficulty of being a content creator. I need to set a point for myself where it's like, if you're getting that many, you're getting 100, and everything over that is pointless.
Is 10,000 Views a Day Enough?
A poll I ran on X gives me some validation here too. I asked, what are y'all thinking? Is 100,000 views a day, which would be a million impressions a day, what we're after? Right now I'm getting about 10,000 views a day on YouTube. My question is simple: is that enough? Is that actually enough? Because in my mind, a lot of the time, it's not.
I've got three different channels, and I live stream on Twitch. Most people would say that's so many more views than most people ever get. If I look at my main channel right now, I get 24,000 views in the last 12 hours, so that's more than 10,000 views a day on average. Some days I've had around 22,000, other days like 6,000, but it averages out to about 10,000 views a day. On Twitch, I've got almost 6,000 followers, and I don't even look at the views while I'm live, because it's so easy to get used to the highest number you've ever had and then everything else just feels like it sucks.
So today I'm just super depressed about my YouTube. It feels like all people want to watch are your crypto videos. All they want is clickbait. If I just did an ICP price prediction every single day, I swear people would be happy. Just do an ICP price prediction every day. But then I have other channels, like my Jerry Banfield Experience channel. I look at the analytics on that one and it's like, this channel just sucks, why even do it? It's got 10,000 views across 65 videos. And then there's my original channel, the one that had millions of views that I deleted, and new videos there are getting 100 views a day.
Why I Need a Fixed Limit
I hate that there needs to be a fixed limit, and I guess I'm just going to have to come up with it myself. I think 10,000 views a day is enough. About half the people in that poll would have said 10,000 or less. I can see the updated version of it on X right now, and it looks like about half of people said 10,000 views a day is enough.
So for me, can 10,000 views a day be enough? Can I reach a point where, if I'm getting 10,000 views a day, I don't need to grow anymore? But as a YouTuber, I don't know, can you even do YouTube without thinking obsessively about growing, without researching topics just to grow, to constantly grow, to get more and more? When is it enough? And do my actions look different if it actually is enough?
I hate making YouTube videos all the time feeling like the views I have are not good enough, because then I crank out videos that I'm not proud of just to get views. What's the point of getting all these YouTube views, especially as someone who's deleted around 3,000 videos off of YouTube? What's the point of getting views on a video and then it just gets deleted later? Maybe I delete it. Maybe YouTube goes down in 10 years or whatever. Is 10,000 views a day enough? I sure hope so.
Because could all of us get 10,000 views a day on YouTube? No. How many videos can a person even watch? Sure, maybe some people watch 100 videos a day, but what's the most an average person could watch, 10 videos a day? So 10,000 views a day is, number one, 100. And it's 100,000 times that my videos have been shown across YouTube. If you look at the impressions on YouTube, what X calls "views" would really be "impressions" on YouTube. If I go deeper into my analytics, that's about 100,000 impressions a day, 100,000 times my videos have been shown a day, just on my crypto channel. That doesn't count my other small channels, and it doesn't count videos where other people have been talking about me. This has to be enough, right?
If It's Enough, I Get to Have Fun
For me, if it's enough, I want to have more fun making my content. I want to play and experiment more. I've been grinding out three crypto videos a day for almost a month, a little less than a month, and that cranked my views up instantly. If I look over the last 90 days, the daily views are getting to be similar amounts every day. Some days really pop off. Other days I do three videos and I still only get like 5,000 views.
This to me is what it means to go for it on YouTube. I'm going to set the line: 10,000 views a day is enough. If I get that, we don't need to think about growing. Growing becomes irrelevant. It doesn't matter. 10,000 views a day, 100,000 impressions a day, 8.2 million impressions over the last 90 days on one channel. Over the last 365 days, and this doesn't count all the videos I've deleted, that's 25 million impressions in a year, with some higher periods and some lower periods. God, what is enough, right? What is enough? I guess you just have to set something like this for yourself.
So today I'm setting it: if I'm getting 10,000 views a day, it's enough. I don't need to care about getting more. I don't need to research clickbait titles and thumbnails. I can literally just do whatever I want. Think about it, if you could take a test and get 100% on it putting whatever answers you wanted, that would be pretty sick, wouldn't it? And I basically am in that position on YouTube. Sure, maybe once a week I research some titles or thumbnails.
But here's another question. If I'm getting 10,000 views a day on my crypto channel, do the views matter at all on my music channel or my vlog? If I'm getting 10,000 views a day on crypto, isn't that enough? So what if I get one view somewhere else? I get more than that, but so what if I only get one view, if I'm having fun?
Someone on Twitch asked how many Bible verses I read each day, yet the world still has so many problems. Well, I look at this reality kind of like a game, and problems and challenges and people being crappy are part of the game. I'm really enjoying doing these life updates on X now. Instead of trying to cram a whole day into a video, you can go back through my feed and see what I'm thinking about. You can see my pictures. I bought some shoes, I had lunch with the family, I took a poorly lit picture of myself in a parking garage. You can see what I'm doing. And I wonder, how many impressions did I get on this? Does this count too? Look at how many impressions I got on it: on X, another 150, sometimes 50, 60, 1,000 impressions. So many impressions on X too. If you want to see more of how I think through this stuff, I share a lot of it in my YouTube Coaching playlist. I hope it's enough.