I also believe it's survivor bias. Eventually anyone doing all those things without success will drop out but you only see those that remain. There's certainly an element of both luck and talent to it, dedication alone won't cut it.
Yes of course, nobody disputes that. But please carefully re-read what the original commenter and I wrote.
Original comment:
> My friends who ”made” it posted three quality videos a week. For 1-2 years.
My comment:
> Anyone who produces content consistently for a long enough period of time, pays good attention to how their content is received, continues to adapt their content to what they find the audience wants, and is attentive in engaging with their audience's messages/comments/etc, will find success eventually.
Sure, plenty of people try to do these things, and soon get discouraged and quit.
But how many of them deeply devote themselves to learning all the necessary skills? To really learning about content creation, and video production, and audience engagement, and engagement analysis? And even to the personal development work required to overcome any confidence issues and performance skills that might limit their ability to speak well to camera?
Sure, you can say not everyone wants to do all that, or has the time to do all that.
But all I'm saying is that the people who succeed are the ones who find a way to learn the necessary skills and overcome the obstacles.
> But all I'm saying is that the people who succeed are the ones who find a way to learn the necessary skills and overcome the obstacles.
I don't think anyone here disagrees that most successful content producers do all of these things.
People are saying that the number of people who do all of these things is much higher than the number of successful content producers, and therefore doing all of these things does not guarantee success.
I am not sure whether you disagree with that assessment or if you think people are saying that consistent production / knowing your audience don't matter and it's all down to luck (which is not what people are saying).
Thought experiment: let's say we took a list of everyone who has uploaded at least 3 videos per week to youtube for at least 5 years, filtered those results down to only those producers who uploaded polished content, and further excluded anyone who didn't change their content based on the preferences of their audience.
I expect that 10% or less of these people would be successful, where by "successful" I mean they make more from their content than they would by working full time as an entry level employee at a fast food restaurant.
There are about 30 million channels on YouTube, and around 1 billion videos, so assuming the standard 80 / 20 distribution holds, we'd expect the top 6 million channels to have a combined 800M videos for an average of 133 videos per top-20% channel. Let's say that 5% of the top 20% of channels meet the "3x per week for 5 years" standard, and 10% of those meet all the other requirements.
That would leave us with 0.1% of channels meeting the requirement, or about 30,000 content creators who should be successful.
My impression is that you need at least a million or so subscribers to make a living on YouTube. Looking at the stats, there are 16k channels with a million or more subscribers.
The estimates are actually within an order of magnitude of each other, which I find very surprising. It is at least plausible that being in the top 1% in terms of amount of content created, and also the top 10% in terms of consistency and responsiveness to the desires of viewers, is largely sufficient for success.
Still, I think if we actually looked at the numbers, we'd find that at least half and probably more of the people who are doing "everything right" and have been for the last 5 years are not successful (which is a big update for me, actually. I would have said 99% before actually looking at the stats). Do you think the success rate would be higher than 50%?
It seems people disagreeing with me are postulating the existence of a huge number of "zombie" content creators, creating good quality, polished content for 3x per week for (in your argument) 5 years but never seeing any success.
I very strongly doubt this zombie army exists. Over 5 years of doing it 3x per week, you either get good at doing it and finding an audience for it, or you quit and do something else. If you haven't found an audience after 5 years, effectively by definition it's not good content.
I don't see how your calculations provide any evidence of the zombie army making 3 good-quality videos every week for 5 years. They seem to rely on big, unfounded assumptions. (Maybe I'm missing something; I'm tired).
> I don't see how your calculations provide any evidence of the zombie army making 3 good-quality videos every week for 5 years. They seem to rely on big, unfounded assumptions. (Maybe I'm missing something; I'm tired).
They don't show strong evidence for the "zombie army", and in fact provide evidence of the possibility that the "zombie army" doesn't exist (side note: I love the name). Before pulling the numbers, I strongly expected them to show that the number of people consistently producing content was so enormously much larger than the number of people who have enough subscribers to make a living that obviously there was no way that all the good consistent content producers are making a living. But then I pulled the numbers and the numbers don't exclude that possibility. I posted the numbers I pulled because it would be dishonest to pull them and then only post them if they supported my intuitions.
I still do expect the existence of somewhat of a "zombie army" because I know a few people who consistently upload videos with shockingly high production value and only a few thousands or tens of thousands of views.
