On being a YouTuber — Plus YOUR videos!

I’m not a YouTuber.

Yes, I have a YouTube channel, but it’s a pretty minor footnote compared to everything else that is Fuji X Weekly. I’m a blogger. I’m an app developer (Sahand Nayebaziz deserves much of that credit, though). You could even make an argument that I’m a social media influencer, although that is a bit of a stretch in my opinion. I do, however, have a YouTube channel, and I do occasionally post videos—a whopping total of three last year. Technically speaking, I’m a YouTuber, but practically speaking, I’m a photography blogger who happens to have a small YouTube channel.

My definition of a YouTuber is someone who is successful at it. They post regularly, have some popularity, and earn a nice side-hustle income or even a full-time income from it. I fail at all three of those points. That doesn’t mean that it won’t ever happen, because it could. If I make a plan and work very hard at it, plus don’t give up, there’s a pretty good chance that I could find success. In time I could be a YouTuber, but right now I’m very far from it.

Making YouTube content is hard. It doesn’t have to be: strap on a GoPro and post the clips. That’s not my style, though. Many hours of recording and editing go into each minute of every video on the Fuji X Weekly YouTube channel. A two minute video might have taken eight hours or more to complete, start to finish. My wife, Amanda, does the vast majority of it. She’s busy raising our four children, and YouTube content is not at the top of her priority list. She very much enjoys doing it, though, and I’m always impressed at her skill and vision. I have a face for radio and a voice for print, yet she somehow manages to make it seem otherwise. It’s easy to understand why putting together quality videos is a near impossible task—hence, just three published in 2023—but Amanda does an amazing job, especially considering all of the challenges. She deserves a lot of credit.

*Fujifilm X-T5 + Kodak Vision3 250D v2 Recipe*

I’m surprised by the success that the Fuji X Weekly YouTube channel has had: over 14,000 subscribers, and three videos that have topped 15,000 views. 14K subscribers puts the channel deep into the Top 10%! Supposedly, only about 9% of all YouTube channels have over 1,000 subscribers, and only about 2% top 10,000 subscribers. I’m only in the Top 2% because of the popularity of this website, and not because I’m prolific on YouTube. The percentage that tops 100K subscribers is about 0.3%, so Omar Gonzales, Serr, Pal2Tech, and many others like them, are in an elite category that not very many reach, and even less surpass. Only 0.03% YouTube channels have a million or more subscribers.

What’s interesting is that the top 0.8% most-watched YouTube videos (which are ones that have at least 100K views) account for about 83% of all views on the entire platform. The inverse of this is that 99.2% of all YouTube videos (ones under 100K views) only account for about 27% of all views. Most of the videos on YouTube don’t get many views—in fact, about 88.5% have less than 1,000 views. Only 8% have more than 1,000 views but less than 10,000 (which is where most of my videos are), and only about 3.5% have more than 10K views. The percentage of videos with 100K or more views is less than 1%.

If you’re not a big channel with 100K or more subscribers, you are playing in the shallow end of the pool. There are some smaller channels that manage to break the mold, and have some success with one or two or a few videos. For most people, they’re stuck with under 1,000 subscribers, and their videos will almost always get less than 1,000 views. I feel very fortunate to have somehow moved into the Top 2% for subscribers, with most of my videos in the Top 8% for views, and a few that climbed into the Top 3.5%. Even so, I’m very small potatoes. The Fuji X Weekly YouTube channel is still much too small for me to be considered a YouTuber. Maybe someday it will get there (although that’s not currently a goal of mine). I like seeing it grow, but I have no expectations that it will ever be in that Top 0.3%, which is where one needs to be in order to eke out a living at it. Those that are getting rich from YouTube—aside from Google—are an extremely tiny fraction of the users—probably about 35,000 people worldwide (there are about 115 million channels on the platform).

So I went on YouTube today, and found some videos from smaller channels that posted about Fujifilm and/or Film Simulation Recipes, and included them below. I hope that in some way this helps them grow their channels. I also hope that you enjoy their content. If this can facilitate you finding someone new to follow on YouTube, then this article was a success. At the very bottom I also included my latest YouTube video, in case you have yet to watch it. Right above it is the latest SOOC Live broadcast.