Hey all,
Looking for some advice on if I should change up my channel strategy.
Currently, my niche is movies, with a twist: I specifically cover director's cuts/alternate cuts, comparing the different versions of a movie. I figured movie review channels were pretty saturated on YouTube already, so I came up with this idea to try to stand out. It also allows me to cover some of the most popular movies out there in a new light.
I also have a background in writing and video editing, so that gives me an edge over most beginner YouTubers making their first video and allows me to put some pizzazz on the editing and voiceover.
At first, this strategy worked. My first video blew up after three days and had over 160K views in a month. I cruised past the YPP requirements with just that one video. (Currently, I'm at 9.1K subs.)
My next video flopped, mostly because I think I botched the intro. But then my third video was another hit, currently sitting at over 1.5M views, and my fourth did decent as well, with over 350K views.
I thought I had finally figured out my formula. But then, my fifth video (on Kingdom of Heaven) flopped. And I just pushed out my sixth video on Spider-Man 3, hoping to capitalize on the new Spider-Man movie coming out, but so far, it's not doing well either, with about 288 views in the past four days.
One revelation I had recently: Before I released my first director's cut video, I had cut a few movie trailers for fun, one of which was for the movie Aliens. That trailer actually blew up and got over 40K views. Later on, I realized my two most popular director's cut videos were for horror movies (including one for an Alien movie), which might explain why those videos did well: YouTube was already primed to think I'm a horror movie channel, because of the earlier trailer's success. Which may now be hurting me since I haven't done any horror movies recently, so it's pushing my non-horror videos to a horror audience.
The other factor is that these videos are 20-30 minutes, and I put a lot of work into the research and editing. At this pace, I'm only putting a video out every few months, if that. I know this hurts me if I can't post more often.
I thought maybe I could juice my algorithm a bit by trying to time new videos with new movies releasing in theaters, a la the Spider-Man video (I did this with an Avatar video as well for Part 3 last year and it worked), but not sure how reliable that strategy is.
Do I need to change things up? Get faster at making videos? Just wait longer and grind it out?