Here's what a year of weekly YouTube uploads did for me

Hey there!

It's been a few weeks! October and November have been phenomenally busy months. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't tired, because I am. I'm hopeful that the end of the year will be more restful. In all my busyness, I completely missed a major milestone: November marks one year of consistent, weekly YouTube uploads without fail. That's a huge milestone!

While I had my channel for many years before 2024, I generally consider this video to be the "start" of my YouTube channel:

Write Great Melodies with the Anchor Note Method [Music Theory for Producers]

I posted this video on November 6th, 2024 and have proceeded to upload a video every single week since then. It's funny watching this video now. The technique I'm discussing is great but the execution of the video shows how much of a novice I was at that point. It looks and sounds like it was recorded on a potato. You'd never know from watching this video that I did an internship in college at a post-production audio house. I probably couldn't be bothered to make the audio sound any better after putting so much effort into getting the whole tutorial perfectly synced with the music. It was cool but not sustainable. I dropped that concept immediately.

Compare it to the video I uploaded just one year and one day later and the difference is night and day:

Ableton tools that turn ANY sound into ANY instrument (without AI)

It looks and sounds so much better and that's the direct result of putting in the hours week after week. It's a testament to not letting perfect be the enemy of done.

The numbers after year one

I was curious to look at some channel stats to quantify last year vs now. I figured you might be interested as well. So here's a comparison of some numbers.

Subscribers:

November 6th, 2024: 264

November 6th, 2025: 12,186

Monthly audience:

November 6th, 2024: 163

November 6th, 2025: 33,134

Top performing video of year one:

I will teach you how to use sampling to ALWAYS be inspired

Worst performing video of year one:

I had one hour to score a video game in front of a huge audience

The one video I think should've been a massive hit, but wasn't:

Make music with your childhood memories

Total views in year one:

311,458 views

Total watch hours in year one:

19,189.3 hours

Some observations on these stats

While subscriber count is something I track regularly, most of these numbers I haven't seen until now. The total subscriber growth is something I'm immensely proud of. I was around 600 subscribers when I set my goal of 10,000 by the end of 2025 and now I'm shooting for 15,000, which may be possible. But the monthly audience count? I find that staggering. That over 30,000 people have tuned into my channel this month is difficult for me to actually grasp in any meaningful way. My feelings are similar regarding the total views and watch hours. To put the watch hours in perspective, 19,189 hours is about two years and two months of time.

I also find it interesting to see which videos performed really well and which one's bombed. I still personally think that it's a tragedy that "I had one hour to score a video game in front of a huge audience" is my lowest performing video. It's wildly fun. It also highlights a big challenge I have right now with my channel. I want to grow my audience and do more than just tutorials but I still haven't cracked the code on how to frame those videos with titles and thumbnails in a way that grabs y'all.

If you're interested in starting a YouTube channel but you find yourself held up by the fact that your videos might not be the best quality, I can tell you that quality is in fact not a great indicator of video success. Of my 10 worst performing videos THREE are from the last three months, which was after I invested in a really nice camera. All those videos have fewer views than my very first video, which is certified deep fried.

What's next?

I still have plenty to learn about YouTube going forward. I do feel like I'm just getting started and I am comfortable with saying "YouTuber" as one of the things I do. As far as what's next for the channel, I'm going to wait until the end of the year to set any goals for 2026 but my channel has recently hit a big milestone that I'm particularly proud of. I'm going to ask you to wait a few weeks before I tell you about that.

Til next time,

ZW