Eric Siu breaks down the numbers behind YouTube growth: 418 videos to reach 100K subscribers, 1,171 more to hit 1M. He built his own channel from 2.5K to 50K subs in three years with roughly 420 videos, and explains YouTube's three content types: how-to, hub, and hero content.
All right, so today we're going to talk about how to get to a million YouTube subscribers or even 100,000 YouTube subscribers. So those of you that are aspiring YouTube creators want to do a great job with streaming or just becoming the next MrBeast or the next Logan Paul or whoever it is exactly, whoever your hero is, I got some numbers for you. So let's take a look at my screen over here and we're looking at Twitter and this was written by a, a person, this person over here, Luba. And mind-blowing stats, here's what it says. How long it took YouTube creators to get followers averaged out, okay? So from 1K to 10K, 151 videos. From 10K to 100K, 418 videos. 100K to 1 million, 1,171 videos. And then to 1 million, 3,873 videos, alright? So what that basically says is that this takes time. It takes time to compound, it takes time to— it takes time to grow. And going back to these numbers over here, if I can pull it up. So, I remember for the longest time, maybe this was maybe 3, 4 years ago. And by the way, my YouTube channel is not huge. My audiences are more so around the podcast. So, I'll share some information around that in a second, but also around the blog too, right? Just to share to you that, hey, yeah, we're talking about YouTube here, but just creation in general and building an audience in general. It's the same formula at the end of the day because what do you have to do? You have to be consistent over time. You have to be consistent with your output and then over time you're going to naturally get better as well. It's just most people give up too quickly because they're playing this comparison game, comparison game where it's like, oh my God, they're like, they're at 25 million, I'll never reach that. And yeah, if I'm thinking like that, if I want to reach 25 million, I'll never get there. You're better off just competing against yourself and you want to be getting 1% better every single day. 3, 4 years ago, I was at 2,500 YouTube subscribers, okay? And I believe at the time I might have had 100 videos or something like that. Now, 3 years have gone by and we're at exactly this, I think, 420 videos or so, and we're at about 50,000 subscribers. So we're doing better than average, that's good. We're below average here, I would say, for the first one, but we're at 420. So Following these averages over here, it's okay. We got to basically 3x, get to around 1,200 or so to get that 100K. Now, some people might get there a lot faster. Some people are really good at creating these videos that get a lot of fanfare, or if you want to call them viral videos. So MrBeast is again another good example. He's got over 56 million subscribers combined, I believe. And he's doing crazy stuff like giving away $100,000 or $1 million or giving away Lamborghinis, right? And so that's how he's— by the way, he's done a lot more videos than that and he's way over a million now. If I'm coming to podcasts for a second, we're at about, for Marketing School, as of this recording, we're at about 1.5 million downloads a month. Okay, that's good. That took time to get there. We've been doing that podcast for 4 years. For the Leveling Up podcast, we're at about 100,000, but that one I've been doing for 7 years, but also that's a much smaller audience. Marketing School, we're growing a lot broader and we're also creating a lot more. Same deal with the blog. The ad agency I have, Single Grain, When I first went to the company before I took it over, we had 4,000 visits a month. And then when I took the company over, it took about 3, 4 years to get to about, you know, over 100,000 visits a month. And then now we're at about 350,000 visits a month, which is good. It's not millions and millions, but in our niche, it's also very competitive as well. And so what I think about is just, man, it takes time. And as long as you're consistent, you're gonna get better. And then what I would say with this channel, with our YouTube channel, by the way, The reason we're not at, you know, 100,000 or a million or so is because I haven't focused a lot of time on it. Now I'm actually starting to focus a lot of time on it. I'm getting really excited about it. I got my camera back here, but you're gonna see things change eventually in the next couple months. We're gonna have a completely new camera setup, we're gonna have different lighting, it's gonna look good. And I'm genuinely excited to create this content, and I just know that I'm patient, I played this game long enough to understand that the people that are successful are the ones that stick it through. It's the same thing with business too. If you want to be successful with business, generally it takes about 3 years to get the thing going, right? Sometimes you might get lucky, you might hit lightning in a bottle and then boom, you go. Same thing with content too. But the more at-bats you get, the more home runs you're going to see. Every now and then you're going to see a home run. You just keep creating over time and some videos, a lot of videos you're going to create are going to be evergreen, they're going to stand the test of time. And YouTube said something where they have these 3, the 3 H's. Basically, you got the how-to, I believe. And then you have the hub and you have the hero content, right? The hub is basically content that your channel might understand. And then hero content is more about you, maybe your day-to-day, or maybe even talking about products that you have. But the hub is people that understand what you're all about. And so I would highly recommend checking that out, but that's what it is. Here again, how long it took YouTube creators to get followers averaged. And as of this recording, you might get lucky with TikTok's algorithm. Who knows what's going to happen, but that's how you get there. All right. So that is it for today. levelingup.com. If you want to get a free chapter of the book, And go to your favorite online retailer to check it out if you want to go buy a copy, and we will see you— we'll see you later.
