I became a chess youtuber for a year. Here's what happened.

Hi there 2 years ago I was watching chess videos on YouTube and thinking "Wow, I want to be a youtuber too!". But in any niche to became famous you have to outsmart your competitors. Here's a story how I became a YouTube content creator, how my videos got viral and how I lost all my progress because of 1 rocky mistake.

Table of contents:

First steps

A huge decision

Crowned position

Crucial mistake

Big Payback

Conclusion

First Steps

First step to creating a YouTube channel was choosing a name. I decide to go with "Chess For Enjoyment", a solid and creative username that had never been used before. After I created my logo and banner, it was time to upload a video! I had a big inspiration from a channel called "Fairy chess" and my first video was "Princess Army vs Queens in the labyrinth | Fairy Chess".

It was a carefully made video that took 5 hours to make. It wasn't the best, but I'm still quite proud of it. It only got 18 views, but little did I know that everything was about to change...

A huge decision

YouTube Shorts got popular, and I wanted to give it a try. 3 days later I uploaded a short with a cool opening trap. Despite quite poor video quality, my video managed to get 1000 views. I started getting subscribers. Without even realizing it, I used YouTube Shorts as a place to promote my channel thanks to less competition here. The existence of YouTube shorts was like a gold mine.

People were binge-watching short content, and that was forming an audience for small channels like me. That was helping push my videos to the right audience and right people. YouTube Shorts algorithm managed to find the audience that my channel needed, and it felt like I hacked the YouTube algorithm! My shorts were getting thousands of views, but the real change came to my long-form content. When I uploaded other chess topics, it didn't get any views at all! But my new, improved fairy chess video "Can knights show Rooks Army the power of jumps? | Fairy Chess" got 26 thousand views! What was happening?

Crowned position

It was matter of time when a banger happened. On 8 January 2023 I uploaded a video that is still most popular on my channel "Are diagonal movements of queen useless vs. rooks? | Fairy chess". It got 106 thousand views! Why was I getting so many views?

Well, only now I understand why. I was following a youtuber pawn method all along:

F - Find. Find a niche that you will enjoy making content about, find a good topic, find what your viewer likes and dislikes in a video so you can attract even more viewers that enjoy similar content. YouTube algorithm is not recommending your videos to viewers, viewers look at your videos and say "Wow, that's what I want to see! Let's watch this!" or they don't say anything because you failed the only mission that you had - make your video appealing.

I - Imagine. Imagine yourself on a place of your ideal viewer. What do I want to see? Do I really want to watch your new chess opening which I might never need? But, what if instead of tittle "New chess opening" we changed it into "How to win your games quickly with this new chess opening"? This will be more attractive for a viewer. He asks: "What is this is opening?", "How do I use it? Let me watch the video and see.". I'm not going to tell you how to make good thumbnails (because this is another topic and I'm not sure if I'm good at making thumbnails myself), but I think you understand the direction you need to make a good video idea, thumbnail or tittle.

C - Create. Now, when you know what your viewers want you can invent a new masterpiece. Don't be in a hurry, take your time, make sure that everything is perfect! (or at least as close as possible to perfect)

A - Analyze. Now you can look at your analytics and feedback. What do viewers like the most? Which part of the video was least interesting for the viewers? Analyze and take notes! This is the key to improving your video quality!

R - Repeat.

So, why was I succeeding? The answer is really simple: I was the ideal viewer!

Crucial mistake

So, everything is going to plan, what could possibly go wrong? Well, there is always a flaw to every method. While doing everything I could something happened. I stopped getting views. You number just kept going down and down! I didn't know what to do!

And the answer was really easy. I made a mistake without even understanding it.

While the topic (chess) for my channel is permanent I got too focused on a trend (Fairy chess). People were tired of this trend so they just moved on, but I didn't...

I stopped being an ideal viewer for my channel.

I was focused on this one trend, and when it died, my channel died with it.

Big Payback

The world is moving. And so does the internet. But it moves really, really fast. You can get lost without even realizing it. That's the main downside of being a youtuber. It's just hard to keep up with chess trends! I was trying my best, but I didn't keep up.

What advice can I give to avoid doing this mistake? Well, if you know you won't be able to keep up with trends then don't start YouTube. It will worn you out for nothing! Making content and getting nothing is very frustrating. It makes you empty from the inside, and for what?

In other hand, if you do keep up with trends in your niche then there is a guaranteed way to come up with video ideas! Just scroll, watch videos on your topic, and YouTube will show you which trends are popular! Don't be a try hard like me and don't try to come up with a new trend! Most of these people don't succeed.

It is important to understand that creating a new trend in YouTube is almost impossible. YouTube algorithm is not developed like this! In reality, TikTok starts most trends that are then transformed to YouTube, and then to other platforms. Again, YouTube is not optimized for this, but TikTok is. They have a special algorithm for creating new trends which forms from voice and video reaction from their users. Unlike TikTok, YouTube doesn't record your voice and video, so if you want to create trends, I recommend you getting in touch with TikTok instead.

My view count was hitting lows that I had never seen before. Trying to save my channel I was thinking of different ideas, but it was pointless when you don't follow a specific trend. On 18 October 2023 I quit YouTube.

Conclusion

First, it's time to reveal my statistics on YouTube:

Here's final conclusion on how to be a successful youtuber in general:

0. Find your topic. It is essential.

1. Use shorts to promote your channel at first, there are more powerful than you think.

2. Find your ideal viewer. Shorts are amazing opportunity to find your audience.

3. Keep up with your topic's trends! Your ideal viewer changes, he can't like the same type of video forever. See what your viewer likes right now, not 2 years ago!

4. In long-form videos tittle and thumbnail is everything! Do your best to make people click on your video! Your thumbnail must also be connected to the start of your video, make your thumbnail and your first 8 seconds of the video as intriguing as possible.

5. Use the method that I described in this article to succeed in making videos on YouTube!

That's all that I wanted to tell you in this article. Thank you so much for reading it! Write in the comments down below if you agree or disagree, in which aspects and why. I would also really appreciate if you subscribe to my youtube channel because it literally took 1 year to make this article.