Hey friends,
In last week’s LifeNotes issues, I spoke about feeling a little lost after hitting 6M on YouTube. In this weeks issue, I want to go into our numbers a little bit more. If you’re an aspiring YouTuber/creator, hopefully you find some insights. If you’re not in the content creation space, hopefully there are still some takeaways about how to deal with setbacks.
Okay, so the thing that’s been on my mind lately is that our YouTube channel views are down about 15% compared to last year – from around 80 million to what looks like 70 million this year. Same number of videos, fewer views.
When I saw these numbers, my initial reaction was “uh oh”. There’s this voice in my head going “Is this the beginning of the end?” It’s that familiar pit-in-stomach feeling when you see numbers trending in the wrong direction.
But here’s what I’ve learned about dealing with these sorts of setbacks. It comes down to three steps that I’ve found pretty helpful:
(1) First, I try to actually feel the feelings. It’s tempting to jump straight into problem-solving mode or try to rationalise it away. I used to be terrible at this – my doctor brain would immediately go into diagnostic mode: “Ah yes, I observe a 15% decline in metrics, let me figure out the problem…”
But I’m trying to sit with that initial “meh” feeling for a bit. Not to wallow, but just to acknowledge “Yeah, this feels pretty bad” without trying to immediately fix it. It’s like when someone tells you about their problem and you instantly start suggesting solutions – sometimes people (including ourselves) just need a moment to feel bad about things.
(2) Second, I ask myself: “How much of a problem is this really?” This is where I put my analytical hat on. It’s easy to catastrophise these things: my initial response might well be “well shit, I guess I’m irrelevant now, I’m a has-been, my channel’s dead and I’m going to end up broke and homeless and alone”.
But then I really sit and think about it, often with pen-and-paper. In this case with YouTube, yes, a 15% decline in views isn’t great. But does it actually threaten the core goal of what I’m trying to do here? The goal was never really about maximising views – it was about building a sustainable business where I can have fun, flexibility, and freedom to teach what I want to teach.
I had a chat with a gaming YouTuber friend recently who went through something similar. His channel went from getting 500,000 views per video to around 50,000 when the game he was known for became less popular. Initially, it crushed him. But after some reflection, he realised that 50,000 people consistently watching his videos is still pretty amazing. More importantly, he’s happier now because he’s making content he genuinely cares about rather than chasing views.
(3) Third, I consider what I actually want to do about it. For me, that means being a bit more strategic about topic selection and video packaging (which is the 80/20 of what drives views), but not overcorrecting or completely changing direction.
It’s like when you’re learning to drive and you start drifting to one side – the natural instinct is to yank the wheel hard in the opposite direction, but that usually just makes things worse. Small, measured adjustments usually work better.
I think this applies to pretty much any setback in life or business. Whether it’s a business metric trending down, a missed project deadline, or realising your new workout plan lasted approximately 3.7 days – the process is the same:
- Feel the feelings fully (usually it’s a “meh, what now?” feeling)
- Ask yourself how serious the problem really is (usually less serious than your brain initially suggests)
- Decide on a measured response (usually somewhere between “do nothing” and “burn everything down and start over”)
Have a great week!
Ali xx
