YouTube is a platform Ivan and I have been trying to get monetized on for a long while. Initially we thought our Nexus Production Group channel was going strong. As the years rolled on however, we noticed it took many years to get the subscriber number to the current 484.
We tried various angles, from posting old films and trailers and even attempting to gain traction with travel videos while living as digital nomads. When that didn’t work, we began incorporating creative educational talk with those travel videos, in the hope of trying to reach a more engaged audience.
Our families liked watching the travel videos. They were a good way for us to remember where we had been traveling at the time. That’s cute, but it was not helping the growth of our community, even though a lot of effort and energy were put into producing the videos.
Soon it became clear to us that our channel was unfocused and our lack of consistency in posting new videos was not helping either. We struggled with posting often or regularly and to this day, we still do.
BROKEN PROMISES
I had a good chuckle when I saw the banner I had created for the Nexus Production Group YouTube channel. On the right hand corner it states ‘fresh videos every Sunday’. We haven’t posted a new video on a Sunday in over a year.
The Nexus Production Group Channel banner
Instead, we simply post when we have new content to share, usually a trailer or a film or behind the scenes video. We found the pressure to deliver a video once a week too stressful and unrealistic for our busy lives. We have learnt to be okay with this, despite understanding that inconsistent posting is detrimental to our channel's growth.
But we figure, if we are offering great advice and well made content, our community and new viewers will enjoy it all the same and find it valuable either way.
A NEW FOCUS AND DIRECTION
Last year, an opportunity to get some advice from a Youtube growth professional presented itself. After a consultation, we realized a new, more focused channel is what we needed, so we could split our educational videos away from our behind the scenes videos. The result was the launch of Micro-Budget Madness channel in March 2023.
We learnt to write YouTube scripts correctly and about appealing to an avatar for your ideal audience – decide on a niche, name, and what exactly this avatar wanted to learn from Youtube. It didn’t take us long to come up with Micro-Budget Madness, the premise being ‘you have to be a little mad to be a micro-budget filmmaker’. And we have lived this life for almost two decades, so why not run with it!
This new channel educates on micro-budget filmmaking and our experiences as indie filmmakers working with tiny budgets. From post-production right through to distribution, we talk about it all and share our success and failures, all in one place.
TOO BUSY?
In theory this all sounds grand. However, Micro-Budget Madness is also a channel that we can't keep up with. When posting videos, we do get comments from filmmakers sharing they get value from us, which is great. Filmmakers share their experiences with us too, which we love hearing about.
But we have run into the same issue of inconsistent posting, and this year many months went by between releasing new videos. Is this year busier than usual for us? Maybe. Or maybe, if we are being honest with ourselves, growing Youtube is just not as much of a priority for us as producing and releasing films.
Case in point, ‘Write New Scripts for YouTube’ sat on my To Do List for most of the first half of the year. At the same time, I wrote a 120 page script for a feature film. It was clear what I valued more.
And when I did finally write new scripts for Micro-Budget Madness videos and Ivan set everything up ready to film, the lights and cameras sat in our kitchen for three days before we finished filming. In the morning we would say, ‘okay, we're going to shoot today’, and the next day we're like, ‘oh, we'll do it the next day because it's taking up too much of our time.’ We are not natural presenters on camera so it takes a while to get things right.
Finally releasing a new video
And once the videos are finally shot, it takes Ivan several weeks to get around to editing them, as currently we have two feature films in post production plus another short film, so finding time to edit YouTube is a challenge.
Each video takes around a day to edit including sound and colour grading. We want our content to be valuable, educational, but also to look good. But we are stretched thin and juggling many plates full of different projects.
And our channel suffers. At the time of writing, Micro-Budget Madness has 369 subscribers. New subscribers trickle in every now and then, but let’s be honest, that number isn’t great for a channel that is 18 months old. Our most popular video is ‘Unlock the Secret to Micro-Budget Filmmaking in 6 Steps’ with 4469 views. Great compared to the other videos on our channel which average only 100-200 views, but nothing to write home about in Youtube land.
GIVE UP?
Many times this year we debated if we should just quit making videos for Micro-Budget Madness all together? Is this something that we want to do? If we can’t find the time (or motivation) to do this properly, should we do it at all?
According to TubeFilter, more than 500 hours of new videos are uploaded to YouTube every minute. That equates to 30,000 hours every hour, and 720,000 hours every single day! Those stats are mind-blowing and really puts into perspective just how much competition for attention there is on YouTube. Further, out of the 31 million Youtube channels that exist as of 2023, 88% earn no money at all.
Despite this, I tell Ivan that I want to keep going, I want that alternative income stream, even if we are still a long way from monetisation, but more than that, I want to provide our community with valuable content, even if that community is small. I want to share what we have learnt about micro-budget filmmaking with our fellow filmmakers because it is bloody hard and filmmakers deserve help.
Just like YouTube is bloody hard.
So for now, the best way to view our channel Micro-Budget Madness is a passion project. An inconsistent, we’ll get to it when we can, passion project. But even if our content helps only one filmmaker find answers to their questions or learn something new about micro-budget filmmaking, well, then it makes a difference. And it matters to me.
Written by Sarah Jayne