How to revive a dying YouTube channel..

G’day creative warriors. 🤝

Hope you all are seizing the day and conquering your goals. If not, this is your sign.

Lately, I’ve been getting more and more DMs about how to revive a channel that suddenly isn’t getting views anymore.

And although there is no clear-cut one-answer-fits-all solution, I can give you the most important reason why a channel stops getting impressions, and how you can adapt to that situation.

I’m going to do this through a fictional client who comes to me to explain this better. Let’s say his name is Gerard, and he makes videos around the game FIFA 24.

Let’s get to work.

Market dynamics

To understand what could be the culprit of why your videos aren’t getting views anymore, we need to dive into our first possible issue.

There is this thing called dynamic attention.

And what it means kind of gets explained in the name already.

The attention a culture has for something comes with ebbs and flows. Sometimes over a cycle of a few years, sometimes over decades. You have seen it with flared pants being fashionable in the 70s, and now the past few years making a strong comeback.

The same happens with anything else. Games, movie genres, music; you name it.

Now, let’s look at FIFA 24 in Google Trends:

As we can see, around release it was massively popular, but ever since has been on a steady decline.

This might indicate one factor of why your views are down. Less people are interested in the topic.

But that also ties into our next contributing factor of why your channel is not getting the views you think it deserves…

Supply and demand

I want you to think of your niche as a pond. And the viewers live as fish in that pond. Now take into account our information about FIFA 24, and it will give us this visual:

You are fishing in a pond with fewer fish, decreasing the % chance that you’ll reel one in.

BUT… This is not actually what it looks like. In actuality, it looks more like this:

Tons of other creators are fishing for the same species, in the same pond.

Now we are getting into a game of which bait is the tastiest. Which lure do they know best versus what feels new?

And it doesn’t always mean the topic (in this case FIFA 24) is getting less popular. Sometimes it simply means more people are fishing in that same pond because they all see an opportunity.

Think of the bodycam niche, the true crime docs, the health/longevity stuff.

Sometimes your pond doesn’t have less fish in it, but more hooks.

So, now we understand our playing field is changing. The laws of the game are not the same anymore.

We need to innovate to still catch the remaining fish in that pond, or pivot to another game.

This is where the next phase comes into play. It’s time to adapt or die.

Getting out of the downward trend

Now our example client Gerard is left with three options:

• Improve his packaging

• Pivot out of his current game and follow the views

• Quit and be miserable the rest of his life because YouTube sucks

From a distance, it’s easy to say which ones he should choose between right?

It’s not that easy when you are in the burning house to find the exit. Looking at the burning house from afar and spotting it is a different story.

Anyway, let’s go over Gerard’s options.

Improving his packaging

A lot of people think of packaging as a title + thumbnail. I think the packaging contains the following things:

1. Title

2. Thumbnail

3. Hook

4. Autoplay (what does the video visually confirm in the first 30 secs)

Improving a title and thumbnail is the shortest way to more success. Instead of looking at what your competitors in the same market are doing, look platform-wide. What trends are happening outside of your niche? Could you adapt certain ideas and visuals from them, giving the fish in your pond something fresh and exciting to look at?

Do an hour of daily searching on YouTube, or use the tool I use called 1of10 to start connecting dots and seeing patterns platform-wide.

What will happen is that you’ll build a brain full of ideas to package your content differently from your competitors but still within range of evidence that it has done well on YouTube before.

Improving hooks is another beast, but can be done the same way. Take the outliers you found, and transcribe the first 30 seconds of those videos.

Look for patterns. Sentence structures. Ask yourself why did this work so well?

If you do this for one hour per day, every single day, it’s a matter of time before you destroy the competition in your market by sheer knowledge.

Let me know if you guys want me to go a bit deeper into the autoplay stuff in a different newsletter!

Pivoting

My good friend Leander who owns the YouTube channel Justicul is a great example of someone who successfully pivoted out of his first niche on the same channel.

He did everything right:

✅ Started with Fortnite, wanted to pivot once popularity waned

✅ Made a video about Fortnite World Cup losers

✅ Made videos about Fortnite meme culture

✅ Started slowly branching out more to internet culture in itself

He pivoted slowly and methodically. If he had pivoted from Fortnite content to ssSniperwolf drama in one upload, he would’ve destroyed his channel, leaving a digital corpse on the YouTube channel battlefield.

Let’s say that our fictional client Gerard wanted out of the gaming niche completely, and his new interest would be commentary videos. He could follow the same blueprint as Leander did:

Start with some FIFA-related questions and pour them into video format. E.g. ‘‘Why FIFA 14 Was the Best FIFA Ever Released..’’. Branch out a bit more to talking people in the FIFA niche. E.g. ‘‘How this Kid Became the Most Hated FIFA Pro Ever.’’

Sure, you’ll end up with some dead subscribers, but way less than he would have if he pivoted in a few videos.

And that warriors, is how you either breathe life back into a dying channel or pivot out of it completely without killing your channel.

I hope this all makes sense, and if you have any additional questions do DM me on X or reply to this email.

See you all next week, go conquer YouTube now. 🤝

Leroy.