Subscribe to the Convertkit Creators podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pgecyiAMksRelated episode: https://swyx.transistor.fm/episodes/why-creator-clones-failTranscriptas a quick recap for anyone new who is listening i have had a youtube channel for i think about eight years um and i've grown up to two thousand two hundred and three thousand subscribers in that time so it's been like a slow growth but you know that's quite a sizable audience um and several months ago i decided to start a second youtube channel to split off a portion of my content and um yeah i don't know there might be people out there who think why would you start another one when you already have one that's got all these people why start a game from scratch you know um and so we're gonna talk about that today about the why behind it how to try and get as much of your audience as possible over from one to another when you start a new project we'll talk about youtube specifically but i guess it could apply to in general creators like starting a new project after already having built an audience somewhere else you know yeah thank you for giving me the platform to talk about this today youtube because i feel like it's been an interesting experience and i have learned a lot oh well charlie why don't you kick us off why do you start a second youtube channel yeah well so i started it because um okay backstory i have this podcast series called inside marketing design quick plug inside marketingdesign.co season two is happening right now um but i i ran this last year and i uploaded the episodes to my main youtube channel because it's like me making the content it made sense for me to put it in one place right um i found that my first of all those videos didn't get as many views as my regular like vlogs and you know or other videos did and also the youtube algorithm i feel like i confused it by suddenly uploading content that was a very different format a very different length like these episodes were like 45 minutes long compared to like 10 minute videos i was making um that all of a sudden it was like i don't know i felt like my whole channel took a while to recover after the season ended but my views on my more regular videos were then lower as well which i was like damn this sucks because i feel like this content is really great like i believe in it you know um i had some advice from roberto blake i'll definitely plug him he has a lot of really useful advice for youtubers you just search roberto blake on youtube and you'll find him um he was like i think you should put this content on a second channel because it is such a different format it's like its own brand and like in doing that you might have a better chance in the youtube algorithm to to keep it separate and also it could be a very different audience right people wanting to watch these their interviews with designers who work at other tech companies about the behind the scenes of their work there might be a different audience for that compared to someone wanting to just watch me hang out in my office with my cats and do my work you know like that's kind of very different content so it made sense to me um to put it on a separate channel and so that is the why behind why i did it and oh go ahead okay um a question that uh someone might have um about this is is that someone youtube allows you that someone might be me uh but i think someone else might have this question so okay here we go uh uh i know that youtube has the ability to kind of segment things within youtube so you can have different playlists and you can have like sub sections of your work there so why would you take the extreme of starting an entirely different channel instead of maybe the you thinking oh the overarching thing is this is charlie and these are the different things that charlie does and here are the different playlists of the things that i do you know go down the rabbit hole that you prefer choose your own adventure why why what's the main benefit of completely separating because you might also you kind of benefit from the fact that you're using your current audience to do this other thing right instead of starting all over so you're kind of taking a hit there as far as like possible eyes in front of your work that's a really good point yep yep that's a really good point um i think that doing that like you said having it in a playlist on the channel that can solve the problem of there being different audiences you know that makes it easy for the audience who likes interview content to find that on my channel but it doesn't solve the problem of the youtube algorithm and like as i'm talking about this please listeners take all of this with a grain of salt i'm not saying this is the only way to go about it if you want to do a different type of content i just know that from my experience um the youtube algorithm stopped recommending me as much and like my previous videos weren't getting as many views once i was starting to put out this interview content um and so that's why the why like a different playlist couldn't solve that basically unfortunately yeah um as far as the youtube algorithm goes specifically i mean is this all trial trial and error right is there somewhere where it says that's the real unfortunate thing here right because really realistically there are so many creators that are really diverse in the type of things that they do so having like one persona one youtube channel but all the different things that they do doesn't seem like it should be something i i guess i don't understand why youtube is doing this i don't understand what the benefit is on youtube right because i i think for us our our mission we always talk about this is supporting creators right so like is it is it it it i don't know it doesn't feel like it's um i don't understand it so i don't understand the value of it that it brings to youtube i guess yeah it's more channels yeah and that's the thing for the youtube algorithm is it's like it is a bit of a black box in that you don't know for sure like i could have made a huge freaking mistake by putting this stuff on a different channel right um and ...

Ask this episode

“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.