18 September 2026

It Took 2 Years (Finding Success on YouTube)

I didn’t believe in my skills enough. I had been disappointed almost two years ago when I had produced a video that I thought had all the ingredients of a successful one. It was an interview of an Argentinian couple living as nomads together with their pets (including an iguana!) in their very old Citroën car:

“Success” meant for me the following: reaching at least 10,000 views, since less than 4% of all videos on YouTube reach that milestone. I had created a very similar video format a couple of years prior:

That previous video was pushed by YouTube approximately 7 months after publication. And what a push! The video quickly exploded, currently sitting at 370,000 views and almost 20,000 hours watched. Most of the underlying data (clickthrough rate, average view duration, etc.) between those two videos was similar (and fairly good compared to industry standards). What’s more, the Argentinian video was in English while the previous video was in French. I was therefore convinced it had all the reasons to do well – which, again, meant eventually reaching 10,000 views.

The Argentinian video only reached 1,000 views after 6 months. To be fair, I noticed that engagement (comments and likes) were below the engagement of the first very successful video. I thus started to think my initial success was mostly due to fluke. I procrastinated in producing other high-quality video content I had in my backlog. In plain terms, I let self-doubt pull the brakes on my creativity.

Oh I did publish videos, but I had set no targets for those because I purposefully hadn’t put much effort into them or they were not designed with a story or a mini-documentary in mind. And so I gradually lost confidence in my ability to film interesting stuff worthy of reaching a wide audience.

Even if it had nothing to do with skills, I also didn’t believe in luck, or rather that YouTube’s algorithm would start promoting an almost-two-year-old video. I suppose the algorithm “regularly” crawls through the massive amount of content to find videos worth pushing to new audiences, whether that’s 7 months after publication (in the case of the first successful video) or 21 months (the present case). I still remember the days (in 2012) when Google was officially communicating that 72 hours of content were uploaded to YouTube every minute. The latest stats? 500 hours! Every. Single. Minute. It would basically take a person’s entire lifetime to watch just one day's worth of these uploads. It’s even harder to comprehend the scale of all the content stored from the beginnings of the platform twenty years ago.

I started seeing an influx of comments on the Argentinian video about two weeks ago. I logged into YouTube Studio which provides creators with detailed analytics. Sure enough, the video was being pushed to an increasingly bigger audience. Since the clickthrough rate (how many times someone clicks on the video thumbnail when they see it on their screen) remained healthy (around 7% or more), YouTube kept showing the thumbnail to even more users. At the time of this article, the video has almost reached 30,000 views. It was standing at 8,000 views just 10 days ago (after 21 months of being online).

So if there’s any takeaway from my experience, it’s this: when one is absolutely certain – ideally with verifiable data points (clickthrough rate, average view duration, etc.) – of the quality of a video, then it should be eventually noticed by YouTube’s algorithm. But one has to prove patient, sometimes incredibly so.

The advantage I have is that I don’t “need” YouTube to survive. I don’t care if it takes years for my content to be noticed. As long as thousands of people, potentially hundreds of thousands of people, watch and appreciate the content I’ve spent time putting together, I couldn’t be any less satisfied. I mean, come on, it’s crazy to think that the equivalent of the entire population of the city of Zürich has viewed thirty percent of that one video I had published 4 years ago. How many amateur or independent filmmakers could have dreamt of reaching such an audience in the pre-Internet era?

The other advantage is that I’ve only ever created what I cared about. The video on the Argentinians in their old Citroën was not planned. I simply bumped into them and thought they were so adorable in their cute car that I couldn’t miss the opportunity to talk to them – and then to ask them to be interviewed, so I could share their amazingness with even more people.

My only real sting of regret is that letting my guard down – and losing my monetisation status (watch hours had gone below 4,000 hours on a yearly basis) – robbed me of the chance to send a few hundred euros back to the people who trusted me with their stories. I had been able to wire a nice amount to the Belgian in the video that had first exploded in growth; such a shame I can’t do this (yet?) for the Argentinians. The amount of money is not life changing but it’s about a month’s worth of expenses for them, so it’s not bad either.

If anything, all this should encourage me (and hopefully you, dear reader) to produce more great videos – in particular if it helps being monetised again and send all of the resulting revenue to the people I interview. The many ideas in my pipeline may lack some unified consistency but I can live with that for now – I’m doing this for fun, as I wrote. There’s perhaps one common thread though: how to design a deliberate life, whether it’s through becoming a nomad, being more productive or helping others via NGOs. I think that could indeed be my defining thread: intentional living and building systems for freedom. Let’s see if my thirst for intellectual connection and my analytical approach inspire you and others. See you soon on youtube.com/@sebastian!