My YouTube Channel: 2,375 Subscribers and a Year of Silence

I started a YouTube channel because my girlfriend got pregnant. That's the honest answer. No grand plan to become a content creator. No passion for being on camera. Just a developer who suddenly needed to figure out how to get more clients and had no idea how marketing worked.

The logic, if you can call it that, went something like this: people watch YouTube. Some of those people need websites. If I make videos about web development, maybe some of those people will hire me. Eventually. Somehow.

That was the entire strategy. The channel is called codingoblin and it currently has 2,375 subscribers. I haven't posted in over a year.

The quantity trap

When I started, I did what everyone on the internet tells you to do. Post consistently. Upload as often as possible. The algorithm rewards frequency. So I tried to upload every day.

The problem with uploading every day is that you run out of things worth saying very quickly. I started making videos for the sake of making videos. Talking to the camera about whatever came to mind. Tutorials I hadn't properly planned. Hot takes that were lukewarm at best. "Day in the life" content that nobody asked for.

I got good at one thing though. Speaking freely on camera. After a few hundred videos of just talking, the awkwardness disappeared. I could sit down, hit record, and talk for ten minutes without a script. That's a skill I still have and I'm glad I developed it. But the content itself? Most of it wasn't good. I knew it at the time and I know it now.

What actually worked

Not everything was a waste. A few things genuinely worked.

The tutorials that I actually prepared for. When I sat down and planned a proper tutorial - a DaisyUI component walkthrough, a Laravel Jetstream setup, deploying Nuxt to a specific host - those videos performed. They ranked in search. They brought in subscribers who stuck around.

The loyal community. Despite the quantity-over-quality approach, I somehow built a small group of regulars. People who watched every video, commented consistently, and genuinely engaged. That was unexpected and honestly one of the best parts of the whole thing.

Getting monetised. YouTube approved the channel for monetisation. The ad revenue was small - nothing life-changing - but it proved the concept worked at a basic level. More importantly, it opened the door to sponsorships.

Sponsored content. I did some sponsored videos for Cloudways, the hosting platform. Those paid significantly more than YouTube ad revenue. One sponsored video was worth months of AdSense. That was an eye-opener about where the real money in content creation comes from.

What didn't work

Uploading every day. Frequency without quality is just noise. The algorithm doesn't reward consistency if people aren't watching. And they weren't - not most of the time.

No direction. I never properly decided what the channel was about. Was it Laravel tutorials? Vue.js content? Build-in-public vlogs? Talking head opinions? It was all of these things and none of them. A channel that's about everything is about nothing.

Expecting clients from YouTube. Remember the original plan? Make videos, get clients? That barely happened. A few people reached out over the years, but the conversion from "YouTube viewer" to "paying client" is so low that it's not a viable marketing strategy on its own. Not at my scale anyway.

The year-long break

About a year ago I stopped uploading. Not because I burned out or lost interest. I stopped because I realised I had nothing valuable to say.

That sounds harsh but it's true. I was making content about building things while not actually building anything. Talking about projects I hadn't shipped. Giving opinions about tools I hadn't used in production. Recording videos about "my journey" when the journey had stalled because I was spending all my time recording videos.

I decided to actually build stuff. Ship projects. Get Service Area WIZARD to nearly 300 users. Build Estimate Calculators. Work on real client projects. Create things worth talking about so that when I came back to the camera, I'd have something to show instead of just something to say.

What's next

I think I'm close to coming back. Not to tutorials though. AI has made the "how to install TailwindCSS in Nuxt" style of video mostly pointless. Why watch a 10-minute video when you can ask an AI and get the answer in 30 seconds?

What AI can't replicate is the story. The decisions, the mistakes, the "I built this and here's what happened" content. That's what I want to do next. Talk about my websites. How they're doing. What's making money and what isn't. The real numbers and the real decisions behind them.

The codingoblin website is still live. The YouTube channel still exists. The 2,375 subscribers are still there - or at least the ones who haven't forgotten about me. When I come back, it won't be with daily uploads of whatever I can think of. It'll be with something actually worth watching.

Or at least that's what I tell myself. Ask me again in six months.