How We Built a Million-Dollar YouTube Channel
This piece was originally published by Marc Barros on Maker Stories.
When we started Moment, we never expected YouTube to be our best customer channel. Since we make mobile photography gear, we assumed Instagram would be the hands-down winner. We were wrong. We underestimated what vloggers could do.
YouTube vloggers are equal parts accessible entertainers and aspirational friends — celebrities you can have a conversation with, whose opinions you trust. Between their on-camera personas and comment section conversations, they form unique bonds with their audiences. When a trusted vlogger recommends a product, their audience buys in. And when a brand partners with a vlogger to create in-house content, it can create similar connections.
We started building our YouTube channel in January 2018. Over 18 months we’ve gained 265,000 followers and driven 184.5 million impressions, 22.4 million video views, and 19.4 million minutes of watch time.
Youtube now accounts for 10 percent of our traffic and eight percent of last click through revenue — over $1 million. It’s hard to measure the overall brand impact, but in our website checkout surveys, 28 percent of customers say they heard about is through YouTube. We share these numbers not to brag, but to show what’s possible. When we launched our latest Kickstarter campaign, YouTube was an incredibly valuable tool.
Why We Chose a Vlogger Approach
There are three paths you can take with Youtube.
Yeti, Redbull, and GoPro rely on inspiring content to convert customers. This direction requires production knowhow and a lot of capital for each shoot; budgets can range from $100,000 to $2 million. The risk here is that inspiring content doesn’t lead to immediate purchase, and you probably need to put additional advertising budget behind the content for it to take off.
Purple, Dollar Shave Club, and Chatbooks take an advertising approach. This direction is about testing different types of creative and putting money behind the ones that hit. This is not about building subscribers; it’s strictly about scaling to millions of views. You can be scrappier on production costs, and can get creative figuring out how much to spend on the video versus promotion. Dollar Shave Club tests different creative themes to see which resonate, and then spend more promoting the ones that work best.
The third path is what vloggers like Casey Neistat, Sarah Dietchy, and Mango Street do as independent entrepreneurs.
