In a lot of cases, YouTube is a platform that takes creators years and years to master. But if you're willing to put in the work, get your reps in, and get some experience, it may not take you years and years to find the success you're looking for on YouTube. I've studied tons of gaming channels that have grown from 0 to 10,000 subscribers in their first month. Now they're shooting past the 50k, 100K, and even 300K mark, like this one and this one and this one. I've gone out of my way to talk to some of the biggest gaming creators there are, such as Spiffing Brit, to try and figure out some of their strategies on how they would grow if they had to start all over from scratch today. So if you're starting a new gaming channel, or you've been at this for quite a while and you're just starting to feel a bit stuck, hopefully, we can help you out here. Before we dive into the advice of someone like Spiffing Brit, let's give just a quick refresher.

on the algorithm for anyone who's kind of new to this whole YouTube scene. First of all, going forward, let's stop calling it The algorithm and I want you to think of it from now on as the audience. The more an audience watches your videos, the longer they watch those videos, the more those videos can spread to The Wider YouTube audience. Really, YouTube's end goal is to make sure that viewer has the best experience, though, and if that viewer is saying, Hey, I like this, then they're going to be like, Cool, maybe more viewers do. This means that you have to meet the audience's demand. So, you can make the best video ever about Farming Simulator 2017, but guess what? We're well into the 20120s now and nobody is looking for that game. You can't expect to get millions of views covering a game that's become ancient and one that no one's really thinking about anymore. But okay, what about playing a game like Minecraft? Something that is kind of old but everyone still owns it and still

plays it to this day. Well, now we have a different problem because now you have to make the best video in the world because Minecraft is a very saturated market. How are you supposed to stand out? There is a much easier and much faster way to get that first thousand subscribers if that's what you're aiming for, and it doesn't involve you having to become the best Minecraft player in the world. You need to play smart and fight battles that you know you can win. I would say the fastest way to get like a thousand subscribers is not to copy the content of, say, your favorite creator that you're watching. If your goal is only to get a thousand subscribers, just find something that is a gap in the market that people want to watch but can't see. How do you do that? Well, there are a number of ways, really. You could pick up a game that you absolutely love and that is popular, but maybe you found that the tips and tricks and guides out there are insufficient, and maybe you can

make some to fill that void, or you could do what a lot of new creators do and try and find a new up-and-coming Emerging Market. It could literally be a brand new game that's coming out. Just go harass a developer for an early access key, make a few videos on that game, get them out before everyone else does, or right at the start of it, and suddenly you've got an audience appearing out of thin air that will just watch anything you make. You don't even have to be interested in the game, but trust me, that will easily get you to 1,000 subscribers. That's what I did. It's a walk in the park, I promise. Your videos will get pushed to a lot more people if you don't have a lot of competition, right? Ideally, there's going to be maybe an existing audience waiting for somebody to serve them what they're looking for, although I wouldn't go so far as to say that's a walk in the park, or is it? We'll come back to that framework in a little bit, but first, if

you're having some trouble even jump-starting your channel, then you need to listen to this shortcut very carefully. It is not easy to get a $1 million idea that actually works, and believe it or not, even the biggest creators on YouTube do not find this part easy at all. But there is a workaround that nearly every creator takes advantage of, gaming or not, and if done successfully, those channels grow way faster. Oh hey, uh, just want to interrupt this video real quick to let you know that right now it's Creator Appreciation Week here at vid IQ. That means for this week only, we are offering 50% off of our boost memberships. If you don't know what that means, basically vid IQ isn't just a YouTube channel; we actually have a whole suite of software tools that can help you create videos. What's cool is that these tools actually link into your channel, and using your channel's actual data, they can do all sorts of things. For example, we have a feature that gives you ideas every single day for new videos you can make.

we have an AI content generator where you could basically just give it a prompt, and it's going to produce all kinds of results for you. You'll get a title, a description, a script. It even provides a sample voiceover and thumbnail backgrounds as well. And we have tools that go well beyond our AI tools, such as our keyword tool. This can help you produce search-driven content based on actual things people are actually looking for on YouTube right now. So, if you want to join the 3 million-plus creators that are using our tools every single day, then please check out the link in the description. And now back to the video. Creators everywhere like to take a simple, proven format and put their spin on it. A recent, very popular example is trying to cross a video game from end to end in one single straight line. From Tears of the Kingdom to Grand Theft Auto to Skyrim, this is something that is starting to become more and more popular as people find it to be a really fun challenge that can work in all kinds of different games and scenarios, and

this trend actually originated from outside of the gaming space itself. So, for your first attempt, if you want the best results here, I want you to take an existing format of maybe some kind of challenge or something like that and bring it to a game that you're already familiar with and that is popular, that audiences are actually looking for, and make sure to study the title and the thumbnails of the videos that are doing a similar thing because those can give you guidance. I'm not saying you should copy them; I'm saying you should put your spin on them. It doesn't have to be crossing a map a straight line, though. It could be so many things. You could take an iconic game like Doom and try and do a pacifist run. You could speedrun a famously slow game like Monopoly. Honestly, this is where the creativity part of YouTube comes in. The sky's the limit here. What I'm trying to do right now is give you ideas to avoid making the biggest mistake that I've seen gaming creators make since the dawn of

YouTube. I call it off-the-shelf content. Any person can take a video game that they bought online or at a store and sit down and play it. So, when a YouTuber does it, what's the big deal? Do not post a video where it's just you playing a game exactly how someone else would play the game if they just went to Walmart and picked it up themselves. If you want to stand out, take this really popular game and bring something new to it. Maybe you're really, really good at it, or you're practicing to do some kind of tournament that's coming up. Maybe you just are terrible at the game. Maybe you don't take the game seriously at all. Channels like Let's Game It Out do this all the time. They take a brand new game and they play it in an unintended way. So, when you start ideating your next gaming video, sit down and come up with a solid premise before doing anything else. But be cautious here because there is a big pitfall you do not want to fall into.

When you're just kind of finding your voice on YouTube, one of the biggest mistakes that gaming channels make, and I partially blame myself for this, is that they tend to start with just one game, and they never think about deviating from that one game. Back in the day, I used to tell creators this is a great strategy to start a YouTube channel, and part of me still believes that because if you are just starting out, it's good to kind of focus on one thing. But as you start to get used to the idea of making videos, you really got to be thinking maybe three years into the future when the game you're playing is long since dead. Focus on a certain category of game, for example, instead of just one game forever. You need to be strategic here. You could be the news guy, for example, but that's a niche market. Maybe 90% of people don't care about the news updates for that specific game. Then what? This is still a solid strategy for starting a YouTube channel from scratch, but keep in

mind your total addressable Market here is just small. Going for gaming challenges opens up that total addressable Market, but of course, it does lead to more competition. Basically, a total addressable Market is, well, think of it like this: the entirety of YouTube is a total addressable market, right? You want all of the people on YouTube to watch your videos, right? However, you can't make everybody happy, so that's not really possible. So, you have to Niche down into a more specific market. So, Mario games would be a more specific Market, Mario speedruns would be a very specific market, and one that's probably still pretty big. However, a really awesome challenge where it almost doesn't matter what game it takes place in, people can just sense that it's going to be entertaining. Now, that's a very big total addressable Market 'cause now it no longer focuses on just one game. Anyway, there's a lot of nuance around the conversation of a total addressable Market, but what you're trying to do as a Creator is cast the widest net possible.

and one that makes sense. What happens if you've already cast too small of a net, though? You find yourself in the situation that I'm describing right now, where you're just doing one thing, and everything feels really narrow, and you're not sure how to get out of it. You've succeeded; you're getting views, but you're starting to run out of ideas or motivation. You might be struggling to find a path to grow, and you might be finally at the point where you're like, I got to do something else. Well, it's time to branch out. This is probably the biggest issue. Branching out from your one audience or your one game is really, really challenging because so many creators attempt it, and then they feel immediately burnt. Like, they'll go, Okay, I make Minecraft content, but I really like playing CS:GO, so I'm going to make a CS:GO video. Once the issue is your audience is just going to get whiplash from that. They're not going to watch that. It's going to get 10 out of

10. The creator will panic, and they won't try any new kind of content again for like six months, and they'll just keep burning out on this one game that they don't want to play. So, if you're going to branch out, there's multiple ways to do it, and I think the best way to do it is to either find another popular adjacent market. So, if you play, say, one popular strategy game, play a different popular strategy game. Canadian guy A, who we've spoken to in the past, had something similar happen on his own channel. He started out by focusing on Crash Bandicoot, but he found a way to pivot and slightly open up his total addressable market by also covering Spyro. He's also found other games that cater to an audience that would like games like Crash and Spyro. They already happen to have a lot of crossover themselves. Basically, he exponentially increased his total addressable market. But what if you really want to do Minecraft? I mean, after all, it is a massive market, right?

earlier, I said you have to be the best Minecraft player in the world, but you've seen smaller channels kind of come up and have success of their own, and you don't think they're the best in the world, right? So, yeah, maybe you can do it, right? If you're going to go into a saturated market, it can 100% be done. You can do it. Believe in yourself, but also do not just do what other people in the market are currently doing. You have to find the emerging market inside of that saturated game. Do you remember the example of the 100 days in Minecraft videos that started to pop up a while back? These days, that concept of spending 100 days in Minecraft is incredibly oversaturated. When it first emerged, though, it was seen as revolutionary, and it didn't even begin with Minecraft in the first place. 100 days content had been popularized by all kinds of different games in the past: indie games, strategy games, games like Stardew Valley. Creators realized that, you know, Minecraft itself is really saturated, but not a lot of people are

just trying to spend 100 days straight in the game. So, they had a fresh concept, they brought it into Minecraft, and lo and behold, it just continued to snowball from there. And so, if you're going to break into a saturated market like, say, Minecraft, you've got to end up with either an established hook that people would recognize or would find interesting, that is proven to have worked, or you've either just gotten a one-in-a-million idea that no one else has ever done, and it's going to shake the landscape. And if that's the case, hats off to you, but that's like a one-in-a-million shot. So, yes, with YouTube, you need to be creative, and you need to be strategic if you want to grow, but that doesn't mean you have to do videos that you just don't love doing. It also doesn't mean you have to only play a couple of things, even if you want to make content about a lot of stuff. Let's take another look at Canadian Guy. This is what his long-form videos look like.

but if you go over to his live streams, he's blowing off steam, being opinionated, bonding over completely different genres. Let's look at someone like Josh dri ha. He's on Twitch, but on YouTube, he has multiple channels that kind of serve different purposes and scratch different itches that he has as a Creator. A lot of the creators we've highlighted today have something in common: they build channels about themselves and what makes them unique as people. This protects them in case inevitably one day they decide they want to play something else. Becoming a gaming personality is not easy, but in this video here, we talk a little bit more about that and dive in on a number of different subjects. If you're trying to grow a gaming channel right now,

How to Grow a Gaming Channel FAST (Ft. Spiffing Brit)

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