I recently put a poll up on my Planet Doug YouTube Channel asked people which they preferred:
- Should I put ALL the videos I make on just ONE channel?
- Or should I put my main videos on Planet Doug and all my other videos (gear reviews, podcasts, behind-the-scenes stories) on my separate Behind the Scenes channel?
A lot of people might not even be aware that I have a second Planet Doug YouTube channel. And I do. I created the Behind the Scenes channel because it felt odd to have mixed content on my main channel. I often wanted to make a video about some random thought that popped into my head, but I didn’t want to clutter up my main channel with all kinds of different types of videos on different topics. I didn’t want to annoy people or upset the almighty YouTube algorithm.
And then in the last couple of months, I did an experiment where I started putting my podcast videos and behind-the-scenes videos on the main Planet Doug channel. I was just tired of trying to outsmart the YouTube algorithm and overthink everything. It’s also a significant amount of extra work to have a second YouTube channel. So I just started uploading everything to Planet Doug. And I was thinking that it would be okay, and I could sort the content by Playlists instead of by having separate channels.
The poll on Planet Doug was decisive. If you group together those who like all videos on one channel with those who don’t really care one or the other, you get 80%. Only 20% said they would prefer having two separate channels.
But I just admit that my vote would still be for having a separate behind-the-scenes channel. I don’t like seeing all that clutter on my main channel. I enjoy doing behind-the-scenes videos, such as the recent video where I recorded my laptop screen for over an hour while demonstrating how I post items to Patreon and elsewhere. It’s not the greatest video in the world, and it’s not going to be interesting to very many people. But I like making that sort of content. And it isn’t a big time commitment. I would have been posting that item to Patreon anyway. All I did to make this video was record my laptop screen while I did it. Yet, I don’t really like seeing that video sitting there on my main channel. It just looks like an outlier – a weird video that hardly anybody watched. I like things to be neatly organized, which is why I created the second channel in the first place. And another side-effect is that I end up hesitating to make similar videos because it is clearly so unpopular. BUT if I have a Behind the Scenes channel, it feels like I have permission to post anything I want there. It’s more of a private space, a private playground where I can experiment and post any type of video without worrying that nobody is going to watch it.
These thoughts are why I found this video from Nomads Trails to be interesting. In this video, he talks about how for many years, he made cycling videos. And his videos were popular enough that he could make a living at it and continue to fund his trips. BUT then he also started making videos about camping and bushcraft. And those videos were less popular. And suddenly, he says, his entire YouTube channel crashed. His theory is that since he added camping videos to his cycling videos, YouTube’s almighty algorithm didn’t know how to categorize or promote his channel anymore, and YouTube just stopped showing his videos to anyone.
So he is claiming that since he started posting mixed content, the views on his videos dropped drastically and he now doesn’t make enough money. And to fix that, he decided to create a second channel dedicated only to camping and bushcraft videos. So he will have one channel for cycling videos and a second channel for camping videos.
I don’t know if what he says is actually true. Nobody knows how the mysterious and almighty YouTube algorithm works. We’re all just guessing in the dark. And when I look over the view count on his videos from the past two or three years, I don’t see the same clear pattern that he does. Yes, his camping videos don’t seem to have performed as well as his cycling videos. BUT since he started posting the camping videos, he hasn’t really gone on a big cycling trip. So I don’t see evidence that his cycling videos were suddenly getting far fewer views. He just hasn’t been posting cycling videos that I can see. And the views on his videos in general are all over the place. There’s a huge range from 11,000 views to 20,000 views to 300,000 views. The view counts are all over the place, so it would be hard to see a pattern.
Anyway, it just struck me as interesting that as soon as I start thinking about merging my two separate channels back into one, I see a video from this YouTuber doing the exact opposite and claiming that putting mixed content on your channel is a terrible idea.