Monday Series: How to Become a YouTube Influencer
July 28, 2020 (San Francisco)
This past Monday, on July 27th, Harmony Plus continued our Future Entrepreneur Challenge (FEC) talkshow. For our seventh episode, we interviewed Xuanyi Wang, an incoming U.C Berkeley Freshman who already has quite the list of accomplishments under his belt, such as working with a start-up company that placed 1st at the Diamond Challenge and being a Senior Patrol Leader and Eagle Scout in the Boy Scouts of America.
Now he’s the co-founder and editor of ChronoYinger, a growing YouTube channel with over 180,000 subscribers. Between the summer of his 8th grade and high school freshman year, Xuanyi and two of his friends got together and conversed about what they wanted to do when they grew up, to which they discovered that they all had an interest in pursuing a career in YouTube. Given that YouTube was a part of Xuanyi’s childhood, he and his friends made the decision to pursue this passion project.
During the creation of the YouTube channel, Xuanyi didn’t have high expectations for ChronoYinger. There was no assumption that the channel would go anywhere or that it would gain a significant subscriber or viewer count, so much of the early work put into the channel was done purely for fun. Most of the early videos consisted of technology product reviews, but after consideration, the channel began to focus more on video game highlights, both of casual and professional gameplay.
“Once we started doing tech reviews, we just thought that there were too many channels on YouTube already doing that. The thing about starting on YouTube is when there’s bigger channels that are doing very similar things to you, people aren’t going to necessarily come to your smaller channel and watch when they can just watch the bigger channels with a million subscribers.”
After making this decision, the first few videos about videos games combined had more views than all of their previous videos combined. For Xuanyi, this was a much better path to pursue as the channel continued to gain traction with each new video release. Xuanyi and his friends were satisfied with this new level of growth, and they themselves enjoyed the content that they were creating, so they dove headfirst into it.
As for other methods of growing the channel, Xuanyi initially relied on word-of-mouth, asking other friends to “spread the word” about their YouTube channel to anyone who could possibly be interested in the type of content that the group was creating. They also posted regularly on social media to promote their channel to help get the channel off the ground. Once the channel began to grow, it became more self-sustaining as its videos became more likely to be recommended by YouTube’s video algorithm.
“When you’re first starting, I would say it’s useful to get as many people as you can at the beginning because it’s really the first 1,000 subscribers that is the hardest.”
Xuanyi recalled some of the challenges in the early days of the channel as well. One of the problems was dealing with copyright issues, which affected the types of content, such as music, that could be used in the videos. Infringing upon copyright would cause the video to be taken down or be demonetized, which hampered channel growth. Xuanyi also noted the early frustration of posting a lot of videos, but not seeing the subscriber and viewer count significantly increase. These problems forced Xuanyi and his friends to grow and adapt to better suit their channel to their niche.
“It was very [discouraging] sometimes when we would post a video and it would only get 50 to 100 views, and we felt like sometimes our time wasn’t worth it.”
Xuanyi also offered some advice for students who wanted to start or grow their YouTube channels. One of the most important things was to pick a topic or interest that not many people on YouTube was already doing. Most people would prefer to stick to larger and more reputable channels rather than potentially take a risk with a smaller, less well-known channel. As such, any content that an aspiring YouTuber plans to create has to help them stand out from the other channels. Finally, he also stressed the importance of persevering early on, stating that it could take anywhere from months to years of constant quality content creation to receive recognition.
If you are interested in learning more about Xuanyi’s story, you can watch the full video here.
