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What I Learned Running A YouTube Channel With 120,000+ Subscribers — Core Insights (Part 1)
When I was in junior high and high school, Halo was my favorite video game. I liked it so much that I started using my spare time to upload Halo videos that I enjoyed from others in the community to this up and coming video streaming website called YouTube. From 2007 to 2013, I grew this communal, crowd-sourced YouTube channel from nothing to 105,000+ subscribers and 50 million+ video views. For a long time, my channel was a Top 100 gaming channel (this was back when YouTube had channel awards), and I wasn’t too far off from being one of the Top 100 most subscribed channels on the entire website. However, in my junior year at UCLA, I stopped running this YouTube channel as I had been losing interest in Halo and it was clear to me that I needed to prioritize my career instead.
After giving up my YouTube channel, I was luckily able to graduate from UCLA with a degree in computer science and go on to have a good career (in my humble opinion) as a software engineer. However, I was recently inspired by a friend’s foray into YouTube as a software teacher and coronavirus has kept me mainly stuck inside with more free time and a longing for community. Because of this, I decided to reboot my YouTube channel as a side project over 7 years after I had abandoned it.
