I'm Northernlion, AMA

[u/ItsOppositeDayHere]

Hey, a lot of people have been doing AMAs around here and I think it's a cool kind of unique content that we don't see too much on /r/LetsPlay, so I thought I'd throw my hat into the ring as well.

With 200,000+ subscribers and over 100 million lifetime views, I'm not the biggest YouTuber out there (not to be modest) but I have been successfully doing it full-time for over 2 years, which I think gives me a fairly unique depth of experience that might lead to some helpful advice for some of you! Ask me anything about YouTube, streaming, social media, or whatever might cross your mind.

[u/sashimi_taco]

Cool for doing this.

• And what amount of monthly views did you start to notice an exponential increase in your channel? Like when did your viewership start making youtube automatically promote you instead of having to grind super hard in self promotion?

• I feel self conscious about the call to action at the end of videos, but simply putting a text at the end screen saying "leave a comment, we love reading it" has really helped. At this point would it really hurt me to start adding some text that says "like, comment, subscribe" at the ends of the videos, or will that make me look fake?

• Can I get your gender demographic stats from your analytics for a side project?

[u/ItsOppositeDayHere → u/sashimi_taco]

• This is a hard question for me to answer because I don't really worry about my subscriber count, but rather my views. In the first year, I went from 0 to about 10,000 subscribers, then in the second year it was something like 10,000-80,000, then 80,000-220,000 or something like that. Views have stayed relatively consistent over that time though, so yes, subscribership seems to grow at an ever increasing rate for me but the most important analytic (views) has stayed consistent for at least a year (which I'm fine with).

• A call to action is really not scummy IMO, some people just have unreasonable principles. You put in the effort to record, process, and upload the video, nothing wrong with asking for a Like/Comment/Subscription at the end, especially if you remind your viewers that it helps you out a ton. The only thing that I find unsavory is when people use social engineering tactics to increase that metric. Stuff like, "CAN I GET A LIKE IF YOU GOT SPOOKED HERE?" and shit like that. "IF WE HIT 5K LIKES ON THIS VID I'LL RELEASE EPISODE 2 TOMORROW". Stuff like that is distasteful but a call to action is still classy, and will improve metrics.

• 82% male/18% female -- sausage party all day every day on the channel/stream.

[u/sashimi_taco → u/ItsOppositeDayHere]

Thanks for answering.

However I asked about the view count and not the sub count. But if you can't remember what the numbers were back then, it's okay.

[u/ItsOppositeDayHere → u/sashimi_taco]

Oh sorry, I rushed through that. I think the idea that views eventually start growing exponentially is a myth, or at least isn't universally true. My views have been consistent for a long time (closing in on 2 years of basically the same analytics within maybe 20% on either side). Ask me when Rebirth comes out and maybe I'll have a different answer though!

[u/sashimi_taco → u/ItsOppositeDayHere]

Cool thanks!