 In this episode, we take a look at a Minecraft channel that's doing a pretty good job. I just have a little bit of things to recommend to help him boost his performance a little bit. Let's jump in. So what you guys want to do is you want to be in creative mode, go to a Never Portal that you've built, go through the Never Portal, and while going through the Never Portal try to break a block like so. But first, a featured YouTube tip from one of you. So make sure you make a thumbnail which is a tractor and always put your channel logo on the thumbnail at one particular piece. So that way, it will attract your viewers every time because they know that your logo is always in a familiar place. It will build a visual memory and that way, it will help them know your channel better and your videos. Hey everyone, my name is Adam or EposVox. Welcome back to another channel review show episode series thing. Today we're taking a look at, over here on my monitor, taking up this corner of the screen, VIP man YT. First and foremost, I don't normally ask this, but please come up with a better name. Like this isn't a name. This is just a bunch of letters. To get people to really care about your name as like a brand, as a person, to see you as a person, I really recommend a little bit better of a name. That's actually like a name and cut off YT. Putting YouTube, like that's like putting TV or YT on your name on YouTube is so tacky and so 2008. But let's jump in. They are a Minecraft YouTuber with over 3,000 subscribers and they're doing a pretty good job. I just have a little bit of pointers and their goal is to have fun and it looks like they're having fun and that's something I want to talk about too. So before we get started, I did want to say that I did meet Mr. VIP man YT on the Freedom Discord server. I'm an admin Discord link will be in the description below. It's a great place. You can come out and chat with almost 2,000 and probably by the time this video goes up, this is a bit of a later video, by the time this video goes up, it will be over 2,000 Freedom partners and other people who aren't in the network that just want to come out and help with graphics and tips and things like that. And chat with other YouTubers, collaborate, share links, discuss topics, get help, things like that. This is not a support platform. We are not here for, we are not Freedom support, but it's a great place where you can meet other YouTubers and collaborate. And that is where I first ran across VIP man YT, but he did fill out the same application form that everyone else did in the description below. So I don't take a whole lot of look at Minecraft channels simply because there's so many of them. They're typically so similar and it's just not my cup of tea these days. I did play Minecraft for quite a few years from like pre-alpha until release and I just can't take it anymore. And the actual YT community, I think needs a huge dose of uniqueness on a pure channel basis. And I'm just going to go ahead and start a video here so I can show you something. Yes, the usual electronic music and the same kind of colorful intros and fonts and things like that. I just really want to see someone do Minecraft without the same theme. So cool thing about VIP man YT's channel is that he tries to keep it completely family-friendly. He does say you can call him Dan, so from now on I'm going to call you Dan. Dan, Dan the man. Okay. Your about section needs a little bit of formatting and grammatical fixing and punctuation fixing capitalization, that kind of stuff. Not a huge deal. I'm completely not a fan of the milestones thing in the about section. This is also a bit of an older thing that people used to do a lot. As a viewer, you don't care in the slightest about the view and sub milestones of a channel. You just don't. Like whenever someone makes like a, oh I got 2,000 subscribers, yay video, that's one thing. But to put it in text form in the about section just kind of waste space and make some viewers feel uncomfortable because they think that that's all you care about or something like that. That place could be used to put like a schedule or something like that. Banner wise, you're doing all right. It looks very compressed or low resolution. It's pretty blurry and noisy and you've got this big green bar at the top that I don't know if it's intentional but maybe it needs repositioned a little bit or cropped off a little bit. But otherwise it's all right. It looks like it's a completely different font and color from your avatar. But that's fine. Just little nit-picky things here. Dumbnails look pretty good. It's one of those things where some designer or fancy thumbnail for fans would just be like, oh it's horrible but it's not. It gets the job done and it's still better than most YouTubers' dumbnails. And that's a big thing that I like driving home is that with dumbnails, it's all about form over or function over form. Not form over function. It is function over form. As long as you have big contrasty text if you're going to use text or a clean, crisp, clear image if you're just using images and people know what they're getting into when they click on the video, good to go. You don't need too craziness like this. These are great. You do have a few videos here that don't have dumbnails. Like I've said before, go back and add those. Just makes your content more accessible. Increases the likelihood that someone sees it. Another entry point for your channel. So he does Minecraft content covering lots of different Minecraft things. There's skin packs. There's Xbox 360 title update coverages. There's even stuff about the Minecraft story mode and then a single Slyther IO video. But mostly Minecraft videos. And they're pretty well put together and they're fairly short. This is something, oops. This is something I'm a huge fan of. Is they're all fairly short. They're consumable. I love it. I do have a couple editing pointers to point out here. Your video looks very washed out and just very plain. And there's a black bar around the top or around the left and the top. And that can be easily fixed in editing at no extra time really spent and it shouldn't cost you any extra rendering time. But would make your video look quite a bit better. And I will show you a sample image of what it looks like now versus what it looks like fixed. All you do up the contrast a little bit add a little bit of contrast in your editing program and add a little crop to crop out that black bar and make it fit. Because that black bar shouldn't be recorded ideally but like in a HAPAGE, HDPVR used to do that a lot. And certain capture cards record a little bit weird but just crop up the little black bar add a little contrast and your video is going to pop and look a lot better. So the message I want to drive home with VIP man YT's channel again hopefully you'll find a better name at some point is the idea of the first 10 seconds being the most important part of the video. His intro takes quite a bit of time. It's a pretty cool intro. He shows clips of him playing Minecraft and then his logo that he made in the actual game along with some music. It is pretty cool. But it's almost 10 seconds long and it's at the start of the video. This is something YouTube has always like pushed but never really given a full explanation as to why that people can fully grasp. And hopefully I can do that here because to me it's very, very important. And that is the first 10 to 15 seconds and usually more closer to the 10 second line of your video is the most important 10 to 15 seconds of your entire video to keeping a viewer around. If a viewer clicks on the video and in the first 10 to 15 seconds they see something that they don't like or that doesn't appeal to them or that makes them cringe or that just bores them because it's not this... Like if it doesn't answer the question that they want answered by watching your video they're clicking off. And you can see that in your watch time reports. You can see a drop off within that first 10 seconds of people just clicking right off the video. And that hurts your video because you don't get as much ad revenue. It doesn't recommend it to anyone basically at that point in search or related videos. And it just keeps people from wanting to subscribe and keep watching your videos. And so if you do have an intro of some sort of some sort like that you definitely want to take advantage of that first 15 and even 30 seconds with this of your video to create a hook to create an engaging lead in journalism it was called burying the lead whenever you've just had too much crap at the beginning that turned people away. Have some sort of start to your video that makes people want to keep watching that makes people you know maybe they just pulled your video up and they're reading something else makes them want to turn and watch your video focus on it make sure that they're subscribed and not click off of it because a 10 second long intro of some sort like this I'm already bored and want to click off because this isn't the video and especially if it's on start of every single one of your videos it gets quite repetitive whereas you if you have a highlight a funny moment from your video a you jumping in and explaining what the video is Hey guys what's going on VIP man YT here and today we're talking about the custom nether portal glitch that you can do in the latest Minecraft Xbox 360 title update 42 it can look like this how do you do it let's find out and then intro blah blah blah boom it can also save you a little bit of time in the video itself because if you get used to practicing doing those sort of hooks and doing them quicker and you know more enthusiastic then you don't have to spend all the time at the start of your video after the intro being like Hey guys today we're going to be doing this blah blah blah not saying that he does it but just what youtubers in general do and that can be key to making your videos a lot more entertaining if you force yourself to have to do something in a certain way then you start to cut off the bad habits and it's really cool to see what the results can come from that so that's my big thing to tell VIP man YT to do is craft some sort of hook for every video that you want to introduce before the start of your video before the intro clip pre-roll rolls either get rid of it to me in 2016 you don't need a pre-roll at all so either ditch it or create some sort of hook that actually engages viewers prior to that pre-roll going so come up with that and then work on making you know being a little bit more pumped about the content and the you're good to go I do hope you enjoyed this episode of my channel review series my name's been Adam Riepel's Vox if you enjoyed it smash the like button if you didn't enjoy it smash the dislike button please don't and subscribe to freedom for more freedom tips and youtube tips and all that jazz come check me out for more tech videos and youtube marketing tips things like that I will be over there youtube.com slash ebusbox and otherwise I'll catch you later I'll catch you later see yeah I