 What if I delete 100 channels? Ah! What if I delete 100 videos from my YouTube channel? Will it help my YouTube channel grow? Or will it help destroy my YouTube channel? I'm terrified. My YouTube channel is beautiful and it's broken. And I'm gonna fix it right now in real time, in front of you. I'm going to delete, remove, or unlist 100 videos. I've gotta do it. I've gotta do it. We're gonna find out if this is the way to niche your YouTube channel. Hello, I'm Neil Rossi. I'm a development producer, helping high achieving creators and performers, just like you, to get ideas out of your head and onto YouTube to make the world happier. If you've ever wondered what is it like to have to niche your channel, this is gonna either be the way to do it or the way to very much not do this. And it started off with this video here. I made one video and that one YouTube video got 200,000 views. But it was on completely the wrong channel. It wasn't on this channel. It was on another channel, one that I didn't wanna grow. So then I went out and I made lots and lots of YouTube videos. How-to's, reviews, clips from old VHS tapes, vlogs, unboxings, reaction videos, travel videos. I made them all. And guess what? I got monetized. It wasn't much. I was only earning one or two pounds a day, but actual YouTube cash was coming into me. Into me? That's not right. But actual hard cash was coming from YouTube to me. And I loved it. I went out and I made more videos. How-to's, reviews, clips from old VHS tapes, vlogs, unboxings, reaction videos, travel videos. I made even more. And do you know what happened to me? Yep. I got demonetized along with absolutely everybody else who didn't have 1000 subscribers. YouTube took it away from me. Google AdSense? No, you don't get any Google AdSense because you don't have 1000 subscribers. I got kicked out by YouTube. My videos are still out there, but no money was coming into me. So do you know what I did? I went out and I made more videos. How-to's, reviews, clips from old VHS tapes, vlogs, unboxings, reaction videos, travel videos. Then I got monetized. I got the 1000 subscribers. I got 4000 hours of watch time in one year. It was March 2020 right here on this channel. I've made a whole video about it. It's on screen now and in the description, but I did it. I got monetized. And then I got 2000 subscribers. And that only took me six months. I have got a really, really big problem with my channel. It cannot grow. It can only just sort of climb up in the way that it is, which I'm very happy for and very grateful for. But I know that my channel is a complete mess. I've got videos like how to fix a Dyson battery or how to fix a toilet seat. And these videos do really well on search. Thousands and thousands of viewers are coming in and watching these videos. But I don't care about any of them. I only did it to get the subscribers and the views and the watch time. I want to make videos like how to launch a brand new second YouTube channel, how I structure and write story, or how I take the text from my YouTube videos to publish eBooks. These are the videos that I actually want to make. And I absolutely know that they will not get as many views as my other videos. It's all sort of interconnected. When a viewer comes in for one video, they might just might be more likely to watch another video. And I've got a funny feeling that's going to tell the YouTube algorithm that my videos are okay. Let me show you my ranking here on socialblade.com. Socialblade reckons that I have 317 uploads. So that's 317 videos, which are public. I'm going to reduce that number to 216 videos. I don't know if I should be doing this. Last month, I got 32,000 unique views. The average views per viewer is 1.2. So that 1.2 is the figure that I absolutely must increase. And the way I'm going to do it is by removing an obscene number of my videos. These are my YouTube analytics. And I know that if you have under 1000 subscribers, you're looking at this right now going, what are you doing? Why aren't you happy that you're getting $251 every month? These are my top videos. This is the part of the analytics I want to look at because I don't want garden tools videos to be in my top 10. Now I can go into YouTube studio onto the videos tab and start unlisting 100 videos. And if you take your cursor over to date and click on date, it turns that arrow upside down and it now lists my videos from the dawn of time. Here's the first public one where baby powder goes. I love this video. It's a video of my son doing something incredibly wrong and bad with baby powder to his little sister. And I don't care if that does damage to my channel because I'm really proud of it as a part of my channel's history. This, however, probably not so proud of is just a shot of Waterloo Station. I think when you start a YouTube channel or when I started a YouTube channel, I would point the camera away from me and I'd just film bits. These bits are still on my channel. I don't want it to be seen by anyone because those eight views are not gonna lead to more views on my channel. So this video's gotta go. Click on the visibility sign and we just make that unlisted. That is video number one. This is where the music and the montage happens. This is actually my history on here. Filming things happening in my life. These three videos are difficult for me because I was trying to explain how a pavement was dangerous. I injured my mum on this curbside that wasn't put in correctly. Do I need that on my channel anymore? I don't know. This is probably the first video where I filmed myself speaking passionately about a topic and I think it was after this video that I decided that I don't want to make evidence-gathering videos ever again. I want to make videos that help people bring good things into the world instead of finger pointing at things that are really wrong. I don't think I've explained that very well. Pointing the finger at other people probably wasn't gonna make me happy. This was the video that made me decide I want to help other people make good videos. I'll keep them public. This is really, really difficult for me. I'm listing all of these videos and these videos are a sound schmaltzy but these videos are a part of me. These videos help me get to the 1,000 subscribers that I needed to become monetized. It is going to lead to a permanent change because I'm gonna set up other channels to keep these public but it will completely destroy their Google juice and remove all the comments and I'm gonna have to delete them from here so it doesn't look like I'm duplicating videos on my new channels. This is an experimental unboxing I tried where I unbox a Chinese takeaway from the supermarkets. That will be number 30. I love this video. This is a crow destroying a car windscreen wiper in London. I sent it in so you've been framed. They didn't want it so that didn't earn me any money. It jumps up onto the roof and there you go. It's time to unlist it. So this was again another experiment. This is a montage of my mum's clothes before we threw them away. She's no longer with us. I thought it would be a fun experiment to make a video of the clothes before we let go of them. I think I'm upset because I'm actually quite happy to take this off my channel. I don't have to take it off. I quite like my kids to see that in 20 years time by accident if they're surfing through my videos. Hello kids. That's Nanny's clothes. So I'll keep it on. It's only one video. Can't do that much damage, can it? This video here is my number six video. Number six in my top 10. In the last month, it's brought in $3. So if I just unlist it, my revenue of $250 is going to go down by $3 or $4. How do I feel about that? That's 2%. So my revenue is going to drop. It's definitely going to drop even though it's only $3 that I'm going to be missing out on. If I have 100 of those videos, that's quite a lot of revenue that it will drop by. I'm going to see the experiment through. I'm hoping it will send a signal to the YouTube algorithm that my videos are more joined up. I did it. I have unlisted 100 videos. I think I'm going to keep going. I'm going to keep going. I've got five videos here that are very dear to my heart. It's me talking to my dad about how he became a taxi driver in London. So he's a London cabbie. He just retired and I asked him all about what it was like in the 1960s and how he even become a taxi driver. That obviously has nothing to do with my core mission to help you develop ideas and make YouTube videos. But for me, I think it's a really good example of how to go out into the world and find things to shoot. So I'm going to keep this. This sparks joy for me. And taxi drivers now and again find it and send a nice message. I use this to produce an e-book and I've made a video all about that in the description below. So I want it on my channel as an example for how to turn a YouTube video into your own book. I think I've got a copy of it here. Yeah, I use the transcript of these five videos to turn into an e-book and then a paperback book. This is just a transcript of everything that appears in the video. That's why I'm going to keep these five videos on my channel. I like these ones. Here's another train video. There's something really interesting here. And this has sown the seeds of doubt for exactly one year now. All it is, it's just a video of two trains pulling into a station to overground trains. But look down here in the comments. And I know why they left that. YouTube offered this video. Of course you're going to leave a question mark. That comment right there is proof that what I'm doing is the right thing. I can now move this video to my trains and buses channel and it won't get a comment from someone leaving a question mark because it will be served to someone who wants to see videos of trains pulling into platforms and me being late and having to run for it. I've been doing this for three hours now. Have I gone too far? I've really gone for it. I knew I'd take off a third of my videos but I'm now just about on the cusp of removing half of all my videos from my YouTube channel. This is why it's tricky. I got a comment on my 1000 subscribers video. They left a very kind comment to say that they actually found my channel through this video. The original idea of making all these videos was that it would bring in tens of thousands of people and if only some of them stuck, then that would be a good thing. Here's the thing. I think I will get far more subscribers from this video if this video is on a channel full of other videos about trains and buses. So I've got to stick with it. I've got to unlist it. Unlist. 141. And this is where I finally niched. I did it. Oh my goodness. So that's 145 videos now do not exist. So it's 145, that's nearly, it's not quite but it's getting pretty close for I've removed half of my videos from YouTube. Let's go to my analytics and look at some crucial statistics. So this is literally how many times YouTube offered my thumbnails to potential viewers. So YouTube put 363,000 thumbnails out into the world. And as a result of that in July, my average view duration was two minutes and 34 seconds. You can see it up here as well. So the click-through rate is 5.9%, which led to 43,000 views. And of those, 35,000 are brand new viewers, so unique viewers. In August, YouTube offered my thumbnails to 350,000 people with a 5.7% click-through rate. Again, it's about 40,000 views. Here are my predictions. I think my number of views are gonna drop massively but there are other metrics at play. Will my click-through rate improve? Because I've stripped out all of the videos that would damage my click-through rate. Will my watch time improve? So the watch time pretty much every month bumps around two minutes 31. I wanna see if my view duration goes up. And in the meantime, I've gotta make lots more of these videos. So let's take a look at my YouTube studio app. This is what I see pretty much every day. But my watch time is about 100,000 minutes and my views are about 40,000. My subscribers go up by about 170 and this is my new revenue, which is really good. I fear I might have damaged my revenue by doing this. I'm gonna show you the two statistics. I really wanna change. This one right here, average view duration. This has been creeping up by a few seconds each month and I think it's because my videos are becoming more consistent. I wanna see if my average view duration goes up. The other really interesting metric is my watch time from subscribers. This figure here used to be 0.1%. It's now 1.7%. This has very, very slowly been creeping up by 0.1% every month. I think if all my videos are less random, I think this figure is going to go up. And I'm hoping that that means that YouTube is gonna offer my videos to more relevant people. And finally, I'm not gonna see this again until I make those videos public again. But my top videos in October are how to recover a Zoom video recording. That's great. That's really on message with my mission. But how to use a Weeder got 12,000 minutes. How to change mobile phone companies. I've left that as it is. It's not quite relevant with making YouTube videos but it gets 11,000 minutes. So I'm expecting that to go up the charts. My valent boiler where I'm reading out the manual, the instruction manual to my central heating. That hasn't been unlisted because I'm running the experiment where I have put 14 ad breaks into that one video to see what would happen if I stuff a video with mid-roll ads. So I think that's gonna go up because it's gonna get colder and a lot of people are gonna watch that video. It's gonna be a very, very different top five videos that I'm gonna see in one month. This is part one of this video. If you've reached this point in the video, please hit me up with a thumbs up. Just let me know someone reached this point. Can't quite believe I've just removed 150 videos from my channel. Now more than ever, if you wanna support me, please hit that subscribe button. I think you understand. I think you appreciate the severity of what I've just done. So if you want to continue watching this car crash, please hit the subscribe button. And here, and leave a comment, say hi. It'd be lovely to hear from you if you are watching this journey. And right now here is what YouTube thinks you should be watching next. And I'll put the video, I'll put the video to part two there. What have I done?