Lucky.
What a word.
A word that changes you as a person. You can be someone without putting much of an effort in almost no time.
You are playing at a score of 99. You hit a ball, its high up in the air. The field is standing right there and he is going to catch it.
But then, he drops it. Wow, what would you call yourself?
Lucky! Right?
You can be lucky in normal life too:
- Win a lottery ticket
- Survive an accident and so on.
When it comes to content creation, can you be lucky?
Look at this growth movement on Youtube:
A Digital Blogger Youtube channel had almost no traction till mid of 2022, as it can easily be depicted in the subscriber-growth graph above.
Then, shorts-format of content started working for us.
Weren’t we lucky to capture that format functioning for our channel and suddenly within a span of 6 months we gained 3 lakh subscribers in a matter of 6 months.
This must really be lucky.
Right?
Let me help you answer that question. We’d need to go to FLASHBACK for that.
So, this is January 2017 when this Youtube channel was started.
How many subscribers this channel had?
6!
The idea was to put out video content on a daily basis. Did not know (and expect) much at that point in time. The simple reason for that was, not many people were really consuming video content back then.
Anyway, 20 months later, we had a subscriber base of 50,000.
By the way, every day – I used to publish 2 videos.
One in English, One in Hindi. All of them are still there on the channel (please please check out the channel home page and sort by oldest. People write anyway and everything on the internet these days).
Anyway, this love affair with Youtube video content kept on going and going.
20 FURTHER months later.
The subscriber base reached a 100k.
Operationally, nothing much was changing. Video content was being made everyday and so was it being published.
Yes, the quality of the videos was getting relatively better (although pretty shitty when I look back now!). The intent was more towards creating content pieces across all formats of content (blogging and spotify was being run in parallel).
If you look closely, the “lucky” moment hadn’t arrived yet.
Honestly, wasn’t even sitting in anticipation of any such moment either. The growth curve was as-flat-as it could have been :).
So, yea. Kept moving.
18 FURTHER months later, the subscriber base was DOUBLE the value.
Well, something got better this time. In this round of 18-20 months, we saw a 100% jump in growth as compared to 50% or so, this channel saw the period preceeding to this.
So, the confidence was high along with the demand of Youtube video content in the market.
Thus, after putting in almost 5-years uptill that point in time, it was a no-brainer that this channel should move on, experiment more, improve more, thing more, create more, love itself more and other mores.
Although, some “luck” was flowing in. Some of it. Yay.
Things still kept on moving like they had been moving for half the decade till then.
- May 1, 2022 – 2,30,943
- Oct 30, 2022 – 5,19,840
That’s a 125% JUMP in subscriber base within the next 6 months!
A Digital Blogger channel had not seen this kind of “luck” or growth in its existence. Today, the channel stands beyond 8.5 Lakh subscriber base.
That implies, in the last 12 months or so, there has been a further increase of around 65% in its subscriber base.
So, to answer the question – Can You be Lucky in Content Creation?
The answer is pretty simple. The way the “luck” factor plays its part in our normal life, in the content creation space, it sits at the same place. It’s rare, very rare. So, don’t count in it.
Yes, you can be lucky in content creation and get a million subscriber base within a few months and there are such examples out there. But, again, this kind of luck (and research, analysis etc) is rare in content world.
For the rest 99.99% of us, we have to go through a journey.
If we had stopped at any given point in time during these initial 2-3 years, we would have never been able to see the growth we got in the 6th or in 7th year today.
Obviously, it won’t take so many years like it happened in the case of A Digital Blogger. There were various reasons including internet penetration, Youtube penetration, stock market industry back in 2017-19 and so on.
However, irrespective of the niche or timeline, it takes TIME and EFFORT and CONSISTENT and 100 other things that we talk about on this blog.
This profession is as hard and amazing as any other profession in the world is.
So, take your “chances” accordingly.
Chao!
