Dave Jeltema

Are you using AI in your content creation workflow?

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 59

Dave Jeltema

It might come across as bragging or promo but, I did my second livestream today and I'm fricken proud of how it went.

Felt the need to say it. :)

Was super cool to see all your faces and help in the way I could. Tons amazing feedback. I'm going to do it again at the start of next month.

If you want the replay for this one, jump on the list tonight, it's going out at Noon tomorrow (Friday 9/3). bcp.boundlesscreator.com/live

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 76

Dave Jeltema

33 things that'll make your own channel make more sense today.

1. Analytics can be a trap. My best video this year has one of the worst retention graphs I've ever had. Almost two years in I still can't tell you why some things work.

2. Not all good advice is good for you. Two creators can give opposite answers to the same question and both be right, for different people at different spots.

3. There's no such thing as a one-to-one comparison. Bigger creators get away with things you can't, and even looking at creators your size comes with hidden context you're missing.

4. Half of the YouTube advice you've been told isn't true anymore. Old advice videos with hundreds of thousands of views keep getting pushed, take older videos with a grain of salt.

5. You can't treat metrics as an objective measurement. 7% doesn't always beat 5%. 7% means two different things on two channels.

6. Don't look at the analytics on a video unless it's doing at least 200 views a day. Below that you don't have the data for any of it to mean a darn thing.

7. You decide who your audience is. YouTube just finds more of them. You type the destination, it finds the route.

8. It's not about finding a single topic. It's finding the through line. I talk about AI, burnout, platform news and lead magnets, and it works because it's all in service of one thing: helping you understand YouTube.

9. Your topic needs to be obvious to a stranger. More obvious than you think.

10. Position broad. Speak narrow. Frame the video so more people can watch it, without changing who you're talking to inside it.

11. Make good content and the views will come. Take a step back, look at your videos outside of emotion, and ask: are you making something people actually want to watch.

12. The answer for why am I not growing yet: Most of the time the videos just haven't cleared the bar yet.

13. Be careful about focusing on the details so much that you ignore the fundamentals. Better hooks and higher CTR do you no good if the thing itself isn't worth watching.

14. Find the thing that excites you, then position it so people want it. Not the other way around. If you're not motivated to make stuff, you're not going to last long enough for it to work.

15. Nobody watches your video if you can't convince them to in the first place. YouTube isn't a video platform, it's a click-and-watch platform. (I borrowed this saying from Paddy Galloway)

16. Packaging is paramount. If you're not spending at least 51% of your time on the idea, the title and the thumbnail, you gotta bump those numbers up.

17. The title carries the promise and the thumbnail creates the emotion. Avoid duplicating your title in your thumbnail.

18. Buying better gear isn't going to make you're content better. Nobody watches you because you have expensive gear.

19. There is zero correlation between subscribers and the views you get. I bet you can go find a 300,000 view video on a channel under 10,000 subs. Then find a channel with hundreds of thousands of subs that can't break 10,000 views.

20. Your content is a revolving door. People have lives and their interests change, so to grow you have to keep finding new people.

21. Every video is an island. 70% of the people watching have never seen you before, so give them everything they need within the video for it to land properly.

22. Think in tens instead of ones. YouTube is slow, and a real test takes a cluster of videos, not one.

23. It's hard to figure out why a video works. I remade my first hit with the same thumbnail style, same subject, same formula. And it's one of my worst performing videos ever.

24. The reason good videos work is in the comments. What people keep bringing up, what line gets quoted, what they thought it was about, what they ask. That's the goldmine.

25. Create with intention. Don't wait for YouTube to pick for you. Careful of landing in success jail. With every video you make, ask if you'd be happy making a hundred more like it.

26. Take a step back and ask yourself the hard questions. Your own channel is the one you see least clearly, and it's always easier to give advice than take it.

27. There's nothing new under the sun. Waiting on an original idea will only paralyze you. You're perspective is what matters.

28. The right cadence is the one you can maintain for years. I couldn't post weekly when I started, but I made it the goal so I reverse engineered how to get there.

29. Get good first. Then get fast. The volume advice assumes you can already make something good enough.

30. YouTube alone isn't enough to make a living. Move people somewhere with no discovery engine and sell the offer there. For me that's email.

31. Paid promotion buys you the wrong audience. Every instance of it I've ever seen has torpedoed a channel. It's for ad's not growth.

32. Failing sucks, but it's how you learn. Optimize for failing forward and failing fast.

33. YouTube is a journey. The things you make and lessons you learn now are what's needed to end up where you'll be.

Go back through and find the one that stung the most. That's probably the one worth working on next. :)

Almost every question at my first livestream was built on one of these. I hope they save you years.

If you want more of this, I'm doing channel reviews live! Join me on Thursday Sept 3rd @ 2pm ET: bcp.boundlesscreator.com/live

2 weeks ago (edited) | [YT] | 104

Dave Jeltema

It happened. Three days late, but it happened. First frame = a view.

Your views are about to jump around 60% and you didn't earn it. Mine
already did, 61.7%, with the before and after to prove it.

YouTube said they'd change how views get counted starting Monday the 24th. Counting from the first frame instead of a few seconds in.

I knew it was coming, so on the 23rd I snapshotted 161 channels and made it public. All 110 of my videos, retention curves, traffic splits, plus 21 competitor channels and 30 of my clients' channels so I'd have small creators in there too.

Monday came. Tuesday. Wednesday. The difference was about 1.4%. Everyone started saying we'd panicked over nothing, but my gut said 1.4% was a rounding error, not the change we were told to expect.

Then Thursday it jumped. I haven't uploaded in eight days. Nothing is trending.

So I went video by video. Out of the 20 I track closely, 12 jumped more than 25%, and the median video ran 1.45 times faster than the day before.

A real traffic surge picks favorites. This one hit almost everything I've ever posted, including a board game video from September 2023 that more than doubled.

Then I checked a client's channel. She hasn't uploaded since February and her graph does the same thing on the same night. And then I looked at another. Same thing.

Your analytics run about two days behind your realtime panel on your dashboards analytics tab, and that's why almost nobody caught this. You've probably noticed it already. Everything outside the realtime panel jumps in chunks instead of climbing steadily. I've timed that delay four times in a row and it's 44 to 48 hours every time.

So anybody who measured this change on Monday measured noise.

Two long term ramifications, and one drama point we'll know about in a day.

Clickbait gets cheaper. When a view counts at the first frame, the click is the whole transaction. A thumbnail that oversells used to cost you right away in the retention graph. Now the creator gets rewarded with a green arrow instead.

The gap between channels gets uglier. This is a multiplier, so a channel doing 100,000 views a month picked up 60,000 on Thursday. If you're at 300 you picked up 180 and you won't even notice.

The drama point is retention. Retention is a ratio and views are the bottom of it. Make the bottom bigger and every retention graph on the platform drops without a single video changing. Same for likes per view.

My average view percentage was still climbing through the 25th, so it hasn't started yet. I'm running that test right now.

My bet is the switch landed Thursday, not Monday, and views are going up around 60% across the platform. Those views were always there. YouTube just started counting them sooner.

If I'm wrong, the data comes back showing a difference of 1.5% to 2.5% and what I saw was a busy Thursday. Doubt it.

Either way, stop comparing across August 27th. Your numbers before that night and your numbers after it aren't measuring the same thing.

I wrote all of this down before the data existed and it's timestamped in a public repo with the raw numbers. I'll tell you which way it went once I see all of this land in the advanced analytics, including if I got it wrong. :)

Pull up your last 30 days and look at the 27th. If your views stepped up that night and nothing you did explains it, email me a screenshot hello@boundlesscreator.com. Don't do it in the comment's, any link you post hides your comment, I'll never see it. If a bunch of us saw the same thing on the same night it's worth making a video about.

github.com/davejeltema3/boundless-view-lag

3 weeks ago | [YT] | 67

Dave Jeltema

I really hate that I have to do this, but if just one person sees this and it saves them from getting scammed It's worth it.

Beware, there is a twat using my name to steal money from you. If you see anything from a Gmail address, that's not me. I have my own domain, if you see @boundlesscreator.com that's me.

Please report davejeltemasupport@gmail.com, boundlesscreatorsupport@gmail.com, joeprotube@gmail.com and anyone else using a Gmail saying they're me! I suspect that last email finally got taken down so they moved to a new one.

What's happening is they are going through the comments of my videos, grabbing the email associated with your account and cold emailing you. They'll use quotes from your comment, or use stats surface level stats from your channel saying they looked at your stuff before asking you a question so you continue the conversation. After several back and forths they might hand you off to a "specialist" and in the end they'll ask you for a bank-to-bank transfer. Please never use this method to pay anyone online.

This is a PSA as well. It's not just my comments section, this is a plague across many creators in the space. I've seen 3 other community posts about this in the last few months. Double check before you send money to anyone.

Edit: Now a 4th

I have a big favor to ask. Would please give this post a like👍 so it can be shown to more of my audience? A comment helps too if you got a sec. It would mean a lot to me. <3

1 month ago (edited) | [YT] | 671

Dave Jeltema

Tomorrow at 2pm Eastern I’m doing something I’ve never done before!

My first livestream. For 90 minutes I’m pulling up real YouTube channels and reviewing them live, out loud, in front of everyone who shows up.

I choose to use Zoom so I can see you face to face. :)

But that comes with a room limit I didn't think I'd hit. 277 people have signed up so far!

Signing up gets you three things.

You get the replay. Everyone who signs up gets it afterward, whether you make it live or not. So sign up even if you can't make it, this way I can tell you about any future ones I plan. Assuming tomorrow isn't a catastrophic mess I want to do another one next month.

You get a shot at your own channel on screen. I’m reviewing channels submitted by people who signed up, if you want to double your chances I'll also be reviewing channels from people who are actually in the room tomorrow.

And you'll get the way I actually look at a channel. I'll be handing out a worksheet for you to follow so you can run the same pass on your own stuff afterward.

You walk away with a bigger perspective and an easy way to apply it to your channel so you know exactly what to focus on next.

The Zoom room holds 100 people. More than that have signed up, so I'd consider showing up a few mins early. There are a few options for bigger rooms in the future I can consider if this ends up being a problem.

You can still sign up during the stream if tomorrow is when you find out about it.

​Sign up here. It sends you the join link, drops it on your calendar, and lets you submit your channel if you want to. bcp.boundlesscreator.com/live

​

1 month ago | [YT] | 40

Dave Jeltema

YouTube is doubling the required watch time to get monetized. 💰

The first comment someone sent to me about it was "They just raised watch hours to monetization 💰 made it nearly impossible." This is a sentiment that I understand very, very well, and since my biggest videos are about how to survive long enough for things to work, I thought that I would send a little encouragement.

I am literally in the process of planning and writing my next video that is about perspective, the ways to look at things, so that you understand how to actually grow and reach your goals to make money on YouTube.

I understand that I am in a privileged position to say this, but I don't think it changes a thing.

If you are going to get monetized at 4,000 watch hours, you'll get monetized at 8,000.

The math behind this is all about momentum and compounding. If you look at an exponential curve, and I were to throw out some random numbers, the work that it takes to reach 4,000 is 90% of the distance it takes you to reach 8,000.

Because of the momentum, you can stop posting at 4k and you'll pass 8k without even trying.

It can be easy to see this change and feel like the goal post moved twice as far, but don't let that stop you from taking action. You have six months before this takes effect.

If you are consistent for the next six months, you will blow past this.

The other really important piece to all of this is that monetization on YouTube is not the goal. It's not how you make money, and it's step one in an infinite game.

It certainly felt insurmountable to me when I was starting, but when you have a wider perspective, that you're going to be making videos for the next 5/10/20 years, then this is hardly a blip on the radar.

You're going to be getting 8,000 watch hours every two weeks sometime in the future.

If you are making content and clawing at every little ounce of progress and watch time that you can... as Yelena said in the new Spider-Man movie: "this is small baby potato stuff, not big potato brain stuff."

You're allowed to dream bigger. 🌱


P.S. My first livestream is in a few days! I will be doing channel reviews. I would love for you to join so I can meet you face to face. You can also submit your channel for review when you sign up. bcp.boundlesscreator.com/live


If you want to grow, having this wider growth mindset is one of the most important things you can have as a creator. I'll be showing you how to gain that perspective through the channel reviews Thursday August 13th at 2 p.m. EST. Even if you can't make it, sign up. I will be sending out the recording to those who join the wait list.

1 month ago (edited) | [YT] | 46

Dave Jeltema

Taking a week off can feel like losing everything you built up.

Most creators treat the streak as the only thing that matters so they post even though they're tired. They ship something they don't care about because the calendar said Thursday.

Then one day they stop completely and call it burnout.

Consistency is the golden key to growth on this platform. I'll die on that hill. But you can only keep posting if there's something left in you to post with.

A cadence you can't take a week off from is one you're going to quit.

Rest is part of the equation.

The whole reason we're building this is so you have the freedom to take a week off.

Go recover, it'll be here when you get back. 🌱

1 month ago | [YT] | 56

Dave Jeltema

The most inspiring creator I met this year has close to 800 videos and fewer than 5,000 subscribers.

Kenny's a board game developer. I sat down at his table at GenCon and he taught me how to play the game he built, the second one he's made.

He'd clearly thought hard about how to teach it. Every rule showed up in the order I needed it. And he was going to do that for strangers all day long.

He and his co-creator have been putting out videos for six years. Most creators would have quit long before video 50.

That's the one thing I can't give anyone. I can teach packaging or how to write a script. I can't teach stubbornness.

Most people would look at those numbers and call it a failed channel. That's a garbage way to look at it.

I left a review on his game and commented on his newest video, because I want to see them win.

Wish I took a picture with them, but I was able to screenshot this from their recent video of where I played their game. :)

Go show them some love. ‪@PartyTails‬ ​

1 month ago | [YT] | 24

Dave Jeltema

75k Let's go! I am beyond grateful for you. Thank you for your time and attention.

The timing of this is interesting. I didn't plan it this way but by chance I just tacked on a channel update to the back half of todays video. Surprisingly appropriate.

My hope is that you watch my content and it inspires you to make content, to make better content. That you leave my videos with more clarity, that you have some simple action you can do next.

I'm entering a season of experimentation. I'm really looking forward to seeing how you react to the different things I want to try. Different formats, different vibes, different workflows. I want to experiment with livestreams so I picked a date (Aug 13th) and figured I'd give it a shot. This first one will be channel reviews. You can submit your channel for review here: bcp.boundlesscreator.com/live

I'm still just getting started. I can't wait to do all the things I have planned. There are some things in the pipeline that I've wanted to do since before I launched this channel but they had to wait for the right time. Now it's finally the right time and I'm building it in the background.

Thank you again for your support, for the nice comments, the constructive feedback, and for showing up to watch my videos again and again. Let's see if we can hit 100k before the end of the year! 🚀

1 month ago | [YT] | 271