MR EDITOR: Six Years, 740 Videos, One Regret
A YouTube channel I started in 2019 with Kinemaster and no idea what I was doing. It reached 2.1 million views in a year, and then I deleted most of it.
I started MR EDITOR on 24 July 2019, just before COVID.
Semester exams had finished, the first wave hit, everything shut, and I had more free time than I had ever had. So I started editing videos.
Kinemaster on a phone. Chroma key, because that was the feature everyone talked about. The early videos were not good. They were not even close to good.
Nobody watched
I would make a video, upload it, put the link in my WhatsApp status, and wait.
It usually did not. There are many channels called Mr Editor, and mine was nowhere in the results. So I stopped searching for the channel name. I searched for "Power of EEE" instead, one of my own videos that actually ranked, and clicked through to my channel from there.
That was the only reliable way I had of reaching my own page.
At home, nobody thought it would work. No support, no encouragement, mostly the opposite. I edited every day anyway.
Then it moved.
Four thousand views in July. Sixty thousand by August. After two years of nothing.
2021
I settled into lyrical videos. Song lyrics on a black screen, coloured text, the kind of thing people pull into their own edits and statuses.
vidIQ gave me the first real insight into what was happening. Which videos moved, when to post, what people actually watched. Before that I was guessing.
Then 2021 happened.
1,000 subscribers was the moment. More than anything that came after it.
Most of what I had tried until then had failed, and most of what I did got criticised. This was the first thing that worked in front of everybody. People who had told me it was pointless started watching.
The mistake
YouTube rejected monetisation. Lyrical content falls under reused content, and that policy is not negotiable.
That last line is what caused the mistake. Reapply in 30 days.
So I tried to fix it. I deleted every video I thought might be flagged. On many of the rest I muted everything after the first nine seconds, hoping that made them original enough.
I deleted around 1,500 videos out of roughly 3,000. Sixty percent of the channel, gone.
They rejected it again.
I never actually cared about monetisation. I cared about the editing. It was the hobby I had found and the one thing I was good at, and I destroyed most of it chasing approval I did not want in the first place.
That is my one real regret from all of this.
After
Something changed after that.
I stopped uploading for views. Now I upload when I hear a song I genuinely like and want to edit. Copyright credit goes to the owners, no strikes, no games.
2.1 million, then 261 thousand, then 76 thousand, then 39.6 thousand. Read as a graph that is decline. It was a choice.
Look at 2023 more closely. 76.1 thousand views from three uploads. Three videos in a year, and the back catalogue kept working without me.
5,000
It took three years to get from 4,000 to 5,000 subscribers.
Slow, because I stopped optimising for it. But it arrived, and one of the things I had quietly written off as never happening happened anyway.
The channel is still there. When I like a song, I open the editor. When I want a particular edit, I make it and it exists.
MR EDITOR is not a normal channel to me. It is the first thing I ever built that was mine.There is more to say about this one. Another time.