Growing A YouTube Channel Off Of Chess Content

Me too! Well, this blog post will show you how.

I started YouTube back in 2019 under the name of kevlu8, doing Roblox content (because I was younger and didn't have a lot of interest in Chess yet...). I uploaded similar content for a year or so, accumulating a thousand subscribers. I started gaining interest in Chess then in September 2020, but kept uploading my usual content. This kept going on until February 2021. I started seeing these Baka Mitai Chess memes in my YouTube recommendations a lot. So, I uploaded my own one and it gained a huge amount of traction, with 250k views in a single day! Right now I am sitting at 3700 subscribers, still uploading Roblox (to entertain my older viewers) and Chess (for my new viewers!).

So, how do we grow a channel?

First of all, you can choose to use an existing YouTube channel or a new one. I would recommend creating a new one, because if you use an existing one that isn't about Chess, you'll need to juggle your content between your existing audience and your newly gained audience.

Now, you need to choose what kind of channel you want to create. Do you want one for puzzles (like cjxchess17), or one for teaching (like St Louis Chess Club) or if you stream, you could have one for highlights or other important lessons (like Eric Rosen). Finally, you can also create a chess meme channel (like mine!) Of course, you don't need to stick to content like that, but it's best if you do.

If you are making a puzzles channel, you will need to scour the internet for good puzzles and be able to analyze them fully and explain them in an understandable way, meaning you need to be fairly good at chess. Then, you will need to record your analysis. You can use OBS to do this (my recommendation). You can do a voice over (if you're confident enough) or you can use a TTS voice.

If you are teaching chess, you also will need to be a fairly good player and be able to explain the ideas of games and why the player played certain moves. With this type of channel you can also analyze games that are being played in current tournaments, eg the US Chess Championship. Or maybe you want to analyze your first OTB match, that's cool too!

If you are making a stream highlight channel, you probably already know how to clip, so just take some highlights and edit them together (no other special editing required!)

Finally, the easiest type: a meme channel. You don't need to be really good at chess, you only need to be able to understand the basic ideas and be able to know why a move is extremely bad (eg blundering the queen). With these videos, you want to pick a game that you think was interesting or funny and record it with engine analysis, having background music and special effects highlighting the moves. It's sort of hard to explain, but here's an example from my own channel: Typical 3000 Chess Match

Now, some general tips to keep in mind:

• Title and thumbnail are EXTREMELY important. You need to have a good title and thumbnail that you think many people would click on.
• Tags are also important. YouTube claims that they play a minimal role in the discovery of videos, but this is a blatant lie. Choose tags that are relevant to your video, like "chess meme", "chess lesson", "funny match" etc. The art of choosing tags is a skill that manifests over time. It's best to have at least 30 tags.
• Description is also important, make a general format with a short paragraph describing what happens in your video, your title repeated three times and your tags. Then, at the bottom you can put your social media links.
• Try to keep lessons or analysis' over 10 minutes of length, this way you have a thourough analysis and explanation of games.
• If your first few videos don't do good, don't worry, that's a part of YouTube! Uploading to YouTube is really like a lottery, as some videos can get tens of thousands of views and some can get 8 views (speaking from personal experience haha).
• You need 1000 subscribers and 4000 hours of watch time to apply for the partner program. So, keep going and don't give up!
• You can only place mid-roll ads through videos that are 8 minutes or more in length, so practice making your videos long.

Well, by now, you're good to go! Good luck on your YouTube career! Feel free to PM me your YouTube channel so I can give you some more personalized advice!