u/Odysseus9385

I thought creators with a few hundred or a few thousand subscribers would be the easiest people to talk to. I was completely delusional. Over the last few weeks, I've been emailings hundreds of Youtubers from all size, to try to understand what actually frustrates them.

A creator with around 2K subscribers replied then one with around 500K then one close to a million and then another with more than 11 million. I really was surprised because for me the bigger creators would ignore me. Instead they were suprisingly open.

What surprised me the most was the conversations. None of them asked me how to "beat the algorithm." They didn't ask for a magic prompt neither for guaranteed virality. They question were much technical and maybe boring for some but insighful for me:

"What set me appart from the other?"

"What's the pricing structure?"

“Can this save me an hour?”

“Can I iterate thumbnails faster?”

“Can I spend less time editing?”

"We tried to dub but he failed. How do you intent to do that?"

Another creator even took twenty minutes of his times to explained the tiny parts of their workflow that annoyed them every single upload. I was like "wait, what? Really?"

Meanwhile, some much smaller creators immediately assumed I was trying to sell them something before we'd even had a conversation. That me think maybe the biggest difference isn't experience. Maybe the experienced creators already know there isn't one trick that make videos blow up. They're just constantly looking for small improvements. Five minutes save here, a better hook there, one less repetitive task.

Those tiny improvements compound over hundreds of uploads. Did you notice this ?

Have bigger creators generally been more open to experimenting in your experience too ?

One observation I've had recently:

Faceless channels seem uniquely positioned to scale internationally.

Educational.

Explainer.

Storytelling.

History.

Finance.

Productivity.

Cooking

Most of these formats depend more on structure than personality. For example, I'm huge fan of Mangas (Demon Slayer, Naruto, One Piece, Kagurabachi), for me it doesn't matter if the shorts was made by an nepalese, a japanese, an american or an italian. Because I love it. Same things for the foods or the shit life throws at me and I need advice.

These things makes me wonder:

Why do so many faceless channels stay locked into one market? Really why ?

If language barriers disappeared tomorrow:

Would you duplicate your channel?

Target another country?

Or stay focused on your existing audience?

Personally I think distribution may become a bigger advantage than editing quality over the next few years.

Curious how other faceless creators think about this.

Question for podcasters who've experimented internationally.

Did translating or localizing episodes actually move listener numbers?

I'm not talking subtitles.

I'm talking proper localization.

New intro.

New voice.

Adjusted pacing.

I've been wondering whether discoverability is the bigger issue than language itself.

For people who've tried it:

Was audience growth meaningful?

Or did the additional workload outweigh the gains?

Interested in hearing real experiences.

I used to ask:

"What should I post next?"

Now I ask:

"What already has evidence of working?"

Examples:

Old videos with high watch time.

Comments asking the same questions.

Competitors suddenly covering a topic.

Countries already watching the niche.

Sponsors aligned with upcoming content.

It changed content planning from guessing into prioritization.

I still think intuition matters.

But intuition seems stronger when it's supported by evidence.

I'm curious:

Do you build content calendars around:

Topics?

Formats?

Audience requests?

Analytics?

Or are you these kind of amazing people who use pure instinct?

I've been looking at Shorts analytics recently and one thing surprised me.

Creators often talk about retention as if it's an intrinsic property of a video.

I don't think that's true anymore.

I've seen the same format behave very differently depending on who watches.

Same edit.

Same pacing.

Same hook.

Completely different audience response.

What seems to matter:

• cultural references

• speech tempo

• thumbnail expectations

• information density

• local competition

The biggest mistake I used to make was assuming:

80% retention = good video.

Now I think:

80% retention with WHICH audience?

I've started looking more at:

Audience-country overlap

Topic saturation

Viewer competition

Do people here segment retention analysis by audience geography?

Or is everyone mostly looking at aggregate AVD?

Over the past year I realized I wasn't spending most of my time creating.

I was jumping between:

• topic research (juggling between books, wikipedia, GPT or Claude and every kind of tools to make my content scientifically right or at least).

• script drafts (Which tooks me days or hours if I'm inspired. Not so often)

• thumbnails (Which one to choose ? How to choose it ? Which colors, texts ? You know the usual stuff that you love but hate in the same time)

• invoices (between all the tools you use. It's crazy how sometime it's expensive and you didn't know it)

• sponsor follow-ups (If you're lucky but we know how difficult it can be)

• analytics (which metrics to follow ? Youtube doesn't help and it seems you are lost in the desert. Do you have to see the channel metrics or the videos metrics ? Crazy, huh)

• content calendars

• deciding what to post next (the most difficult part after the quick dopamine of publishing a video)

The weird part is that none of those tasks are individually hard.

It's switching between all of them that kills momentum.

When I looked back at periods where I posted consistently, I noticed I almost never started with:

"What should I make?"

I started with:

"What opportunity already exists?"

Examples:

• old videos with good retention but poor packaging

• topics competitors are getting traction on (How do I get It ? What's the new trend ? Ex: In France, For 3 weeks, Clavicular was the topic and when he came to Paris and get rejected by French Girls. God knows how some unknown youtuber use this to increase their subscribers in France and in the world)

• sponsors aligned with upcoming content (How do I attract them ? How do I present my self to get a sponsorship)

• formats that already worked on my channel

• underserved audiences in countries already watching the niche (I saw that Clavicular in France is pretty popular in many countries. Same with the epstein files)

Nowadays I think creators need less "AI that generates videos" and more systems that help them make decisions.

The creation itself usually isn't the bottleneck.

It's deciding:

What to make.

When to post.

How to package.

Whether it's worth translating.

Whether a video is dying because of retention, CTR or audience mismatch.

Curious:

For full-time creators here, what actually consumes most of your week?

Editing?

Planning?

Analytics?

Sponsors?

Admin work?

One thing that surprised me localizing audio into other languages: subtitles do almost nothing for retention, but a real dubbed version changes listening behavior a lot. People stick around when it sounds native instead of read-aloud.

The bigger lesson though was picking the market. I wasted effort translating into "big" languages where nobody was looking for my topic, when the real opening was a smaller language that already had demand for the niche and almost nobody serving it. Demand-first, language-second.

If you've gone multilingual with a show, did you pick the language by audience size or by where you already had listeners leaking in from analytics?

Quick process I wish I'd had earlier, for anyone thinking about international growth.

I used to do it backwards. I'd dub a video into a "big" language like Spanish, publish, and hope. Results were random. Some worked, most just sat there.

What changed it: stop starting from the language, start from the gap. The question isn't "what's a big market," it's "which countries already watch my exact niche but have barely anyone making this in their language." That overlap is tiny and specific and it's where a small channel can actually get pulled by the algorithm instead of buried.

So the order I use now:

Step one, find the underserved-but-already-watching countries for the niche.

Step two, sanity-check that the format travels (faceless, educational, explainers and storytelling adapt best in my experience, reaction or super-local-reference stuff doesn't).

Step three, only then dub and lip-sync, because that's the expensive step and you don't want to spend it on a market that was never going to retain.

The part I'm still bad at: cleanly measuring retention per market after the fact. Working on it.

For people who've expanded into a second language, did you pick it from data or just from whatever you spoke? Genuinely curious how common the "backwards" approach is.

Spent the last few weeks dubbing and adapting my videos into other languages instead of just slapping auto-subtitles on them, and the part that surprised me wasn't the translation. It was how differently the same video retained depending on the country.

Same hook, same edit. In one language people watched 65% through. In another they bailed at the ten second mark. I went in assuming "good content travels." It kind of doesn't, not evenly.

The bigger realization: I was guessing which countries to target. I'd just pick Spanish or Portuguese because the numbers looked big. That's backwards. The thing that actually moved the needle was looking at which countries were ALREADY watching my niche but had almost nobody making it in their language. That's a much smaller, weirder list than the obvious "big market" picks.

I'm building a workflow around this idea (still rough, the publishing side is smoother than the analytics side right now, which is annoying because the analytics is the whole point). Demo's in the comments if anyone wants to tear it apart.

Honest question for people here who've gone multilingual: did you pick your second language based on data, or did you just go with whatever you happened to speak?

One thing I’ve noticed looking at channels trying to grow internationally is that most creators start with translation.

I think that’s backwards.

The expensive part isn’t dubbing. It’s making the wrong bet.

For example, a fitness creator might instinctively dub into Spanish because it’s a huge audience. But a smaller country with strong fitness consumption and very little local supply can sometimes grow a channel faster because you’re competing against fewer creators.

I’ve been experimenting with treating international growth as a recommendation problem instead of a localization problem.

The process looks roughly like this:

• Find countries already consuming the niche.

• Measure local creator density.

• Estimate subscriber acquisition potential rather than raw view potential.

• Prioritize markets.

• Only then spend money on dubbing and lip-sync.

Something else surprised me: translating isn’t enough.

Creators still end up juggling YouTube Studio, spreadsheets, sponsorship emails, calendars, content ideas and analytics.

I ended up building a tool around this workflow because I wanted one place to answer:

• What should I publish next?
• Which country should I target?
• Which language is worth translating into?
• Should I even translate this video?
• Is this helping subscriber growth?

Demo if anyone wants context:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-IKToVAKeM

The piece I’m still unhappy with is measuring subscriber lift attributable to a new market. Retention is visible, but proving causality is messy.

https://reddit.com/link/1ubs5ir/video/jq7841gihn8h1/player