It's been 3 months since I announced PronounceMe project I was working on at the beginning of 2019.
The initial approach was simple - build and run the MVP, see if it gets some organic traction. MVP included:
- Written expectations and desirable figures
- Generator engine - core which renders videos
- Endless data source - video production process should be never stopped
- Basic internal analytics for metrics I focus on
- Autonomous deployed a system which restarts itself if something breaks
The current state of the project
- YouTube channel gets views and has a steady growth in this metric. It's very far from any monetisation but will see how far it can go. At the time of writing, it has ~280 views/day
- Subscribers one of the most important metrics but unfortunately it hasn't changed much since the initial post. I see people subscribers are bouncing and it's clear - if the system generates ~40 videos a day it might create a lot of noise in the YouTube recommendations feed. I don't have an answer to this issue yet.
- The total amount of video uploads - 4400, meaning single video generates 5.1 views on average. For me, it's one of the important indicators. If this figure grows exponentially there is a good foundation for growth. Linear growth won't make much stir.
Screenshot from the YouTube studio:
And statistics collected from Social Blade for mid-May 2019:
Threats
Clearly, I wasn't the only one who noticed demand in pronunciation help. Apart from a dozen websites and YouTube channels Google has noticed that and made a special form for "pronounce" keyword, similar to the "define"
Fortunately for me, they're still displaying video search results after. Although most of the traffic on this keyword will go to Google I believe I still able to get some traffic because of context picture used in the video. The first time I noticed that feature on February 2019 and seems like they're rolling out it slowly across the world
What's next?
Organic growth isn't impressive so I'll wait and observe if something winds it up. Apparently, few videos were shared on the social networks and that gave a spike in the views(like 500 in one day). Hence, one of the options would be "growth hacking" as someone would call it. Essentially it's about finding channels, mechanics and triggers for people to share the content
Check other posts about this project: #pronounceme
