Just last weekend, I noticed a ridiculous amount of comments appearing on my latest video I posted on Youtube. Just some context, I post occasionally on my channel for fun as something I do on the side when I'm not busy with school. Over a period of half a year, I slowly built up my channel to a nice stable 1000 subscribers while averaging at around 5000 views per day. Throughout this time, I did not monetize since I wanted to keep my videos ad-free because they were just for fun and I never expected any of them to gain any traction.
Jump forward to last week, as I saw the torrent of comments flood my notifications I quickly jumped to my analytics and could not believe my eyes. The graphs showed exponential growth that gave me more views per minute than my usual views per day. Checking my analytics, it seemed that most of the views were coming from "search and browse" features, which meant that it was the Youtube algorithm getting me those views, and not some popular post on social media. However, later in the day I saw my video being shared on Facebook, Twitter, my favorite subreddits. etc. By the end of the day it was almost at 1 million views, a number I had never expected to reach in my Youtube hobby. I quickly jumped on this opportunity and made a a few more videos that people had requested and was able to reach similar success over the next few days with those as well.
I realized later on that if I had applied for monetization before this weekend, I would have been able to pay off a significant portion of my university tuition, but I get that this event was completely unforeseeable. I would also like to create more videos more often to ride this wave of success, but unfortunately I am taking a fairly difficult term this semester and will not have the freedom to do so. Overall, I am really thankful that I was able to achieve this level of success and hopefully I can continue to deliver and please the thousands of people that subscribed to me after this weekend. I suppose this is truly a case where I did not let my memes be dreams.
Current status: https://socialblade.com/youtube/c/laggy
If you have any more questions feel free to comment below and I'm willing to share what I have!