-Updated- Changing the Channel for YouTube Engagement was a bad idea

UPDATE: Moving channel was a bad idea

I thought it was such a great move moving channels as it increased our CTR for educational videos. In reality what happened was it confused our user base. What I found out the hard way was that we needed to keep all of our content in one place and actually update Purrfect.dev to become CodingCat.dev Podcast as well. Now our branding is all surrounding the CodingCat brand going forward, on a single channel.

If you read nothing else in this article

We are moving our podcast to a new channel. https://studio.youtube.com/channel/UCD5oDjUZTYM13irzpRjnVeQ

I am moving off the company twitter account https://twitter.com/codingcatdev and onto my own account https://twitter.com/codercatdev.

I know pretty close username right, gotta keep on brand.

We want you to write and create for us too, so please DM or email to join us.

Why I made CodingCat.dev

Back when I started CodingCat.dev I wanted a place where people could come and learn web development. What I learned was getting people to come to yet another website for another coding tutorials is really hard!

Feeling still like Kevin Costner in a Field of Dreams, I continue to push.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/NOPTByHw5RA

What was broken

YouTube has this unfortunate feature where it takes into account two things.

Click Through Retention

Average View Duration

You will notice that in our top 5 all time vides for CTR they are all programming videos. Even though Brittney and I have spent around 60 hours on screen, recording the podcast each week. The second part of this shows that our average view is around 3 minutes and 42 seconds on average.

This told us that not only is no one watching the podcast, but they are not finding our other content. We love the podcast and love talking to all the amazing people we get to talk with on it. So we don’t want to give it all up and let it go, but we also want people to find all the awesome content that we plan to send out this year too!

How Jeff Delaney taught me to fix it

Jeff has a great video on how he got to 1 million subscribers. It was a great guide for me to understand why we needed to change channels.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/j_q0D_jbMk8?start=99

Whats next?

What we are going to do now is switch from a recorded, cleaned up version of the podcast over to a live version where we still are able to run advertisements realtime.

This will free up all our editing time for content writing time.

The next step is to move to my new company’s platform Builder.io. This will allow us to setup custom roles and ease the capability to produce content that we can view live. While allowing some of our custom components from Firebase authentication. It is honestly so amazing what this product can do and it is evolving every day, the team is growing like crazy!

Builder.io is not only going to allow us to have a live preview of the page, but it will let us drop in any React component that we won’t with that live preview. Instead of using something like MDX which we still love btw, we can actully drop a full component in while we are creating. There is no reason to have a compile step to run the code and parse on the otherside. We can ship JSON representing all blocks within our page. For now we are still leveraging all the utilities of TailwindCSS, but I would not be surprised if we don’t get even closer to raw css and html in case we decided to pickup the next latest framework that is moving the web to the next level like Qwik. In our beta builds I am already seeing massive performance gains using Partytown as well!

So please come join us and sorry for all the trouble while we change gears!