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Analytics & Lessons from Year 1 on Youtube

Pinball Pursuit·video·29m 11s·analyzed·Jan 13, 2026
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Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.029

TL;DR

Pinball Pursuit's first year: 50K views, 1.1K subs, scripted tutorials proved winning formula.

Summary

Dr. C from Pinball Pursuit reflects on their first year of YouTube content creation, sharing analytics from January 2025 to January 2026. The channel has grown to 1,100+ subscribers and 50,000 views by focusing on scripted educational tutorials about pinball games, which significantly outperform other content types. Key lessons include: scripted tutorials are their strength while forcing scripts onto reviews backfired, overcoming on-camera anxiety was critical after community encouragement, ignoring negative gatekeepers while embracing positive feedback drove growth, and organic search from tutorial queries drives substantial traffic.

Key Claims

  • The pinball YouTube content creator space lacks highly scripted, educational 'edutainment' content compared to other niches

    medium confidence · Dr. C observed that while there are many pinball podcasts and content creators, there's a shortage of scripted educational material similar to creators like Defunctland and Matt McMuscles

  • Tutorials are the dominant content driver, with 28.5% of views coming from YouTube search for tutorial queries

    high confidence · Analytics show almost all top-performing videos are tutorials; search behavior data shows 'tutorial' appears in nearly all search referrals

  • 82% of channel visitors are unsubscribed despite consistent viewership

    high confidence · Direct YouTube Studio analytics data presented showing subscriber vs non-subscriber breakdown

  • Jaws Pinball tutorial has driven 182 subscribers despite being released mid-year, and is the channel's top performer

    high confidence · Video-specific analytics shown with 9,000 views, 801 watch hours, 182 subscriber attribution

  • Initial AI-generated caricature avatars received significant negative community backlash and were abandoned

    high confidence · Dr. C states majority of early negative comments attacked the AI avatars, accused entire channel of being AI-generated, and credits Loser Kid Pinball podcast's Josh Roop with encouraging on-camera appearances

Notable Quotes

  • “There just isn't a lot of it. There's a lot of podcasts, which are great—everyone loves a podcast—but there wasn't a lot of scripted material.”

    Dr. C@ 4:13 — Core motivation for starting the channel—identified an underserved niche for scripted educational pinball content

  • “And basically said, 'Hey, what you're doing is really good. It's different. You should keep going, and you should just get over your fear and get on camera, because nobody cares.'”

    Dr. C (quoting Josh Roop from Loser Kid Pinball)@ 25:50 — Critical encouragement from established community member that pivoted channel strategy away from AI avatars to on-camera presence

  • “We don't want noobs teaching noobs, and why don't we just leave this to the good content creators.”

    Anonymous commenter@ 26:49 — Example of gatekeeping sentiment Dr. C actively rejected; reflects community tension between newcomers and established creators

  • “It's not everything. It doesn't do everything we want it to do. And so holding too tight onto that idea was, was not great.”

    Dr. C@ 23:23 — Lesson about flexibility: scripted content works for tutorials but forced scripts on reviews felt unnatural

  • “If you're anywhere between 3% and 6%, you're doing pretty good. If you're in the 10% range, you are doing amazing.”

    Dr. C@ 15:04 — YouTube metrics context; their 5.1% click-through rate positions them in solid range

Entities

Dr. CpersonMrs. JpersonJosh RooppersonPinball PursuitorganizationJaws (Stern Pinball)gameGodzilla (Stern Pinball)gameStranger Things (Stern Pinball)gameJurassic Park (Stern Pinball)gameFoo Fighters (Stern Pinball)game

Signals

  • ?

    community_signal: Pinball community creators actively support new content makers through cross-promotion and encouragement; Loser Kid Pinball's outreach was transformative for Pinball Pursuit viability

    high · Josh Roop found small channel organically, reached out with encouragement; Dr. C credits this as turning point when considering abandoning channel

  • ~

    sentiment_shift: Early gatekeeping pushback against new pinball content creators, but strong support from established creators like Loser Kid Pinball; positive comments vastly outnumber negative over time

    high · Comments shown dismissing 'noobs teaching noobs'; Josh Roop from Loser Kid reached out with encouragement; Dr. C notes negativity was loud early but positive feedback became dominant as channel matured

  • $

    market_signal: Scripted educational pinball content significantly underserved relative to podcasts and casual gameplay videos; tutorial format drives 28.5% of views via organic search

    high · Dr. C identified lack of edutainment-style scripted pinball content despite abundant podcasts; analytics show tutorial videos dominate top performers and search referrals consistently contain 'tutorial' keyword

  • ?

    community_signal: Creator overcoming on-camera anxiety was pivotal to channel success; AI-generated avatars were rejected by community and replaced with on-camera presence

    high · Majority of early negative comments attacked AI avatars; Dr. C ditched avatars after Josh Roop's encouragement; now uses on-camera footage with voiceovers

  • ?

    product_concern: Forced scripting on review content felt unnatural and was rejected by audience; unscripted discussion format performs better for reviews

Transcript

youtube_groq_whisper · $0.088

0:00
Hello and welcome to Pinball Pursuit. I'm Dr. C. Obviously, just me. I wanted to make a video just kind of going over a few different things. Really, we're so grateful to everyone that has subscribed, that everyone's watched our videos, and I really want to be candid. I want to be transparent with where we're at, where we've been, and all that stuff. And so this video is basically just going to be me going over a few of the things about our first year on YouTube. We created this channel in December of last year, and we didn't upload anything. We didn't upload until January 2nd. So what I'm going to do here in a minute, I'm going to grab my computer. I'm going to show you all of our analytics from January 1, 2025 until January 1, 2026. And kind of go over just what it's like being a YouTuber, being a content creator in a very niche market as something that is not my full-time job. Something that, you know, my wife and I are kind of doing on the side just for fun. But first, before we go into all of that, I kind of want to go into like, why? why why did we start a youtube channel um we have a video i'll link it here kind of like what got us started into pinball um but i kind of don't want to talk about the pinball aspect of our channel with this video i want to talk about the youtube uh channel part of this this whole journey of ours so really what it boils down to is um when i got bit and i got bit hard by the pinball bug and like any person who has a little bit of an obsessive personality when I when I get interested in something I want to learn everything I can about it and so what I did is I went to forums I went to you know Google searches but primarily YouTube because that's where I do a lot of my on the side entertainment to figure out what was out there what could I learn about this new hobby that I was so interested in. And, um, a few things stood out to me. A, there was not a lot of creators out there. There's, I mean, there's a lot, but there's not like you could find for video games or for a lot of other hobbies out there. There just isn't a ton of content creators in this space. And so really it ends up being that this is a pretty niche space. And there's a whole section of how to be a niche YouTube content creator. Promise me, I looked at a lot of those videos too. But what I saw was when you're looking at a niche, what are the things that you want to look for if you're looking to get into content creation, right? And I wasn't initially going to do content creation. That was never part of the plan. But what I found was when I went to go look for things, I have a specific type of YouTube video that I really enjoy. And that is scripted edutainment type content. Some prime examples of this, Defunctland. If you've never watched Defunctland, he is amazing. He does deep, deep dives into the history of amusement parks and TV shows for kids and all sorts of stuff. It's cool. It's good stuff. Another one is Matt McMuscles. Uh, and I try to take, I'll talk a little bit more about his inspiration here. Um, but I loved his videos. I loved what he was doing with his YouTube channel, where it was highly entertaining. It was scripted and it was all about disasters and video games and some movies. and that was stuff that I really liked and so when I went into the YouTube space for pinball I was looking for content like that that was highly scripted that was edutainment type content and unless I'm mistaken there just isn't a lot of it there's a lot of podcasts which are great everyone loves a podcast but there wasn't a lot of scripted material and especially when I wanted to learn something, I learned best from highly scripted, you know, words on the screen type of things. I've always been someone that learns in a more traditional way in that way, right? I like being able to see something, take notes if I need to, have words on screens. There's a reason that I have a PhD and then I went to school for as long as I did. and so what i found was for the type of like tutorials and learning that i wanted that it wasn't there in the style that i learned from best right and that's not to knock anyone who's doing tutorials or beginner's guides on anything. They do great content. Um, but I have a hard time following along with someone that just kind of either throws the ball around or tries to explain a game while they're playing it. It just doesn't work for me. Um, and I remember talking to Mrs. J, my wife, uh, about how I was just really struggling with finding the type of content that I wanted to find. Um, and I had the conversation a couple of times with her and, um, she basically said, well, why don't you make that? And it, I was like, ah, that's funny.
Defunctland
person
Matt McMusclesperson
Loser Kid Pinballorganization
YouTube Partner Programorganization
Pinsideorganization

high · Dr. C explicitly states scripted reviews 'didn't feel natural' and were abandoned; Mrs. J prefers discussion format; audience responded better to unscripted review videos

  • ?

    technology_signal: Video editing skill acquisition and AI-assisted avatar generation experimentation represent new technical barriers to entry for niche pinball content creators

    medium · Dr. C spent December 2024 learning video editing from scratch; attempted AI avatar generation; required trial-and-error approach before settling on real footage

    • 5:56
    Um, but it kind of weighed on me, um, that there was a, a market that maybe wasn't being served and maybe could be served. Um, the other thing that really motivated me was seeing how even some of these smaller creators um were getting access to some of the big names in pinball um you know they were getting invited to go see pinball machines on launch day right they were being invited to go to cistern to jersey jack uh for these big releases and they were people with channels that had less than 2 000 subscribers and those two things the fact that There were people that were able to get, you know, inside knowledge, inside access without having a ton of subscribers. And the fact that I felt that there was a type of market that was not being served that I wanted really led me to think more and more about this. Now, I work full time. My wife works full time.
    7:01
    We just had a kid, right? I don't have a ton of time. So the idea was, okay, what can I do? So I spent our first rental for a pinball machine, which is really what solidified this thing for me was in October I got it for my birthday And we had that machine until November And so after we returned that machine I spent basically all of my free time in December learning how to edit videos. I'd never done editing. And one thing that I've told people about this whole endeavor is it's really scratched an itch that I haven't been able to scratch in a long time. As I've said, I'm a scientist. I think I've said that somewhere else. Hurrah for science! Woo! Hurrah for science woo. I can't say I approve of the woo, but the hurrah was quite heartening. But I don't do a ton of the science myself anymore. I lead the team, which is cool. I love being a team leader. I love that aspect of my job. But it means that a lot of the creativity that you do as part of being a scientist, um, I don't get to do as much. And so what I found that was while I was editing these videos, I was kind of doing this, it was scratching that itch. I hadn't had scratched in a while and I really kind of got hooked on it. I really enjoyed it. So I made a couple of different videos. I wanted to have a few in the bank and we press that download, sorry, upload button on January 2nd of 2025. and the response was really cool initially.
    8:37
    So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to move the camera. I'm going to grab my laptop and I'm just going to kind of go over all the fun analytics.
    8:49
    So here we are in front of the computer. When you create a YouTube channel, you'll get this YouTube studio page. This is where you can see all the things. You can see there's clicks to content, analytics, which we'll go to in a minute. You can see all of your comments you've ever had on a video over here.
    9:11
    All that stuff is over here. Customization, which is how your page looks when you go there. Anyway, this has your latest video and how it's performing. You can see here we just uploaded our Stranger Things video to YouTube about two days ago. and it's done pretty well 480 views so far which is above average for us you can see here it has the last 10 videos we've uploaded and how many views those have gotten in two days and five hours so right now this video is performing above average at 480 views in two days our we bought our first film machine did a little better everything else is done that was good so interesting there and it has obviously just a ton of things you can click on analytics it goes there's so many analytics we're going to go over that in just a second recent subscribers a bunch of stuff from youtube you can see here we are part of the youtube partner program kind of cool don't read too much into it it's not that big a deal i'll go over here to this earn thing again just want to be transparent um we are a youtube partner now there are two levels of being a youtube partner there's what i call level one monetization or level one partner and a level two level one means that people can give you money basically it's user supported monetization so we have supers turned on that's just like a thing that you can click on and say hey i like your videos i'm going give you a buck five bucks whatever um so that's one thing kind of a cool little feature that youtube added for people that want to use it we don't push it because i think it's kind of i don't know it feels weird um the second thing is when you actually get watch time um revenue from ads right so the first part of the the equation which is the level one where users can give you money um the threshold for that is 500 subscribers and 3 000 watch time hours we hit 500 subscribers a long time ago we only recently got to that 3 000 watch time hours it's a lot of watch time hours um to get to level two we need a thousand subscribers we just hit that um not that long ago but you need 4 000 watch time hours in a year so in 365 days you need 4,000 watch time hours you can see we're a little short of that it's fine we're going to get there my projections are that we will get there by around March if things keep going according to how they had been going going back to the analytics side of things I can put in here a custom date range so I'll just go here on 1-1-2025 and right here I'll put this to 1-1-2026. So this is our first year.
    12:26
    Our first video was uploaded on the second you can see here. We actually uploaded a couple of different videos. Let me see here yeah there you can see there's a couple of different videos that we uploaded on that very first week. January 3rd is actually when we started uploading. but we have gotten a total of 50,000.7 views which I think is pretty good for being a small niche. Our watch time has been 3.4 thousand and 1.1 thousand subscribers in that time.
    13:02
    Pretty proud of that. So you can see here that our views started off really really big. I think YouTube really tries to push a new content creator into getting excited to keep going and then we kind of died off for a bit had a couple of videos did okay and then we had a big kind of pickup in things you can really see that in the watch time hours where starting in may with a particular video we'll talk about we started to get a lot more consistent watch time hours from our videos um you can see that our top content in this time period uh jaws uh holy cow for those who are wondering if jaws is going to end up being an all-time great in the pinball community it is according to this video it just is a killer um jurassic park which is one of our very first videos that we put up there also doing great uh godzilla which came a few months after um jaws also doing great you can see that all of our top videos i tried making some shorts they didn't work great um are all of our tutorials uh with one exception being uh we do have a thousand views on our jaws pinball review um so you can see here we're in the thousands of views for all these top videos which is really great they're all the tutorials which kind of like i said before is the more scripted stuff that I was looking for. So it it really validating that that is the case I go over here to specific content Um you can get from that custom range This has a little bit different view count but we had 55 555 thousand impressions What that means is that is how many times that our thumbnail was shown to somebody with the option to click it. What that means is we have a 5.1% click-through rate. From what I understand, If you're below 2%, you're not doing great. If you're anywhere between 3% and 6%, you're doing pretty good. If you're in the 10% range, you are doing amazing. Like unheard of amazing. So 5.1%, we're pretty happy with that. Most of our videos are shorter. So our average view time being four and a half minutes-ish. Not bad.
    15:27
    This has some key moments that you can look at. So this is intros. So what YouTube says is it says, okay, you have your first 30 seconds of the video. That's when people either click off or click or don't. So these videos here, um, have above average. I've averaged about 50%, um, where people stay and they continue watching. So really happy about that. These ones have below the average. Um, a lot of them are clips. Some of them are reviews. That's just fine. here's an interesting thing that I always find kind of exciting it's how people find our videos you can see that most is just browsing really happy to see that 28 and a half percent of our views come from people searching for the content we're making those are almost entirely our tutorials somebody types into the search bar hey I'm looking for a jaws pinball tutorial our video comes up they click on it so uh this is huge suggested videos you know that's stuff that comes at the end screen or whatever um external sources we do post to instagram i tend to post to reddit um and a few other places this could be google searches people searching on google for tutorial and they find our video um channel pages is people who go directly to our channel and they click on something and then other is just other um what's interesting is you can look at the external a lot of it is like i said google search a lot comes from edit some comes from youtube i don't know why that's considered external it's kind of weird um pin side we do get a view i do post all our videos on pin side uh and then a little bit from facebook i just started kind of doing the facebook uh cross promotion i'm really bad at social media guys uh so that's why we don't have a ton there you can see youtube search it's all tutorials people looking for jaws tutorials Godzilla, Jurassic Park, Foo Fighters. If I went to click more, you can see all the different sources that are coming and almost all of them say the word tutorial. That's what people are looking for. That's our kind of our bread and butter. We're really proud of that content.
    17:37
    You can see again our top videos there. Suggested videos. These are videos that people click on when they're suggested it um obviously the part two from jaws part one makes sense but we have a couple others there uh next let's go into the audience analytics which is kind of interesting um we have a monthly audience of two and a half thousand people i think that is the average over the whole year uh you can see that we did have quite dip there in the middle kind of that early stage that we really had to get through. And then we got a lot more after that to the point now where we're kind of above the 3,000s on average for views every month. Watch time behavior. This is kind of an interesting one. People who come to our channel like once are considered new viewers. That's two thirds of our content. Casual viewers, people that come every once in a while. We love those people. Regular is 2.8. I wish we could get those up a little bit more.
    18:39
    You know, share this video. Come back. We like having you guys. So that's that. You can see that with different audiences. Obviously, Jaws tutorial is huge.
    18:54
    Still, Jaws tutorials with the casual people. They're all the tutorials generally. Our regular viewers like seeing us. They're more into me and my first pinball machine, stuff like that. but it is definitely interesting um these are videos that haven't you know necessarily grown our audience too much in the last 90 days we won't focus too much on that where people watch our things this is kind of an interesting one right here which is the number of people that are subscribed versus unsubscribed 82 of people that come to our channel are not subscribed to our channel um so please if you're watching this and you're not subscribed do it a duly noted and ignored um we are mostly male not surprising pinball is a mostly male hobby even though there are a lot of females in it um and we're mostly in that elder millennial to you know uh gen x boomer category um with these analytics a few gen z years but generally it's It's Elder Millennials and JetX, which makes sense. That's where a lot of the people in the hobby are at right now. And then obviously we're mostly in the United States. That's kind of given.
    20:11
    This is the revenue tab. As you can see, we have made no money, which is great. It's fine. We're on the road to being monetized. Hopefully it just covers a subscription to my editing software. That's really all I'm looking for right now. um but yeah these are all of our channel analytics if we click into um jaws tutorial i find this interesting obviously this is our top performing video it has almost 9 000 views 801 watch time hours and it's gotten us 182 subscribers really proud of this one i actually don't think it's our best tutorial i think our godzilla tutorial is better um and i've really refined how I make the tutorials. I think our newest one, Stranger Things, is really well done too. But this is kind of where I really started to figure things out was with the JAWS, I feel. And it's obviously done well. You can see that the search is driving almost over a third of our reach there. What's interesting about this one as well, 5% click-through rate. You can see here, again where people are finding the videos google search people are searching on google for jaws pinball tutorial and we have it obviously um and then if i go up to engagement again um a lot of the same things here people like the video which is great um people click the end screen which is nice 2 of the time which they would do it more But here is where you can see the number of viewers we get on a daily basis It about 20 views a day which is fantastic Again where they watching it But the sad part where this is the part that makes me sad. 91% of people who watch this video don't subscribe. I wish more people did. But this is kind of the truth of YouTube. So anyway, that's just, you know, clicking into one of the analytics. Hopefully this is kind of cool for you guys. So here's just a couple of lessons that I've learned doing this, right? The first lesson is your first idea is usually good, but it doesn't apply to everything. Our tutorials, which are the scripted content I talked about that I really wanted, are absolutely the best material we have on the channel. It performs absolutely the best. However, I tried to script everything in the beginning, right? Our reviews were scripted and it didn't feel natural and people pointed it out. And so we abandoned having everything scripted and having some discussions. And people, I think, like our discussions. We enjoy doing those videos a lot, especially Mrs. J. She loves just chatting with me on camera and chatting about what we're talking about, it's a lot of fun. I was trying to force it with, with scripted reviews at the very beginning. And that wasn't the way to go. Whereas, you know, having scripted content absolutely has been the backbone of this channel. It's not everything. It doesn't do everything we want it to do. And so holding too tight onto that idea was, was not great. Lesson number two, you just got to get over the awkwardness of being on camera if you want to do content creation I had a lot of anxiety about that I'm a bigger guy you know I've had issues with my appearance and my confidence level of that and so in the beginning I didn't want to show my face my beautiful wife didn't care as much about that but I was really self-conscious and so in the beginning I created these little you know caricatures of us I took inspiration from Matt McMuscles he has this kind of caricature of himself that's a skeleton that that makes a bunch of comments and he has different poses then he moves around I really loved that and so I thought maybe I could I could use what he was doing and apply it to our channel with these little caricatures problem is i can't draw i have no artistic ability in that way i was already teaching myself how to edit videos how to write scripts um and everything and so i just said you know what we'll have ai do it and it took a lot of trial and error um some of the stuff that it came up with was terrible but these worked okay i felt and so we we put it out there um and people hated them um i would say the majority of our negative comments that we got at the beginning were about hating these images and accusing everything we were doing including even our voices of being ai i'll show some of those comments um really negative uh comments about that and it took me some convincing um the people that really did it was loser kid um if you haven't heard of loser kid pinball they're they're another podcast that is pinball content and um when i was feeling a little bit low our channel wasn't doing really great i just lost my dad i was kind of thinking like you know what maybe this isn't working um he found our channel He reached out and Josh basically said, hey, what you're doing is really good. It's different. You should keep going and you should just get over your fear and get on camera because nobody cares. And he's right. He was absolutely right. So that was really the second thing.
    26:07
    Don't be afraid to be on camera. So we ditched the AI people. I've been thinking about changing all of our thumbnails that use them to get rid of them. Haven't done that quite yet, but that's why they're gone. and now we use real pictures of us. We still do the voiceovers, obviously, for our scripted content, but that's why that's gone. Lesson number three, don't pay attention to all the negative people. There are a lot of jerks. There are a lot of gatekeepers. There are just a lot of people who don't have your best interests at heart. And they're going to be the minority, but they're going to be a lot louder than they should be in your own head. take for example this comment we don't want noobs teaching noobs and why don't we just leave this to the good content creators that that was a hurtful comment um it it's not great and it's really elitist in my opinion uh we ignored this comment but it still hurt and when we were early on if we had kind of succumbed to some of those early negative comments we wouldn't still be doing it. So like I said, the third thing I've learned is have a tough skin. People are not going to love you, especially with the anonymity of the internet. They're going to attack you a little bit. And we've gotten a lot of those negative comments. I'll just flash a few of them here. But those are the minority. And the more that we've done this, we found that the more positivity we've gotten. Lesson number four is the opposite of lesson number three. Pay attention to the positive people in your community we've had so many nice comments it's been great um we've had joking comments from some of the creators of these games uh which has been fun to kind of have that interaction with with the community um it's it's been so good to get such glowing praise and to see people who have the same thought as me which is these types of tutorials are exactly what we want. And then for the good comments on like our reviews, it's, Hey, we like you guys. We think you're fun. Um, I think we're fun. And so we've really enjoyed that. Let's wrap this all up. Been too long of a video. These are all the analytics. This is all of the lessons you could say that I've learned doing this for a year. And I look forward to doing it some more. If you have suggestions, if you have critiques, if you've got things you'd like to see us do more of, let us know um we're always looking to improve and if this is something that you like let us know that too and just thanks thanks for paying attention thanks for watching thanks for all the positivity um and until next time keep flipping so those are so
    29:10
    you