Working on my YouTube channel

I've been using YouTube for several years, my first video was published five years ago and I've been a pretty steady contributor since. Some of my videos have done surprisingly well - my most popular video is a short review of our large Playmobil castle set which is currently sitting with 127K views. Recently, my video of us assembling an Ikea Stuva loft bed has been very popular, and I also do quite well with holiday destination review videos.

I have never made a fortune from YouTube monetisation, but I did make a few pounds a month which was always nice to have, and a good motivator to keep producing popular content. Back in January, along with many other small creators, I received the e-mail telling me that my channel was no longer eligible for monetisation. They introduced new benchmarks, and creators are required to have over 1000 subscribers and 4000 hours of watch time in the last twelve months.

At the time I had just 463 subscribers and was about half way there with the watch time. My problem is that although I have a few videos with very high view counts, they are short videos so don't add much to my watch time, and they are also one off niche videos which don't attract new subscribers as my content is so varied. I made the decision to try and work on my YouTube channel to reach the new requirements, although five months in I'm still way behind.

Over the last few months I've managed to build up my subscribers and I'm currently on 915, so I'm doing well although there's still a little way to go. If  you aren't already subscribed I'd love you to pop over to my channel and consider clicking the red subscribe button, I really do appreciate each and every subscriber! You can find my channel here - Jennifer Jain on YouTube.

When it comes to watch time though it's proving a bit more tricky. I'm not very good at making longer videos, and most of mine only last about three to four minutes. That's because I know that I don't have the time personally to sit and watch videos all day, and I like to keep things short and sweet. I hope this means that people have the patience to watch to the end at least, but if they click away afterwards then it doesn't do much. I'm desperately trying to think of longer content that I can create which won't be too boring!

If you watch videos on YouTube I'd love to know which type of videos really keep your attention!