I’ve been in the content creation space for over a decade. Since I was small. So thus I’ve accumulated some experience with growing a channel from scratch and by extension anything when it comes to YT’s algorithm for some time.
Most of what I know and learned from is from maintaining the Lynxmic channel. Since I started that channel in 2016, for the longest time it was a big struggle to get it to grow.
Now one important thing to know, and that’s the fact Shorts didn’t exist until 2020. Lynxmic was created at a time Musical.ly and Vine were (still) a thing.
2016 wasn’t too meaningful since I only started in December. And of course I only had started to get editing skills at the time, and combined with the content I was doing it wasn’t too professional. in 2017 I already evolved a lot with editing, I was very obviously doing everything for fun, 2017-19 generally I had lots of fun playing with Virtual Machines. In 2018 my young self even felt like my channel was “ahead” of other small channels its size.
Anyway, let me get into more detail into my history on YouTube when it comes to growing a small channel like mine:
Growing the Lynxmic channel
Solarix 2018-19, first year of actual growth
After being stuck under 30 subs for almost two years, the Lynxmic channel then known as Solarix finally started to somewhat grow in late 2018. But there’s an aterisk.
The videos that have been giving the channel most subscribers and views around this time were mostly “How to get X Rich Presence on Discord” videos or those from the “Discord.js Bot Tutorial” series.
If we break down by Traffic source, a majority of the views come from External or YouTube search.
Most of the views coming from “external sources” were from Google Search.
Now was it a “good thing”? Maybe in the short-term, but in the long-term? I don’t think so.
The “most popular” videos of the channel weren’t really pushed by the algorithm. As tutorials, they came to be because people were looking for them and only for them, not for the channel itself.
The channel itself has always primarily been a “tech” channel. Indeed other types of videos were also done during this time including programming and gaming, but they were always secondary.
The subscribers the channel gained in late 2018-early 2019 were basically nothing and rapidly turned into “ghosts”. Not to mention I ‘quit’ programming in 2019 to only primarily focus on tech-related content on the Lynxmic channel, basically the thing I actually love doing, but even then.
Average views per video didn’t go up with the subscriber count, most times you were lucky to even get 100+ views on a video.
Any growth is good, but this wasn’t sustainable. I made content, but I barely got anything in return, as much as I wanted.
Now thinking about it, maybe I actually felt like having a third channel was a good idea at the time without realizing it?
In fact those who were around for me long enough might remember NightskyArchive, which used to be my “media perservation”-focused channel which I since deleted. It started as a “tech tutorial” channel before later evolving into Codarix, a coding-focused channel.
And considering the programming/IDE videos were for some reason more popular than my other videos, maybe it would actually been a good idea if Codarix happened earlier sticking just to the programming/IDE videos?
At that point it was already pretty much too late either way, since Spring 2019 my channel has struggled to grow past the 75-90 subscriber range, and things wouldn’t improve until 2022, when it finally hit 100 subs for good and never dropped below that threshold again.
And that leads us to the next blog post section:
Lynxmic 2023-24
By early 2023, nearly every video started to get beyond the 100+ view milestone and I even got a most popular video which today has 37K+ views: a remake of a remake of a Windows Consumer Upgrade Fest.
Did I expect it? No. At this point I didn’t expect anything after struggling to grow for years. It is fundamentally the same thing as with the original videos from 2019 and 2021.
What actually happened is that by 2023 YouTube appeared to have changed their algorithm and in a positive way for small channels like mine was. Below you can see views by traffic source between 1 January 2018 and 31 December 2024:
By far, Browse features dominates. It means traffic from the “homepage/home screen, the subscription feed, and other browsing features” but at this stage it means the actual YouTube Algorithm is pushing your channel and videos to people that are truly interested.
Only thanks to the algorithm, the Lynxmic channel picked back up in growth again while getting an audience that is actually (even somewhat) loyal to the channel and actually watches the videos that I’ve been posting there.
And it wasn’t just the Lynxmic channel. In recent years I have observed increasingly more videos with like 30 views being recommended to me, let it be from the homepage or suggestions in watch pages.
It doesn’t necessarily have to be a “professional-looking” video, it can be the most random video ever on YouTube. It can even have just an auto-generated thumbnail and a title that is just the date e.g. “3 March 2026” (default behavior on YT Mobile if no title is set), it can get many views overnight.
2023-24 wasn’t exactly “too late” but at the same time “was”, considering.. now. The Lynxmic content at this point was fundamentally the same from earlier years, and my passion for messing around with VMs was already starting to wind down compared to 2017-19.
The peak of the Lynxmic channel growth-wise was fall 2024, when it finally hit 1K subscribers. The channel at the time was growing at a rapid rate, and that could have been the best opportunity to grind, grind, and grind more, however as I said my interest and energy to make the same VM videos I did for years were in a decline :(
What I learned
First off let me emphasize that for a period, between summer 2022 until March 2023, the Lynxmic channel primarily had a weekly schedule where videos would be uploaded every Saturday.
It was at a time where I kinda started to miss having frequent uploads like I once did in 2018-19, which I might have knew it might work, and surprisingly enough I managed to build surpluses (a.k.a. have videos ready multiple weeks in advance.)
After March 2023 though I dropped the schedule and uploads slowed down since I was shifting my focus on the behind-the-scenes and how I could improve my content. And even without the weekly schedule, by the end of 2023 the Lynxmic channel was above 400+ subscribers.
As for 2024, in the first half I generally had the same “old” schedule of generally at least 1-2 videos per month. Growth wasn’t that notable, except for that one video showing the then-”new” Windows 11 Setup.
Later I knew summer was an opportunity for me as a creator so for throughout July-August 2024 I reintroduced the weekly upload schedule previously abolished in 2023. This has been a success which has benefitted the channel even into fall.
So, the important things to note:
- Upload frequency is important if you wanna seriously get far with YouTube.
- It doesn’t have to be a schedule you have to strictly adhere to, ideally you just have upload at least every 2 weeks or something if you wanna have your channel/videos pushed.
- If you don’t feel like making a video so often, it’s fine! You don’t have to do it. You can take a break if you need to. Making a video is something you should be able to enjoy doing, not one that feels like a chore. The more passionate you are, the better you can cook a video that both you and your audience enjoys!
- A video shouldn’t be too boring, starting from the title and thumbnail.
- The first thing people see about your YouTube video is the title and thumbnail. The more better they are, the more catchy it becomes for people to click/tap on your video. It shouldn’t be too boring, but at the same time not clickbaity either.
- Then, the video itself. The better the editing is, the better your recordings are, the better your video is.
- Though I should say that I’m not the best at giving examples so if you want the closest idea, stick around for the AstroNT section!
- Generally for inspiration/ideas, I’d recommend looking at other channels then drawing your conclusion based on what you’re seeing. Look at how other channels edit their videos, their quality etc.
A new start
In October 2025, I became part of a different YouTube channel project: AstroNT. This basically marked my return to the content creation space after a six-month break.
Throughout this whole time I’ve used my experience previously accumulated from the Lynxmic project when making videos for AstroNT. The plan: improve as the channel grows.
One key thing here was that for each video I tried to make the titles and thumbnails as “catchy” and as good as possible.
So my first videos were simple edited videos with recordings and textboxes. In 2025 I uploaded roughly 2 videos to the AstroNT channel, which they didn’t do too bad for a channel at the beginnings.
Then no videos would be posted to the channel at all until January 2026, when I finally finished the two other videos I started in 2025 but left behind: Y10K on Linux and 5001 via DOS. Analytically speaking, they flopped, and that’s completely fine at this stage!
Then came the 8Store video. Style-wise it was no different from previous videos. Everything was fundamentally the same.
It did better compared to all other videos in the first week. In fact what I noticed in the tech side of YouTube in particular is that the videos that actually perform well the most are Windows-related. That are interesting enough.
Even if we look at the Top 25 most popular Lynxmic videos right now, every single video is Windows-related. Except for the 25th one, that being the KolibriOS video from early 2020.
Anyway back to the 8Store video, guess what happened after a week of it being out!
Notice the clear spike in both views from Browse features and Suggested videos? That means YouTube’s Algorithm is pushing the video and the AstroNT channel got its place on the map! So far so good ^w^
I knew what to do from here this time, thanks to the Lynxmic 2024 experience I’ve previously mentioned: push another video. How did it perform in the first few hours?
Remember, this is literally just your ordinary Windows-related video. It’s nothing wow, even less than 5001 via DOS.
Now let’s check the analytics for the entire channel right now as I’m writing this blog post:
Granted it’s past the peak, but almost 300 subscribers in just almost half a year since the AstroNT channel was originally created in September 2025, of which most of it gained within 1.5 weeks is impressive!
There’s still work to do though, and for that ideally all what’s needed is to keep up with the videos as they are, staying consistent with the current uploading schedule, which so far ended up to be 2 videos per month. No rush. No hurry.
Although maybe I should make sure I have everything properly set up beforehand before making a video, the ExplorerEx video was recorded twice, the first set of recordings turned out so well but it turned out I forgor to enable Capture Cursor in OBS (which i thought i had the entire time!) so my mouse cursor didn’t show up in the recording and that ruined the vibe arghhhh >.<
Why am I saying this though? In the niche AstroNT is in, when you do some shenanigan video with all of the fun in it, you can get the best shots from the first try! But if you somehow accidentally get one thing wrong without realizing or just anything happens and you have to re-record 100% of the video, the vibe is gone and you have to act dumb, instead of being dumb.
I’m still pretty satisfied with the outcome of the video nonetheless.
And that’s another advice not just for future me, but for others who also want to start a channel: make sure you’ve got your settings and equipment right before starting to work on your video.
Conclusion
This was pretty much all my personal experience with YouTube’s algorithm and overall growing YouTube channels. Definitely cannot call myself an expert here, but this has been pretty much my advice to anyone who wants to start a new channel in this day and age.
In the meantime I want to keep going not just with the AstroNT channel, but also my personal channel at some point. Who even knows what will happen in six months?
Side note, if I somehow happen to come up with any missing points I didn’t think of when first writing this I may or may not edit this blog post to include them, because useful information after all… This is a pretty complex topic in its way, sooo yeah.