I've been creating video content for a while now - over a decade, and I have learnt a few or two in that time. Amongst the things I've learnt is the value of evergreen content.

When it comes to video, the premier place to go is, and has been for a long time, Youtube. I have several YouTube channels that I use for different purposes. I have a channel dedicated to film photography which I have had the longest of any of my channels. I also have one dedicated to crypto. Both these channels are monetised on YouTube but they are two completely different beasts.

The film photography one is what you can call an evergreen channel. The content there is enjoyed by film photography fans, no matter when they watch it. The content isn't time sensitive or sensational in any way. It's purely informative and entertaining. It's also quite hard to compete with that channel since most of the subjects have been discontinued. It's nearly impossible to recreate that channel now in 2023. It also requires some investment over a period of time.

The second channel is a kind of news channel. It means the information gets stale within a couple of days. As such the content is time sensitive.

It's been 3 years since I last uploaded to the film photography channel, but it still gets roughly the same views every month, bringing in the same revenue, day in , day out. It's not much, but it's been constant. Since all coasts related to creating the videos have been recouped, it's pretty much just passive income now. True passive income as I have to do absolutely nothing. Of course it may die suddenly but, for now, so far so god.

The second channel gets a lot of vides on the day I release a video, and then dies out. If I don't upload, I don't get paid. Simple as that. If, however, I upload a lot of videos, I get paid more, with a diminishing return after 3 videos. Because this content isn't evergreen, when the video dies, it dies. I may as well remove the video from the channel as it becomes dead weight.

From YouTube analytics, there are two main sources of organic traffic to a video: Browse and Search. The first channel, the evergreen one, is "search based" channel. The second channel is a "browse based" channel.

So which is better? Personally, I pick the first type: the search based one. The problem is, originally, it doesn't bring in much revenue, if any. This sort of channel also involves quite a bit of investment, off the bat, in terms of time and money. When you hit critical mass, however, the effort required to keep it going isn't much. You can also take chunks of time off without affecting the revenue much. They also compound and grow very fast once you get to the threshold.

Browse channels are more suited to news agencies that have the capacity to produce new content daily. In fact, news requires that sort of format because, well, there's new news every day.

If a channel can find a way to mix the two, it's a potential runaway success - like Mr Beast's channel for instance, which is both Search and Browse simultaneously.

I've been building another tree channels, in the past year, that are search based evergreen content channels. None of them is monetised yet but two of them are close. The one I'm most excited about has already achieved the view hours required for monetisation. I'm just waiting for the subscriber count to reach 1 thousand. It's currently 3/4 of the way there. The has been a boost in subs lately due to one of my videos going semi-viral. It's a video that helps people fix their Apple Pencil in an unorthodox way.