According to Rattay, choosing a good thumbnail, or the image displayed as the video "cover" on YouTube, is essential to the success of a video. Image courtesy of Elija Rattay.
When junior Elija Rattay started a Youtube channel as a middle schooler, he had no idea that someday he would manage a monetized account with thousands of subscribers.
Rattay started his YouTube channel with the goal of making gaming videos with his cousin, Jaxson. “We had seen other people make videos on games and whatnot online, so we were like, ‘Yeah, let’s do it,’” said Rattay.
The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic temporarily sidelined their ability to work together, and they created their own channels. Despite low viewership, Rattay continued to create gaming videos on his own.
That changed after Rattay created a video of him purchasing a Godzilla character for the game. “It just took off,” said Rattay. “The next day it had like 5,000 views.”
“From there, I kept posting and [the videos] kept getting bigger,” Rattay said. “At the end of the week, my channel had already gotten like 1000 subscribers.”
Rattay continued to build his channel with support from new friends in the gaming community. “They kind of helped me get better and helped grow the channel a little bit to more what it is today,” he said. “It helped my channel grow bigger because I kept unlocking more characters in the game, which is obviously what people like to watch.”
Soon, though, Rattay experienced a setback as the game in question, Kaiju Universe, was deleted from Roblox due to a copyright infringement lawsuit with Toho Studios, the creators of Godzilla.
“I had to find something else to make content on,” he said. He chose Jailbreak, an open-world cops versus criminals game.
“It was more of an older style game, but it could still pull big views,” he said.
Rattay’s channel now has close to 7000 subscribers and well over a million views. It’s also monetized, meaning he is paid by YouTube for his content.
“In order to get monetized, you have to get 1000 subscribers and 4000 hours of watch time, which I did in a fairly short amount of time,” said Rattay. “When I was young, when it started exploding, I didn’t really care. In the last couple years, it’s meant more to me because, you know, you can make money off of it.”
Monetization rates vary based on genre and consumer base, and monetized content creators can make anything from a dollar to twenty per 1000 views.
As teenage attention spans continue to shorten in the Entertainment Age, Rattay has been forced to update his strategies to stay competitive.
“Content nowadays is like, people post whatever the heck they can to get views,” he said. “I hate that, because I like to post quality videos.”
YouTube released a short-form video platform called Shorts in 2021 to cater to the demand for shorter videos in the 30 to 60-second time range. Rattay does create Shorts to fill that demand, citing the ever-shortening attention spans of teenagers.
The benefit to catering to this demand is a huge viewership bonus. “Within like an hour, they can get a couple thousand views, so that’s pretty good,” he said.
Rattay encourages other young people to start their own channels. One of his biggest pieces of advice is to learn about the system to grow their channels.
“My advice is [to] learn about the algorithm of YouTube videos, because if you want to have a video play out really well, you’re gonna have to focus on the algorithm of what other people do,” he said.