Will "TheNiveNulls" be the next YouTube family vlog superstars to take on "Shaytards"?

Breaking down YouTube viewership and engagement by the numbers, and seeking to answer the question: Should you take up family vlogging?
By DANE GOLDEN

You may be familiar with the trend of family vlogging on YouTube. Family vlogs are video diaries created by people who regularly share their family's inner lives on camera. In general, each member of the nuclear family unit is a co-star on the vlog.

The most well-known and longest-running of the family vlogs is "Shaytards," which has documented the life of Shay Carl Butler and his wife and kids every day for more than five years. They have several channels, but the main channel has more than 2 million subscribers. Butler was a member of the original group that started Maker Studios. Vlogging is his full-time job. The family has five children. Click here to watch the recent CNN Headline News interview with the Shaytards.

A number of other family vlogs are gaining in popularity. One of those for which vlogging is also the primary family business is "TheNiveNulls." Austin Null, the father in this vlogging family, was recently a full-time employee of Fullscreen, a competitor to Maker Studios, but announced he was leaving the company to focus on vlogging full-time. The Nulls also have several channels, but the main channel currently has almost 110,000 subscribers. The family has two children. Click here to watch the recent CNN Headline News interview with TheNiveNulls.

The Butler and Null families happen to be friends, and both relocated to the Los Angeles are to pursue careers on the YouTube platform (the Nulls more recently). And both are top-level experts in building and engaging online communities around successful YouTube channels.

I was curious about how these two channels compared, and if I could determine whether, based on publicly available YouTube data, TheNiveNulls was indeed going strong and could one day be as large as Shaytards. As an independent consultant for brands, entertainment properties, and national non-profits, I often run data on YouTube channels to see how they compare (nerd alert!), so I thought I'd share with you what I found in this case. My sources include public data from VidStatsX, SocialBlade, ChannelMeter, the VidIQ Vision Chrome extension, the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, and my own past studies of public data. The best data points, however, are not public, so this study is by its nature incomplete and my conclusions are only assumptions based on my experience on how public data relates to private data.

When ranking YouTube channels, many YouTube observers rely only on either viewcounts or subscriber counts. Both of these are interesting, but, as the book "Lean Analytics" says, a ratio is more important than a number when looking for meaningful data. When I analyze a channel I work to analyze and compare YouTube performance across more than 30 ratios to find out where improvements can be made in audience growth. My goal is to find statistically-proven leading indicators and prescriptive methods that can help channel creators or companies grow great authentic channels. While I have yet to find the "One Metric That Matters" (OMTM), I've found some interesting trends overall.

Today I'm applying a portion of that methodology to Shaytards and TheNiveNulls, starting with subscriber growth rates.

On Jan. 25, 2013, the first date I studied, Shaytards had 1,034,708 subscribers. And the average views for their previous five videos was 80,674, or an active viewership of 8% of subscribers. On March 7, 2014, the second date I studied, Shaytards had 1,946,867 subscribers, but their active viewership had grown to 21% of subscribers, or 415,729 views per video, after some outliers were removed. From my research, 21% percent is a very high active viewership for a regularly posted YouTube channel, particularly for one which has been going strong for more than five years. Usually, active viewership as a percentage of subscribers goes down over time as total subscribers increases. And yet Shaytards has more than doubled its active viewership percentage during that period. Also of note is that during the 30 days leading up to this date, Shaytards had published 35 videos, more than one a day.

On Dec. 19, 2012, the first date I studied the data for TheNiveNulls, the channel had 15,703 subscribers. I did not have archived data for this channel, and views on old videos from that period have increased over time as the channel has gained more subscribers. But in a video from that week, Austin said that each video was getting between 2,500 and 5,000 views. So I split the difference and used 3,750 as the average video viewcount for that week. That's an average active viewership of 24% views-to-subscribers - also very high, but not totally unheard of for a young channel with a lower subscriber base.

By April 5, 2014, the second date I studied, TheNiveNulls had grown to 109,376, and the average views from the last five videos was 27,379. The channel had actually increased its active viewership over 16 months from 24% to 25%. As the channel has expanded its subscriber base, the viewers have stayed very highly involved. Also note that during the 30 days leading up to this period, TheNiveNulls channel had published 25 videos, almost one a day.

During the last 16 months, TheNiveNulls subscriber base has grown seven fold. If this same rate of growth were to continue for the next 16 months, the channel would have 765,632 subscribers by August of 2015. With a 25% active viewership, their videos would average 191,408 views each, or 4,785,200 total views per month. Shaytards started in Oct. 2008 with 59,9895 views and had a peak of 22,500,000 monthly views in 2010, then a drop-off to a low of 7,058,145 monthly views in Sept. 2012 (see this video for reference, starting at 5:32). From then until Jan. 2014 monthly views went steadily up to 28,322,162, a four-fold increase over 16 months. At this rate Shaytards will have 113,648,113 monthly views by April 2015.

I think that we can conclude that TheNiveNulls is doing well in comparison so far to Shaytards growth. While it took Shaytards five years of daily vlogging (since 2009) to get to its current level of success, the YouTube landscape has changed by adding more viewers overall. It's possible TheNiveNulls could gain viewership at a faster rate than Shaytards originally did.

At this point you may be thinking to yourself, "Hmm, vlogging sounds like fun. Maybe I should quit my job and just put my family on YouTube every day." Well, before you think it's easy, understand that vloggers are known to work 18-hour days every day of the week, every day of the year. Shaytards haven't taken a day off in five years. Serving an audience takes a lot of time and effort, between shooting videos, editing, tweeting, commenting, email responses and so on. It's endless.

But it's worth asking how much money can be made for all this work, because perhaps this is the job for you. So let's do the math. A good rule of thumb for when a YouTube channel that is working with a multi-channel network (MCN), the channel gets about $1,500 per one million views, or $.0015 per view, after YouTube and the MCN have taken their cuts of the advertising. TheNiveNulls in Dec. 2012 had 3,750 views with 25 videos a month would be 93,750 monthly views, or $140.63 per month. Producing 25 videos at 27,379 per month, as they did in April 2014, equals 684,475 monthly views, or $1,026.71. However the channel has a lot of old videos that continue to receive views, so the total videos for the previous 30 days is 1,140,672, or $1,711. Additionally, the family has other channels. And Austin Null said in an interview with Tubefilter that the family is getting 60% of their income in additional sponsorships.

We can apply the same math to the Shaytards, notwithstanding their other channels or income from other sources. For the 30 days leading up to April 5, 2014, the channel had 28,520,880 overall views including previous videos, by this math totaling $42,781.32 for that month.

Could TheNiveNulls one day be as big as Shaytards? Possibly. And they could get there simply by just continuing to make videos that resonate with their fans. But if we were to take an engagement-metrics based approach, there appear to be some areas where Shaytards has done well that TheNiveNulls could emulate.

In likes-per-view, TheNiveNulls compares favorably at an off-the-charts 9.14% average. Shaytards is at 8.05%, also extremely good but down slightly from a year ago, when they were at 9.81%. However Shaytards has a 1.49% comments-per-view average, down from 3.31% a year ago when they had fewer subscribers. Yet TheNiveNulls has a respectable, but 26% lower, comments per view average of 1.18%. This percentage is quite high by overall YouTube standards (I consider anything over 0.5% to be pretty good). But if we see TheNiveNulls getting to Shaytards levels of viewership, I believe we will likely also see their comments-to-views ratio at similar levels.

There are a number of other KPIs I could go into - believe me, I could go on and on. But I'm sure that's plenty for today. I wish the best of success to both these vlogs and the families that create them - they are staking out new territory in a brave new world.

Thanks for reading! Please let me know your comments or questions below.

Dane

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Dane Golden is an independent YouTube brand strategist and audience growth consultant, and the founder of Hey.com. He co-hosts the weekly YouTube marketing podcast "TubeTalk." Find him on Twitter @danegolden and on LinkedIn.