Let me set expectations honestly upfront. This is not a session about thumbnails, titles, video length, scripting, upload schedules, retention curves, end screens, tagging, audio mixing or any of the dozens of tactical optimisations that determine how a video performs at the production layer.

That information is freely available. Best practices for tactical execution are extensively documented across YouTube itself, on countless blogs and creator forums, in free tutorials and paid courses, and increasingly through AI chat tools that genuinely excel at delivering this kind of formulaic guidance. A motivated person can find 90% of what they need to know about tactical execution without paying anyone for it.

If your question is “how do I make a better thumbnail” or “what is the ideal video length right now”, you do not need me. You need an afternoon and a search bar.

My insight is 100% strategic. This is the kind of experience, expertise, perspective and judgement that stems from 20 years of platform context and pattern recognition across every era YouTube has experienced.

It is the kind of knowledge that cannot be searched for on Google or YouTube (the irony!). It cannot be replicated by AI tools since they lack the nuance or lived experience to back the advice. Furthermore, it cannot be acquired by anyone who has not done it themselves or who arrived at the platform after the algorithm-driven era was already established.

This session exclusively covers the strategic layer of your YouTube situation:

• Platform Alignment: Determine whether your current direction is structurally aligned with what the platform and your audience are rewarding, or whether you are fighting the platform without realising it.
  
• Viability Assessment: Identify what is genuinely durable in your current strategy and what is built on sand.
  
• Problem Diagnosis: Discern whether your channel underperformance is a strategic problem that no tactical fix can solve or a tactical problem that better strategy will not address.
  
• Execution Roadmap: Define what to focus on for the next 90 days, what to fix immediately and what to stop doing entirely.

This is the layer where judgement matters and where commodified or AI advice fails. Not so coincidentally, it is also where most channels and businesses have the actual problem they came to solve, even when they think the problem is something else.

Before the call, you will complete a short intake form with three or four questions about your channel or business objectives, your single biggest YouTube question and what you would like to walk away from the session with. The more specific your answers, the more useful the call and the less valuable time is wasted establishing context.

During the call, we work through your situation directly. I bring the experience, expertise and perspective. You bring the specifics of your circumstance. We meet in the middle and produce a defined strategic direction.

After the call, the ambiguity that brought you to the session is replaced with clarity on your next moves. You leave knowing what to do, why and in what order.

The current visible official count is around 200 million, following the removal of content for music copyright over the years.

Both figures are real and tell different parts of the same story, which I will share with you as a cautionary tale in your strategy session to spare you the frustration and depression that is partially responsible for me eventually hopping on a bicycle and crossing Canada in winter, which turned into a decade of touring countries and continents on two wheels.

37 videos have exceeded 1 million views, 20 have exceeded 2 million, 14 have exceeded 3 million, 13 have exceeded 4 million, 9 have exceeded 5 million, 3 have exceeded 10 million, 2 have exceeded 20 million and the most popular has generated over 32.9 million views on its own.

Overall, 191 videos have exceeded 100,000 views and 73 have exceeded 500,000.

This performance signifies a repeatable methodology rather than a series of isolated, lucky or accidental successes.

That is over 229 million hours of accumulated viewing across the channel, with very niche content. This is YouTube’s own most valued metric, ahead of total views and subscriber count. My channel averages nearly 34 minutes per view, against a platform average that has trended well under a minute as Shorts have grown.

Admittedly, my content is long-form by design, which leverages the watch-time metrics that YouTube rewards regardless of format. However, the principles of sustained attention are universal and translate to channels of any length.

Not a single lucky viral hit but hundreds of executions across nearly two decades, each offering a lesson on what succeeds on the platform.The sample size is substantial enough to distinguish strategy from luck.

It goes without saying that I have also had a number of “failures” if one focuses strictly on metrics. However, those videos that only achieved 10,000 views still represent 10,000 individuals reached which is still quite something!

Personally this is the most fulfilling and flattering metric on the channel. It means people not only wanted to share what I created with loved ones and with the world but they also wanted to bookmark it to keep coming back to it. That kind of return engagement is something I am genuinely grateful for.

Nearly half a million people trusted the content (audio-only DJ Mixes) enough to pass it on to someone else and over a million more registered the most straightforward form of approval the platform allows (a thumb up).

That kind of voluntary recommendation and engagement is humbling and I am honoured for every single share and like.

Firmly above the 100,000 threshold that marks YouTube’s first official recognition of channel scale. My channel was already active for over six and a half years before the Play Button awards programme was even conceived and when the silver plaque eventually arrived I forgot to claim it for three years. If you want a funny anecdote, ask me to share the story of how it ended up in the rubbish bin for a whole week.

With over 100 million YouTube channels in existence as of 2026, channels at this scale of subscribers, lifetime views and watch time are consistently reported as well under 1% of the total platform. Mine sits comfortably in the top 0.1% to 1% range depending on which metric is used.

YouTube launched on 14 February 2005. I signed up as www.YouTube.com/JaBig on 28 January 2006 (11 months later).

Facebook was a private university-only network still technically called “thefacebook” in the minds of many. MySpace, Orkut and Friendster were the reigning Old Guard social network champions of the internet.

Internet access was slower, more expensive and less reliable.

My journey on the platform was rolling along smoothly years before the founding of Pinterest (January 2010), Instagram (October 2010), Snapchat (July 2011), Vine (January 2013) and my established success predates the arrival of TikTok (September 2016) and Threads (July 2023).

The major music and video streaming platforms all came later.

Amazon’s video service launched in September 2006 (8 months after my channel) and went through multiple rebrandings before becoming Amazon Prime Video in 2015. Netflix was still an online DVD rental service when I started and did not launch streaming until January 2007. Hulu followed with a public beta in October 2007 and a full launch in March 2008.

Spotify and SoundCloud both launched in October 2008. Tidal launched in 2014 and was relaunched by Jay-Z in March 2015. Apple Music launched in June 2015.

The iPhone launched 18 months after my channel began. As a YouTuber, I experienced the transition from desktop and laptop-only viewing to mobile-first consumption, and every device shift in between.

It does not seem significant if you did not experience the transition firsthand (if you are 25 years old or younger), until you realise that my views increased exponentially when people worldwide were able to listen to my DJ mixes on the move.

The Partner Programme launch, the Google acquisition, the algorithm changes of 2012, the Adpocalypse of 2017, the Shorts era from 2020 and the AI content disruption from 2023 onward. I have lived through all of them, for better and mostly worse.

No label, no manager, no agency, no marketing budget. No proximity to Los Angeles, New York, or London or any global hub of music and entertainment. No relationships with the music industry, the content industry, or the YouTube partner ecosystem. No mentors or help of any sort as it had never been done before.

The methodology that worked from Montréal, my hometown, will work from anywhere. There are no geographic prerequisites (unless your content is geo-dependent).

Many large channels were built with institutional backing. The painfully tried and tested methodology I used had to be accessible because I had no other option. That is what makes it transferable.

Today it is said to be the number one career aspiration for kids and the platform has created multi-millionaires and reportedly even a billionaire. Building through the years when “YouTuber” carried stigma rather than prestige took mental strength, resilience and tenacity that the current generation of creators does not have to develop in the same way.

DJ mixes (my YouTube content) generally cannot be monetised through AdSense due to music copyright. I built a 414 million view channel knowing traditional monetisation was structurally unavailable, which was not a significant loss as my focus was on brand building, which worked out well.

In fact, the JaBig channel contributed directly to international DJ touring and paid opportunities that more than made up for the absent AdSense revenue.

The average tenure of a senior employee at most technology companies is under five years. I have been operating on YouTube for twenty. My institutional experience and expertise of the platform predates most of the careers of the people currently making product decisions at it.

Most consultants in this space entered the field within the last five to ten years, after the algorithm-driven era was already established. I built before the algorithm existed, watched it emerge and adapted through every iteration since. The depth of context is structurally unavailable to anyone who arrived later no matter how much research they do.

I have stuck around when big timers of my era moved on, burned out or gave up. The peers I came up with in the 2006 to 2010 window (early MCN signings, the first wave of music channels and the original lifestyle and travel creators) have largely gone dormant or left the platform entirely. I am one of the few from that generation still actively operating.

The good news is that many became mainstream international stars and I remember watching some of their earliest videos when they were just getting started.

Which include third-party institutional validations and recognitions.

These include a Guinness World Record challenge for cycling across Canada in winter, international DJ performances, and photography work for major cycling publications. It has led to coverage and appearances with CNN, BBC, GCN, CBC and others. That level of third-party endorsement is critical; booking agents, procurement officers, marketing directors, and corporate buyers look for such validation before committing to an engagement. The channel has been the engine that opened every door that followed.

This channel has also provided a platform to contribute to the global community by fundraising for international and local charitable organisations and causes of personal importance.

Inquisitive minds will ask how a YouTube channel that streams DJ mixes can assist its owner in breaking a Guinness World Record on a bicycle. Ask me how, and more!, in the strategy session.

Someone in EVERY country on the planet knows of my work because of it. The relationships built through the channel are themselves part of what the channel is worth, beyond any metric on the dashboard.

Anyone can experience a viral moment and many can build to scale once. However, I am deeply grateful for the sustained relevance this channel has maintained across two decades of platform evolution.

The channel did not simply peak and disappear: it continues to operate, generate engagement and be discovered by new generations and individuals to whom the content is brand new… even during the decade (half its existence!) it remained unattended while I cycled the world.

This longetivity is a testament to a durable methodology, but more importantly, it is a reflection of the long-term trust of a global audience. I do not take that longevity for granted.

Both. The intake form asks whether you are using YouTube primarily as a content platform or as a marketing platform for a business. The call is calibrated accordingly. The strategic principles overlap significantly however the metrics that matter and the playbooks that apply differ depending on the goal.

The session is genuinely useful for beginners considering a channel. The decisions you make in the first thirty days determine whether the channel compounds or stalls. Strategic clarity at zero is more valuable than strategic clarity after months of misdirected effort.

That is one of the most useful conversations to have in this session. Some businesses should not be on YouTube. Knowing that early saves significant time and money. Other businesses should be on YouTube urgently. Knowing that early is equally valuable.

No. Strategic advice is judgement applied to your situation. Whether you implement it, how well you implement it, and what the platform does in the meantime are factors I cannot control. What I can guarantee is that you receive twenty years of platform experience focused entirely on your specific situation for sixty minutes.

If technical problems on my end prevent the session from happening, yes. If you book and then change your mind before the session, yes within forty-eight hours of booking. After the session has been delivered, no.

For some clients, yes. We discuss this in the session itself if it is relevant to your situation. The session is the entry point and the only public offer.

Not at all. I am working privately to share my 20-year expertise, experience and perspective with my clients whose interests I serve first and foremost. I have no affiliation with YouTube, Google or Alphabet Inc, its parent company.