Sometime during the course of last night, our YouTube channel got its 300,000th subscriber. At the start of the year, that total was under 100,000; in April 2024, it was just 8,000.
I will be honest; I cannot help but be pleased about this. Returning to YouTube, as I did in April 2024, has proved to be demanding, time-consuming, an enormous learning process, and fairly successful.
In the last 12 months, we've had more than 31 million video views and over 2 million hours of watch time.
256,000 of those subscribers have arrived in that period.
The result is that we have been able to spread our message further and wider, as this volume of traffic is more than three times that of this blog. Audiences are also, to some extent, more engaged on YouTube: the response to our polls suggests this.
This exercise has also enabled me to turn my son, Tom, who is responsible for much of the recording and editing on these videos, into a near full-time employee of Tax Research LLP, which publishes both this blog and the videos. His brother has now joined him to expand our work further.
I have to thank Thomas, in particular, for all he has done to achieve this. Like me, he started out not knowing a great deal about how to make video, and whilst we acknowledge that we still have a lot to learn, we know a great deal more than we did.
I should also thank Jacqueline, because we frequently discuss video topics and edits, and she provides critical feedback on a regular basis that has been incredibly helpful.
What I have learned is that there is an appetite for political and economic change amongst people who can see that neoliberalism has failed. People realise there has to be a different way of doing things, and I hope I am carefully and patiently laying out that alternative so others can share stories about what is possible.
The one thing that I can be sure of is that, so long as I am able, I am going to keep doing this. I enjoy coming up with the content; most of the time, I enjoy recording it, though every now and again, I need a second attempt to get something right, and as we have learned more, the editing processes involved in this exercise have become very much simpler, which has reduced my time involvement.
Data from an organisation called VidIQ suggests that a channel of our size is probably in the top 0.3 per cent of all YouTube channels in the world, and if we narrow that range down to only serious channels, which they define as those that have a reasonable chance of publishing videos that will attract 5,000 views, then we are probably in the top 3 per cent of channels in the world. That's not bad going, but if it keeps growing, we won't be complaining.
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Congratulations. 🙂
300k is a big number. There are only a handful of parties and armies with bigger numbers than that. If the power of that could be merged.
Well done and congratulations to all of you.
Well …. KUTGW …. Keep spreading truth to correct the professional misinformation machine(s).
To put your figures into context, and to allow a little smirk, here is a quote from a recent Private Eye (1661): “The Sun announced it was giving its political editor Harry Cole a promotion to ‘editor-at-large’ and sending him to Washington DC to present a new online video series, hubristically named ‘Harry Cole Saves the West’. […] By far his most popular video so far with just under 40,000 views, was a chat with disgraced ex-ITV presenter Jeremy Kyle …. In which Kyle teased that he might become a politician for Reform UK.”
It seems many of Cole’s videos are getting around only 100 views.
I checked: he’s doing a bit better than you imply, but we do better…which is quite amusing given the differing scales of the budgets involved.
Congratulations to the Murphy team, let’s hope 2026 continues to see the subscription numbers rising further.
Thanks
‘What I have learned is that there is an appetite for political and economic change’
That’s definitely the case!
But it’s so hard to make an impact on people’s mind and opinion! People are like barnacles: encrusted into their ideas, stuck on their social class rock and to move the needle of their opinion, to nudge them and ask them to THINK instead of just react a mammoth task…
So I really admire your persistence on top of the quality of your work. Thank you for your persistence ✨
Thanks
Excellent! Well deserved. Recently YouTube has allowed me to ‘hype’ videos by pressing a star icon, so I have made use of it. I have also learnt to press the ‘like’ button. I enjoyed the Knights today, and the Magic Money Tree – they will make people think, pique curiosity.
Discovered you through You Tube, only recently dropped into your blog, great stuff, we need your message to get out wider and further, keep up the great work . Looking forward to reading more of your blogs
Thanks, Mike.
A quick bit of mental arithmetic…. Roughly 500 new subscribers on average every day since April 2024 and now, I notice, roughly 1000 a day in the last 28 days. Puts you on target for half a mil in 7 months time if that latter rate continues. It would be interesting to back track the exponential growth rate over the past 12 months and then forward project the 1 mil timeline!
I could do the extrapolations bt I also know that success with YouTubes of our sort depends on:
1) Ability to think up new material
2) Ability to package it
3) Events.
We can control (2). I can try at (1) and seem to be getting better. But (3) is entirely beyond our control.
I have a strong feeling that 3 won’t be a problem though!
I suspect you are right.