I wonder about this as well at times...
I have found a handful of smaller channels, but it's pretty difficult...
The thing is I see this from both sides of the fence (I have a small youtube channel), and it's equally frustrating on both sides.
You look at the youtube home page and what you tend to see is all 'large' channels. Even suggestions for 'stuff you may like' is dominated by 10,000+ subscriber channels, if not the real big 100,000-1,000,000+ channels...
Good luck finding channels with 5 subs, or 20... Or even 150...
I saw this with my own stuff...
I have done a search a few times for videos from my most recent series.
It's quite interesting. Search for my youtube username and it's just me you find. That's also true if you google that name. So that's helpful.
But on the other hand, search the title of the game I played, and my channel will be swamped out by bigger ones. Typically, you can find it on anything from page 5-12 of the results... With it depending somewhat on the success of any given video...
Ironically, if you limit the search to the last week, you'd often find just me, which shows what I've been doing isn't that common, but still...
And then I've seen other small channels, and they just don't seem to grow AT ALL...
It makes so little sense. I get about 20-40 views per video, typically, after about a month. I know one person (who ironically tried to hijack a thread I made about getting views on youtube) who... Even having done that, typically has no views at all for their videos. (if they're lucky they'll have 3)...
And I don't really know why that is...
Where do MY views come from? Well it's hard to say. I seem to just get some at random, which is always interesting.
It seems some people follow the trail of my many thousands of youtube comments (almost none of which mention the existence of my channel, but they do link to it... So... >_>)
Facebook got me a few of my friends watching...
Putting my videos on my escapist profile gets me about 10-15% of my views, although that isn't so helpful because the people that do check that rarely watch any of my videos for more than about 20 seconds...
(I guess they don't really appeal to the crowd around here...)
The thing is, the trouble I'm having getting viewers also led me to wonder why there isn't a better established method for getting people to check out 'small' channels...
Like, say, a search that only includes channels with less than 1000 subscribers? Or 100? How about a system that heavily promotes any videos with less than 1000 views?
I mean, when nobody's watched a video, who can even say if it's good or bad?
After say 1000 views, surely you have a better estimate of the actual quality of the video, and where it should really fit in search results...
I actually considered that maybe a website dedicated just to promoting 'new' channels should be made. Which has it's own search system that excludes larger channels from the results, giving smaller channels a chance to find an audience, and people looking for something new a way to find it other than just running into the same old huge channels everyone else keeps finding over and over.
(and make the search results in some modes semi-random, so you are not always getting the same things suggested, but rather a variety of them over time.)
I'd do it, but I lack the technical expertise, and the financial resources necessary to run and maintain such a service.
Besides which, even if I could create such a service, I'd just end up creating a situation where I'd need to promote the website that provides it...
If no-one knows such a website exists, it does nothing to help the situation at all...
Anyway, I definitely agree we could do with a much better system for finding new channels...
