If you want to develop an audience who consumes your content on a regular basis, your website, YouTube channel, or Facebook Page can’t just be about providing pieces of knowledge. This becomes clear when you study Bob Ross’ painting videos. The vast majority of his audience never painted; they just liked watching him paint. Likewise, a cooking show too has to have value by itself even if the audience never cooks. Regardless of the type of content, there has to be some redeeming quality to the act of reading or watching it.
“Cooking with Dog” has over a million subscribers. I’m pretty sure the vast majority of those subscribers have never cooked anything they saw in the videos. Those videos are just funny to watch. I think this is also true with many popular podcast producers and radio show hosts; the quality of their voice might be a more significant factor in their popularity than what they are saying.
If people want to know how to cook gnocchi, for instance, they would search “gnocchi” on YouTube. Once they learn what they need to know, they would discard it. They wouldn’t care about the other videos you might have in your channel. When people search anything on the Web, it’s about the knowledge they seek. They are not looking to be a regular audience unless the content has something more than just the piece of knowledge they were looking for.
It’s actually worse than that. Searchers have specific goals they want to achieve. Searching is just a step in that process, so even if your website has more than just the answers they seek, they are not in a mental state to check out anything else you have; they need to go back to completing their goals. You are catching them at the wrong time.
If you want to make money from advertising, you would need to build an audience. You cannot just be a destination for search results. Searchers are not loyal. They just get what they want and leave. I think this is why social networking sites are better platforms to promote content.
