@codingoblin Channel Audit: 2,380 Subs, 128 Videos, Growth Diagnosis

Here's what jumps out first: 128 videos uploaded, 250,307 total views, 2,380 subscribers. Doing the back-of-envelope, that's roughly 1,955 views per video lifetime and one subscriber for every ~105 views. The subscriber ratio is actually pretty normal for the build-a-business niche — people watch this kind of content for one specific tactic, then bounce. They don't subscribe the way they would for entertainment. The bigger story is the videos-to-subs ratio. 128 uploads for 2,380 subs means each video is bringing in about 18 new subscribers on average, assuming organic growth. That's the math of a channel that's been showing up consistently but hasn't had a breakout video flip the trajectory yet.

The channel description — 'Building real online businesses. Follow along for the wins, the flops, and the real numbers' — is doing work. It positions @codingoblin against the larger guru end of the build-in-public niche, where everything is a win and the screenshots all show £40K months. Promising flops and real numbers is a defensible angle. The risk with that angle is delivery: viewers in this space are skeptical, so any time a video title sounds like it's selling something, the watch-time collapses. Channels that survive here tend to be the ones where the thumbnail and title sound like a friend texting you a screenshot, not a marketer pitching.

On upload mix — 30 of the last 30 uploads are long-form, zero Shorts. That's a clear bet on YouTube's main feed and search rather than the Shorts shelf. For the business and entrepreneurship niche, that bet is defensible. Shorts subscribers convert poorly to long-form watch time, and the algorithm increasingly treats them as separate channels in 2026. The downside is no top-of-funnel pull. Shorts are still the cheapest impressions on the platform right now, and creators who avoid them entirely depend on browse, search, and suggested to do all the new-viewer work. With 128 long-form uploads in the bank, search is probably the realistic growth lever here, not browse.

Honest gap in what I can see from outside: the scrape of recent uploads shows 0 views and blank titles across the last 10 videos. That could mean a few things — the videos are very fresh and haven't accumulated impressions yet, the scraper hit a rendering issue with newer uploads, or the channel recently shifted upload visibility. I can't tell which from out here. What I can say is that if the lifetime average is ~1,955 and the recent average is genuinely near zero, that's a publishing pattern worth checking inside the dashboard — usually it points to thumbnails not earning CTR rather than the content itself going sideways.

The 'building real businesses' space in 2026 is crowded but stratified. The top is dominated by creators with paid acquisition budgets and edit teams. The middle is the build-in-public crowd — Pieter Levels-adjacent, small-bet operators showing dashboard screenshots. The bottom, where 2,380 subs sits, is mostly creators trying to find a content shape that works. Channels that escape this zone usually do it by picking a single repeating format. Could be 'I tried X for 30 days,' could be 'here's exactly how much I made on Y,' could be teardown videos of other businesses. The pattern matters more than the topic, and 128 uploads is enough back catalog to A/B which format pulled best.

If I were sitting with this data and trying to pick one thing to focus on, it would be the title-thumbnail combo on the next 10 uploads. With 128 videos already published, the back catalog is doing whatever it's going to do — what moves the needle now is whether the next batch of titles can pull a 6%+ CTR on suggested. The promise of 'real numbers' in the description is unique and worth pulling forward into titles literally. A title like 'I made £247 last month, here's how' will outperform 'How I grew my online business' every time in this niche, because the specific number is the trust signal that the description is already promising.