Not helpful, but the only advice I can give from personal experience is to start a decade ago. The YouTube algorithms punish animation channels hard now.

In a depressed, sarcastic tone: Make boring, unoriginal content, based exclusively on existing IP's, preferably Star Wars, Marvel or DC, keep your videos under 2 minutes in length, and title them all (Character does a thing from recent blockbuster movie) in LEGO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!. Also upload a video at least every two weeks.

Seriously, I wish this was a joke, but any channel with over a thousand subs that makes truly unique and original brickfilms is a holdover from years ago. I'm only over a thousand because I made this. I made it for two reasons: I like NerdCubed, and two prove to myself I could play the YouTube game if I wanted to.

Youtube Channel

I was already at 800(?) I think when I started brickfilming again in 2014. Now I'm at 2k. I gained most of my subscribers from LEGO Universe videos before that. That being said, I have gained 1k subs since then. However, it's taken quite a long time. I haven't "sold out" (well, except a couple times I made IP theme videos but they had original stories OKAY ), I've made primarily original films. So I think it's possible, if you make stuff people enjoy watching, that you can develop an audience. However, probably not enough to ever get monetization back or anything.

As has been said above, the almighty algorithm favors rapid uploads. One per week BARE MINIMUM, three per week BETTER, one per day GOOD, more than one per day BEST. Honestly, nobody can maintain that by themselves, ESPECIALLY not with animation. So, here's my tip to you. Just make whatever you want. Sure, you want to gain a bigger audience, but you can't let that be your focus. When it becomes the focus, you stop enjoying your craft. And if you don't enjoy it, why do it?

YouTube • Website

"Whatever you do, do all to the glory of God." - 1 Corinthians 10:31b

Thanks everyone, a lot of this confirms what I've been thinking about the direction of my channel. I want to upload more frequently but also want to maintain a level of quality and not flood it with too many trivial things. I had thought of doing some original build videos but I don't want them to bury the brickfilms either.

It's crossed my mind several times to make a new channel and make all the boring, unoriginal content Rio mentioned as an experiment

But yeah, I've accepted at this point that subscriber wise I'm not going to get anywhere far, so I've just let my sub count take its course. It's actually worked quite well as a mentality, as instead of looking towards the next milestone that seems to be forever away I just get pleasantly surprised when I see it increase if that makes any sense (probably not ).

Of course, if you happened to make something that got incredibly popular, then your subscriber count will also increase. I don't know if there's anything to take from this, but I recently posted a WW1 brickfilm, and recently that's been doing really well, becoming by far my most popular video. However, the majority of its popularity stems from the fact that shortly after I posted it another brickfilmer with 26K subs also posted a WW1 brickfilm, so YouTube would put my video on the side of his, and a lot of people ended up watching it because of that.

I made a Christian brickfilm.

Ditto on all of that, to be honest, I'd rather have 100 more minutes to spend animating than 100 more subscribers

Thanks for all the encouragement, I agree getting a couple hundred views is definitely worth more than turning something I love in to a chore that I do to try to get subscribers in the futile quest for monetization that will result in a meager stipend.

I was talking to Paul at digitalwizards who I recently did some work with, and one thing he mentioned as far as views on their recent Jurassic Disney World video, was that they had other known youtubers do some voices on their videos, and that brought some traffic over.
Also I remember BrickfilmDay brought a bunch of viewers over, at least for the first installment of Winterlympics, since it was on that playlist. There was a huge boom that day because of the BrickfilmDay event. I didn't pay close attention to the subscriber number, though I don't think it was significant. I did notice that the views dropped substantially even by the very next day. It stayed mostly steady after that, dwindling slightly over the two week project. Which is a shame, because far more people saw that first segment than the final edit with all of the scenes and narration, etc.
Also the Brickfilm Christmas special had a lot of views, and I think that was my peak of gaining subscribers, though I think most were other brickfilmers.
So there may be something in collaborations, though I'm not sure what that trick is....