90 Days to Achieve Monetization: Implementing Design Thinking in a YouTube Channel

Abstract

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) plays an important role in entrepreneurship. The trend of using social media, especially YouTube (YT) as a source of information, is getting higher. This is in line with the number of people accessing the media. The research on YT that already exists is only related to the study of existing channels, where the researcher is not a YouTuber so that the research cannot explain the development of the channel chronologically. The YT development chronology can only be seen if the researcher is the owner of the YT account or someone else who has access to the YT Studio features. This article will explain the experience of experimenting using YT for 90 days 1 January - 31 March 2022. The experiment aims to answer three questions, namely: (1) Is it possible to start YT Channel (YTC) towards monetization with small capital? (2) Does the application of the Design Thinking method in the content creation process affect the development of YTC? (3) Is YTC's viewer development related to trending topics? To answer this question, the research used the Analytics feature on YT Studio and Google Trends (GT). The result is that building YTC can be started without high skill / advanced tools, big capital, and a famous figure. In addition, the DT method and understanding trending topics are also proven to increase viewers. This research is expected to contribute to the knowledge that YTC can be used as a tool in future research, especially analyzing audience behavior. In addition, for entrepreneurship, this research is expected to provide an overview of how to start a YTC so that they can get revenue from it.