A channel running at series pace
- ~5,500videos
- 2.0Msubscribers
- ~1.95bnlifetime views
- ~355,000views per video, lifetime
Public counts for the channel, as of Sep 2026.
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The flood
While the show is on air the channel publishes every night, because tonight's clip is worth almost nothing by Thursday. Speed and judgement: what happened tonight that people will look for tomorrow morning?
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The drought
Transmission ends and there is no show to cut from for months. The channel still has to be there, so the off-season is made rather than scheduled: compilations, original pieces filmed with the islanders, behind the scenes and footage that never went out.
Published advice about YouTube assumes a cadence: one video a week, same day, same slot, build the habit. A channel tied to a series cannot have that habit. And it does not set its own schedule - transmission does, and that one constraint reaches back into how you log footage, what you decide before you sit down, and how much you leave to taste on the night.
The deadline is not a plan you made. It is the broadcast, and it does not care how the edit is going.
This is the part of broadcaster work that transfers least comfortably and matters most. You learn to make the call early, publish it, and be wrong in public occasionally. A perfect clip on Friday for a Tuesday moment is not a clip.
What the channel needed, and what I decided
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What it needed
During transmission, one thing: whatever everybody was talking about that morning, available while they were still talking about it. Out of series, a reason to exist at all.
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What I decided
Publish to the moment, not to the episode. Clip length set by the length of the moment, titles written the way somebody would actually ask for it out loud, live inside the window while they were still looking for it.
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What went out
Nightly through the run, at a volume where the defaults mattered more than any individual call - and, in the quiet months, work on the catalogue rather than nothing at all.
- 00:00Straight into the room. No build-up. Last night already happened and everybody knows it.
- 00:04The line the argument turns on, before any reaction to it.
- 00:09Hold the reaction. The face is the story; cutting away from it is the common mistake.
- 00:14Second beat lands before the first has finished paying off.
- 00:20Out on the turn. Leave while it is still moving, not when it resolves.
A schematic of how a clip on this channel opens, not a reading off any particular video.
Where the subscribers came from
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Love Island's channel went from around 19,000 subscribers to over 170,000 while I was running it.
I am not going to pretend I did that on my own. Love Island became a cultural phenomenon across that stretch, and a hit format with a national broadcaster behind it does most of the work in a number that size. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
What I did was the editing, the titles and packaging, and the publishing. The show made people want the clip; the channel had to actually have it - at the right length, titled the way somebody would really ask for it, live in the window when they were looking. That is a genuine job, and not the same job as making a show a hit.
I ran that channel in partnership with ITV. Both numbers are figures YouTube itself displayed on the channel's own page, preserved by the Internet Archive.
What the audience actually clicks
That last number, the views per video at the top of this page, is a lifetime average across the whole catalogue, most of which has nothing to do with me. Of the ITV channels I ran that published year after year, it is still the highest ratio, by more than double the next one.
A number that size describes an audience turning up for a moment, not for a programme. Nobody searches YouTube for an episode of Love Island. They search for the thing that happened: a recoupling, an argument, one line in the beach hut on the way past.
So the winning clip is exactly as long as the moment, titled with the moment rather than an episode number. The failure mode is a 5-minute upload with 30 seconds of moment inside it.
The unit of publishing is not the episode. It is the moment - and the edit's only real job is finding where the moment starts.
A moment travels to people who do not watch the show. An episode does not.
The channel
Love Island on YouTube - the official ITV channel, and the one I ran. It is still publishing; "These CRAZY Casa Amor moments were pure CHAOS | Love Island 2026" is one of the channel's own uploads and gives you the current shape of the feed.
Linked as context, not as a portfolio. That clip is the channel's own upload and is nothing to do with me - I am not claiming any individual video on this channel as my cut.
What I would do differently now
2 things, and I would decide both of them earlier now.
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Openings
A lot of what went out began with a beat of setup the title had already given the viewer. On a channel where the click was driven by a moment people half knew about, that beat was pure cost. Start on the turn. Confusion is recoverable; boredom is not.
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The off-season
I treated the quiet months as a gap between series. They are the only part of the year when nothing is urgent, which is what makes them the only time the catalogue can be fixed - titles, playlists, the videos people still arrive on months later.
The next channel I ran taught me the second one properly, because there the off-season is 11 months long - that argument is the whole of the I'm A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! page.
The craft side is what I do now as Senior Video Editor @ Simon Squibb: same discipline, one video at a time instead of 40 a week. There is more about the route between them.