And then I had a Million Views

Hey loves!

When I returned to YouTube after losing Mümi, I made a video about a typical day in my life. I did not expect it to get as many views as my other videos normally do since I had been away from YouTube for a few weeks. Instead, it got hundreds of thousands of views and my channel passed over one million views across all its videos.

I had videos get a few ten thousand views, but never anything in the hundreds of thousands. On the one hand, I was so proud of having so many views. It was a great comeback and a big push for my self-confidence. I was over the moon when the video hit one hundred thousand views and I remember just being so grateful for everybody who clicked on the video.

But when your videos start receiving attention, they also attract the attention of those who will hit the dislike button. since my channel is usually for a relatively small online community, I never had to deal with many hate comments. But when this video blew up a little, I read a lot of hate comments. Here are a few of the comments I read over the past few days:

I have never called any of my subscribers any of the above. I come from a school where people from different ethnic and economic backgrounds studied together and I would never judge someone for the cards life gave them. If you are insulted by the fact that I work hard for my degree on a daily basis, then that is something you need to work on - not me.

I do not know why it is constantly implied that a man must be behind a woman's success. The person who always had my back throughout my childhood was not a man - it was (and still is) my full-time-working single mother. And she taught me to count on myself to get somewhere and not to wait for a man to take me there. So please do not imply that my success must be dependent on the success of a man in my life.

This comment was left under my 'Day in the Life' video and I am not sure if the person actually saw the video - it did show exactly what the title said. Maybe this is not the type of schedule they expected, but it is the way I choose to live my life.

Well, my teachers would disagree.

I wrote a much longer response to this comment on Twitter, but I just wanted to say one thing: the comment implies that my looks "will help [me] a lot in the future" - no they will not. I am not planning to wait around to impress someone who will take care of me. I am not going to law school for that. And I did not get this far because of my looks - I got this far because I worked for it.

I try my best not to let these comments get to me, but I would be lying if I said that some of them did not hurt a little. YouTube tries to filter as many of them out as it can, but some fool the algorithm and then you end up seeing them. It can hurt to have people come at you like that. But it has also made me realise how much self-confidence YouTube has given me. All the love you all have shown me on my channel over the past years has made me believe a lot more in myself than I did before. Some of these comments hurt in the beginning, but I do not think about them for long and I am so grateful for that.

So while I am incredibly grateful for all the views on this one video, I am also incredibly grateful that my channel usually consists of a small community which engages with my videos in a respectful way. I am by no means saying that I am not grateful for the views, but it has taught me that it is not always as amazing as it looks when influencers start getting views.

Thank you for supporting my channel - it means a lot to me! And the next time you are leaving a comment under a video, ask yourself how you would feel reading that comment as a creator.

If you would like to contact me, you can send me a message here.

Lots of Love,

Elena