10,000 Subscribers and ¥166,000 a Month on 1–2 Uploads per Month: Real Data From a Gadget YouTube Channel That Switched to "Quality Over Quantity"

Here is a counterexample to the axiom that “you must upload daily to earn on YouTube” — published with actual revenue figures. A gadget channel posting only 1–2 videos a month earned ¥165,945 in ad revenue at 10,000 subscribers. Because this site also covers a channel earning ¥30,000/month in ads at the same subscriber count, we can concretely verify, by setting the two cases side by side, just how much the contents of the “10K” milestone can vary.

The Published Numbers

Two Years of Stagnation, and How It Broke

Kurashiki Log started the gadget and lifestyle channel in February 2023. He initially kept a weekly cadence, but growth stalled: 2,000 subscribers in year one, 4,000 in year two. The turning point was the pivot to fewer uploads and higher quality per video, from there, the channel reached 10,000 subscribers in six months. He did not go full-time. He continues to run it as a side project.

The pivot was more than a reallocation of hours. He restructured the videos themselves, abandoning the standard conclusion-first format for a non-standard “example → example → example → conclusion” arc, aiming for the “pleasure of taking the long way around.” Rather than withholding the conclusion to farm watch time, the accumulation of examples is itself designed to be the attraction.

The production process is disclosed too: per video, 1–2 weeks of research, 1–3 days of scripting, 3 days to a week of editing. The one-video-per-month pace is not laziness but the inevitable result of fitting this process into a side project’s disposable hours. Total uploads including deletions come to about 74, behind the 64 public videos lie roughly 10 withdrawn trial-and-error attempts, a detail worth noticing.

Subscriber Count and Revenue Have “No Relationship At All”

His most important claim is this: “Subscriber count and revenue have no relationship at all. Revenue is determined by recent views × upload count × niche CPM.” He also describes YouTube as a “game of noticing”. A contest of whether you can diagnose why you’re not growing and swap out the right variable.

Decompose the three-factor formula and each factor’s nature differs. “Recent views” is a variable moved by video quality and recommendation fit. “Upload count” is a variable set by hours invested. “Niche CPM” is a constant essentially fixed at entry. His operation maps cleanly onto the formula: deliberately cap uploads at 1–2 per month, pour everything saved into the views variable, and build on a high-CPM niche as the foundation. That subscriber count appears nowhere in this formula is the basis for his flat assertion of “no relationship at all.”

The claim checks out against another case. Versus a web-development channel earning ¥30,000/month in ads at 10K subscribers, this case earns ¥166,000, about 5x. What creates the gap is recent video views: subscribers are past accumulation, revenue is a function of present views, and channels should be evaluated on the last 90 days of views, not subscriber count. A conclusion made concrete by juxtaposing the two cases.

Note that he frames the ¥166,000 itself as “small.” Even after taking two and a half years to reach 10,000 subscribers, a milestone that looks distant before you start, the ad revenue alone doesn’t fully support a living. The gap between “how hard 10K is to reach” and “how little that milestone guarantees” is exactly what the source article conveys as lived experience, and it stands as a quiet rebuttal of making subscriber count the goal at all.

Why One Video a Month Can Grow: the Distribution Logic

The “upload daily” axiom is not mandatory on today’s recommendation-driven YouTube. YouTube’s distribution decides recommendations by per-video watch retention and click-through rate, not loyalty to the channel, so even at 1–2 uploads a month, if each video’s metrics are strong, the algorithm keeps distributing it. The total of 64 videos in 2.5 years is less than two months’ output for a daily uploader, yet it reached ¥166,000/month. For side-project creators, the perceived entry barrier of “I can’t produce volume, so it’s hopeless” has actually fallen considerably.

If anything, the constraint of only one video a month forced ruthless selection of ideas and guaranteed per-video quality, a case of the constraint creating the strategy. Where many people misdiagnose stagnation as “not enough volume” and grind themselves down, the process of switching the variable to “quality” and breaking through is the YouTube version of MENTA’s specialization pivot.

Also note: on top of the ¥166,000 in ad revenue, the gadget niche is one where affiliate links (product links in the description) can be a second revenue axis, and he does hold non-ad revenue separately. That niche selection should weigh both “ad CPM” and “connection to product sales” is another practical takeaway from this case.

Before Taking These Numbers at Face Value

Some reservations. ¥165,945 is a single month (September 2025), ads only, and since, per his own argument, revenue tracks recent views, it drops in the valleys between hits. A 1–2 uploads/month setup means each video’s success or failure lands directly on the month’s results. Diversification across many uploads is unavailable. The numbers must be understood together with their volatility, not their level alone.

The other reservation is the time axis. The first half of this success story is two years of stagnation, 2,000 in year one, 4,000 in year two. The quality pivot worked only after those two years had built basic conditioning in planning, filming, and editing, plus enough trial and error to withdraw about 10 videos. There is no guarantee that “one high-quality video a month” traces the same curve from month one. The absolute revenue also depends on the niche’s ad CPM. He himself counts “niche CPM” among the three factors.

Conditions for Reproducing This

What generalizes: the strategy of competing on per-video metrics rather than upload frequency. The diagnostic discipline of not jumping to “insufficient volume” as the explanation for stagnation. And the idea of converting a side project’s constraints directly into a quality-concentration design. Specific techniques like the non-standard structure (example → example → example → conclusion) can also be referenced.

What doesn’t generalize: the niche CPM (premised on gadget/lifestyle ad rates and product-sales connections), the hard-to-quantify variable of planning instincts that get videos onto the recommendation feed, and the endurance conditions to hold on through two years without results as a side project. “One video a month is enough” does not mean “anyone gets there on one video a month”, whether you can invest 1–2 weeks of research per video is the real dividing line.

Related Cases

• The web-development YouTube channel — same 10K subscribers, ¥30,000 in ads + ¥100,000 in client work
• A YouTube channel sale on RaccoonM&A — what channels are worth as assets