Rebuilding ACL's YouTube channel
Role: Multimedia Manager and Content Producer
Owned: channel strategy, video creation, packaging, publishing, monetization
Owned:
Role:
Period: 2024 to present
Period:
I took over the American Cornhole League's YouTube channel in spring 2024. Since then the channel has gone from 15,000 subscribers to 54,000, and monthly ad revenue has gone from a few hundred dollars to just over $7,000.
ACL had years of tournament footage on YouTube and almost nothing to show for it. The archive was deep. Full match broadcasts, event coverage, highlight packages going back seasons. But uploads were inconsistent, titles were internal shorthand that nobody outside the sport would search for, and the channel earned about what you would expect from a library nobody was being pointed toward.
What I inherited
The revenue problem was not a traffic problem
When I actually went through the back catalog, a large share of our videos were carrying copyright claims. Music beds inside old broadcasts, most of them cleared for television but not for YouTube. Every claimed video was routing its ad revenue somewhere else. We were producing content, getting views, and collecting nothing on a meaningful chunk of it.
Nobody had assigned me this. I found it while auditing the library for something unrelated.
So I worked through the claims one at a time, identified which tracks were causing them, and rebuilt our audio library from scratch with music we actually had rights to. Then I went back and replaced the audio in the affected videos. That single fix accounts for the first jump you see in the chart.
Packaging, made repeatable
Fixing revenue got us back to even. Growth came from packaging.
I built a system for how every ACL video goes out. Titles are written for how people actually search for cornhole, not for how we refer to events internally. Descriptions follow a consistent structure with timestamps. Thumbnails are produced programmatically, in Photoshop, so a 40 video event week looks like it came from one place instead of forty.
ad revenue somewhere else. We were producing content, getting views, and collecting nothing on a meaningful chunk of it.
Nobody had assigned me this. I found it while auditing the library for something unrelated. So I worked through the claims one at a time, identified which tracks were causing them, and rebuilt our audio library from scratch with music we actually had rights to. Then I went back and replaced the audio in the affected videos. That single fix accounts for the first jump you see in the chart.
unrelated. So I worked through the claims one at a time, identified which tracks were causing them, and rebuilt our audio library from scratch with music we actually had rights to. Then I went back and replaced the audio in the affected videos. That single fix accounts for the first jump you see in the chart.
FIG. 1 - ACL's Youtube Revenue from 2024 to 2026, with a note where I take over
FIG. 2 - 12 ACL's Youtube Thumbnails
Cutting for the platform, not from it
Full matches run long. Shorts and vertical clips are where new viewers find a sport they have never watched.
I started pulling short form directly out of the broadcast workflow rather than treating it as a separate job at the end. Clean shots, clear stakes, no context required. One of them crossed 13 million views.
That is the part people underestimate. A cornhole shot is a perfect vertical video. It is short, the outcome is obvious, and you do not need to know a single player's name to understand what just happened.
views
I took over the American Cornhole League's YouTube channel in spring 2024. Since then the channel has gone from 15,000 subscribers to 54,000, and monthly ad revenue has gone from a few hundred dollars to just over $7,000.
ACL had years of tournament footage on YouTube and almost nothing to show for it. The archive was deep. Full match broadcasts, event coverage, highlight packages going back seasons. But uploads were inconsistent, titles were internal shorthand that nobody outside the sport would search for, and the channel earned about what you would expect from a library nobody was being pointed toward.
When I actually went through the back catalog, a large share of our videos were carrying copyright claims. Music beds inside old broadcasts, most of them cleared for television but not for YouTube. Every claimed video was routing its ad revenue somewhere else. We were producing content, getting views, and collecting nothing on a meaningful chunk of it.
Nobody had assigned me this. I found it while auditing the library for something unrelated.
So I worked through the claims one at a time, identified which tracks were causing them, and rebuilt our audio library from scratch with music we actually had rights to. Then I went back and replaced the audio in the affected videos.
That single fix accounts for the first jump you see in the chart.
Fixing revenue got us back to even. Growth came from packaging.
I built a system for how every ACL video goes out. Titles are written for how people actually search for cornhole, not for how we refer to events internally. Descriptions follow a consistent structure with timestamps. Thumbnails are produced programmatically, in Photoshop, so a 40 video event week looks like it came from one place instead of forty.
Full matches run long. Shorts and vertical clips are where new viewers find a sport they have never watched.
I started pulling short form directly out of the broadcast workflow rather than treating it as a separate job at the end. Clean shots, clear stakes, no context required. One of them crossed 13 million views.
That is the part people underestimate. A cornhole shot is a perfect vertical video. It is short, the outcome is obvious, and you do not need to know a single player's name to understand what just happened.