I have watched quite a few of Treemonkey videos and another guy working with him on his channel redbull 661 iirc. Frankly , I’m surprised he has as few subscribers as he does vs what he given to the community in terms of knowledges thru the years. He should have waaaaay more than 3000 subs imho! Then again utube seems to favor flashy graphics / video presentation over actual talent and skills. In other words actual skill apparently does not = subscribers. You see evidence of this with some new guys to the scene having 6x the subscribers but 1/10th the knowledge and skill. A flashy cookie cut for 30sec with music playing and then 20mins of staring at a moon face rambling on and on and on regurgitating info that most know already. No rhymes or reason - just how it is!
Tree monkey's subscriber problem is just that most people now days have extremely short attention spans. (Think covid, epstein, the list goes on.)
Tree monkey imparts actual knowledge in his videos, but you have to watch the whole video if you want to see/hear it. Most people are not willing to sit there for an hour watching a guy talk through a job. We are. But we're chainsaw nerds, lol. Most are not.
Like you say, the average youtube consumer wants a 30-60 second short, that's loud and flashy, and its on to the next one. Thank tiktok for that one. But it's by design. Big tech has spent more money on researching the optimal time to keep people engaged on their phones than all of our chainsaw collections put together.
Long range shooting is another passion of mine. Another youtube channel that really suffers from a lack of subs but shouldn't, is a guys channel called MountainsMulletsMerica. Think of him as the tree monkey of the precision rifle world. Same problem. Average video is 30-45 minutes long, and people just won't hang around for it. Even though it is some of the best shooting content on youtube.
I don't run a youtube channel, so I dare not tell tree monkey what to do. But, and there it is, from what I've seen, the channels that keep their "long form" videos under 30 minutes seem to get better traffic.
The problem for tree monkey there is, he'll grind on something for 5-10 minutes, then drop some knowledge bombs of some of the things he's learned in his lifetime of being a professional logger, saw dealer and porter. Which again, is fine for us saw nerds, but not your average social media consumer.