£0 budget. 13.3 million views. Building Silent Hillside by earning attention, not buying it

How I turned an independent Silent Hill project into a global niche media brand by treating audience behaviour as the creative brief.

At a glance

• Role: Founder, Creative Director, brand lead, audience strategist and producer

• Timeframe: August 2022 to August 2026

• Budget: £0 marketing budget

• Scale: More than 13.3 million lifetime views, approximately 1.3 million watch hours and more than 45,000 subscribers

• Platform signal: 144.3 million YouTube impressions, with 67.3% generated through YouTube recommending the content

No budget means there is nowhere for weak judgement to hide

Silent Hillside began as a weekend project around a game series I already appreciated. There was no brief, audience, production team or paid distribution. I created the name, brand, content model and publishing operation from scratch.

The obvious challenge was reach. The more important one was relevance. Without media spend, I could not compensate for vague targeting by placing more content in front of more people. Every view had to be earned through usefulness, curiosity, search behaviour, recommendation or community participation.

That reframed the creative problem. The question was not simply what Silent Hill content I could make, but which parts of the audience were already looking for something and where there was room to give them something they were not getting elsewhere.

Strategy and execution shared the same feedback loop

I owned the creative direction, brand identity, audience strategy, editorial model and publishing decisions. I also researched, wrote, narrated, edited and packaged the content, managed Community activity and reviewed analytics.

Doing everything myself was not the strategic point. The advantage was the short distance between observation and decision. I could see behaviour change, adjust the framing, test another format and learn from the result quickly.

The project became a live environment for developing creative judgement around audience attention.

Different formats should perform different jobs

I deliberately tested gameplay, retrospectives, lore, Shorts, Community posts and investigations rather than deciding in advance what the audience wanted.

The useful distinction was not which format produced the most views. Full-game playthroughs became strong search and watch-time assets. Shorts and Community activity supported discovery and subscriber growth. Lore created a persistent archive. Investigation-led videos generated participation in the question itself.

That became the system. Reach, discovery, watch time, subscription and conversation were different behaviours, so I stopped asking one format to do all of them.

YouTube Search represented approximately 28.4% of traffic, Browse features 32.4%, Shorts 19.8% and Suggested videos 8.7%. Silent Hillside was growing through both deliberate search and algorithmic discovery.

Finding the niche inside the niche

Silent Hill already has a highly engaged audience. The opportunity was to identify smaller behavioural niches within it. Some viewers wanted complete-game archives, others wanted nostalgia, character histories, mysteries or technical detail. The same person could move between those behaviours depending on what they wanted at that moment.

Understanding those differences gave me permission to make stranger creative choices because they were grounded in recognisable audience appetite, not novelty for its own sake.

The clearest example was a video built around one deliberately trivial question: how did Eddie order a pizza in Silent Hill 2?

I treated the detail with the investigative seriousness usually reserved for lore and symbolism. The idea sat between two established audience behaviours: detailed Silent Hill analysis and enjoyment of the absurdly mundane details surrounding the series.

The video generated approximately 169,000 views. Its analytics recorded approximately 2.3 million impressions, with 88.6% coming from YouTube recommending the content. In the first 24 hours it reached approximately 26,500 unique viewers and generated more than 500 subscribers.

People then extended the idea themselves through memes, comments and community posts elsewhere. The audience did not simply consume the premise. They carried it.

Community became part of the creative process

I increasingly used YouTube Community as a low-cost research surface rather than simply a promotional channel. Preference and judgement-based questions repeatedly outperformed obscure lore prompts, while recognisable subjects such as Lisa Garland, Nurses, Pyramid Head and the fog generated recurring discussion.

That helped me see what people were emotionally invested in before committing to larger pieces of content. The audience informed the editorial environment without dictating it. The objective was to find the overlap between existing appetite and a perspective that felt specifically Silent Hillside.

That perspective became a form of creative governance. Searchable utility content should make its usefulness obvious. An investigation should create curiosity. A Short should earn attention immediately. Consistency came from judgement, not forcing every piece into the same template.

Building authority without losing personality

As Silent Hillside became more established, I developed contact with Konami and used publisher responses in investigation-led content where appropriate. I also brought performers from the original games into relevant character and lore videos.

These were not endorsements added for status. They made the work more useful and entertaining for an audience that already cared deeply about the source material. Silent Hillside was moving from commenting on the community to bringing parts of that community into the work.

By August 2026, the channel had generated more than 13.3 million lifetime views, approximately 1.3 million hours of watch time and more than 45,000 subscribers. The detailed analytics record 13,183,835 views, 1,307,450 watch hours and 45,443 subscribers across the reporting view, with more than 55,000 gross subscribers gained.

What changed

By approximately 199 public uploads, Silent Hillside had become a searchable archive, entertainment brand and recurring community touchpoint. Older content continued to compound through search, while Shorts, investigations and Community activity created different routes into the same brand.

The project changed how I think about budget and creative leadership. Money can increase distribution, but it cannot correct weak audience understanding indefinitely. With £0 to spend, targeting had to become more precise and the creative proposition had to earn its own momentum.

The better I understood the audience, the more distinctive the work could become.

Reach was part of the system, not the business case

Impressions are often dismissed as a vanity metric. On their own, that is fair. But treating 146.7 million organic impressions as the final outcome completely misses it's true value.

With no paid media, Silent Hillside generated 13.8 million views, 1.37 million hours of watch time, 46,138 subscribers and £20,342 in estimated YouTube revenue. More importantly, the data showed that different impressions were doing different jobs.

Shorts produced around half of all total views, but only 2.7% of revenue. Full-game playthroughs produced roughly 30% of views while accounting for 71% of watch time and 63% of revenue. Editorial and analytical videos converted viewers into subscribers at around 6.25 per 1,000 views, more than three times the rate of the full-game content.

That changed how I thought about reach. Impressions were valuable because they showed where the content was being surfaced and favoured by YouTube’s recommendation systems in response to audience behaviour. They became an early signal of what was gaining traction, what needed adapting and where to accelerate. Used properly, that information helped shape the next creative decision, generate more engagement and, ultimately, more revenue.

The commercial value also continued long after publication. Two full-game videos released in 2023 generated approximately £2,313 in the first nine months of 2026 alone, including during periods when I wasn't even checking the channel. By then, I had built a self-sustaining content system: an accumulating catalogue that continued attracting viewers, subscribers and revenue without depending on constant new output.

Community became another part of that system. Across 416 posts, YouTube recorded 9.9 million impressions, 167,127 likes and 3.18 million responses. Rather than using the Community tab simply to promote uploads, I used questions and polls to understand what people cared about, test interests and maintain a relationship between major pieces of content.

None of this means gaming behaviour can simply be transplanted into another category, although I have seen people rage-quit both Dark Souls and a boardroom. Different audiences bring different motivations, levels of intent and expectations around trust. What transfers is the method. Understand the behaviour, work out what earns attention, give each format a clear job, then use the response to adapt or accelerate. The audience and industry may change but the discipline of understanding what resonates, and being creative with that knowledge, does not.