What a channel audit should contain
An audit is a scored document with an order of work at the end, and half of what it scores is what you already do well.
Somebody has offered to look at your channel and tell you what is wrong with it. Reasonable question in return: what is going to arrive, and how would you know whether it was any good?
That question has an answer, and it is the same whether the audit is done by a studio, a freelancer or by you on a Sunday afternoon with a spreadsheet. The shape does not change. What changes is who has the time.
What is an audit for?
To turn a vague dissatisfaction into an ordered list of decisions.
Before one, the feeling is that the channel is not working and could be better in about nine ways at once. That state produces either paralysis or a burst of activity aimed at whichever fault was mentioned most recently, and neither is progress.
After a good one, you should have a small number of things to change, in an order, with a reason attached to each. That is the entire deliverable. Everything else in the document is evidence for it.
What should actually be in one?
Topics scored separately from execution
Two different questions get muddled constantly. Are you making the right things, and are the things you make any good? A channel can be excellent at both, weak at both, or, most usefully, strong at one and weak at the other, and the fix is completely different in each case.
So the topics get scored on their own. What you cover, how it maps to what people are actually looking for, whether the subjects repeat in a way anybody could follow. Then the sub-topics underneath, because a channel that reads as scattered is often three good series filmed in a random order.
The craft, split into its parts
Picture, sound, pacing, packaging, the first fifteen seconds, whether the video delivers what its title promised. Split, because a single overall mark is useless. Sound at four and picture at eight tells you where the afternoon goes. An average of six tells you nothing at all.
The good scores, explained
This is the part that usually goes missing and it is the part that changes behaviour. When something scores well, the document has to say why, in specific terms, because that is the thing you must not accidentally stop doing.
Reading that your intros work is pleasant and useless. Reading that your intros work because you start on the thing being made rather than on your own name is a rule you can apply to every video from now on, including ones nobody has audited.
An order of work
Three or four items, ranked, with what each one costs in effort rather than in money. An audit ending with fourteen recommendations is avoiding the harder job of deciding which two matter.
Why does an audit have to say what is working?
Because a list of faults is not actionable, and because knowing your own strengths is the only efficient way to plan.
Faults tell you to stop doing things. Strengths tell you what to do more of, which is a far cheaper instruction to follow. The person who learns that their explanations land and their openings do not can rebuild an opening in a fortnight. The person handed twelve faults rebuilds nothing, because there is no starting point in a list of complaints.
There is a second reason, less comfortable. A document made entirely of problems is what you produce when the purpose is to make somebody feel they need help. One that names what is already working is harder to fake and impossible to produce without watching the videos.
How do you run a rough one on your own channel?
An afternoon, ten videos, no tools beyond a spreadsheet.
One row per video. Columns for topic, sub-topic, what the title promised, whether the video delivered it, and a mark out of ten each for picture, sound, pacing and packaging. Fill it in honestly and quickly, because your first instinct on your own work is usually right and your second is usually a defence of it.
Then two passes over the finished sheet. First, find the columns where your marks are consistently low. That is your craft problem and it is the same problem in every video, which is good news, because it means one habit fixes ten videos. Second, find the rows where your marks are high and look at what those videos have in common. Subject, format, length, who you were talking to. That pattern is worth more than the fault list, and it is the half people skip.
Finish by writing three sentences: what to keep doing, what to change next, what to stop. If you cannot get it down to three, you have not finished the audit, you have just made notes.
How can you tell an audit from a sales document?
Read the recommendations and ask who does them.
An audit will contain things you can do alone this week, things you could do with help, and at least one thing the person writing it does not sell. If every recommendation happens to be a service on their website, the document is a proposal that has been formatted like an assessment.
The other tell is specificity. An audit that could be sent to any channel in your category was written before your channel was watched. It will use your name, and it will mention nothing that only happens in your videos.
In this studio the audit scores main topics and sub-topics out of ten, and the good scores get the same explanation as the bad ones, which is also why nobody here quotes for work without looking at the channel first. The looking is free either way.
Run the spreadsheet version yourself before you accept anybody's offer, including this one. Twenty minutes into your own ten videos you will know which questions are worth asking, and an audit you can interrogate is worth several you cannot.
Keep reading
This is a service, and the method is written down.
Everything above came out of doing the work rather than writing about it. If you want the method instead of the story, it runs in order on one page.
Start with a free audit
Tell us where your content is now. We will come back with what we would change and what result to expect.
A person reads the channel and writes the audit by hand: a considered read typically takes three working days. That is the usual shape, not a promised turnaround. We use these details only to reply to you: no lists, no lurking.
What you will get
A fit snapshot: where your channel stands, and whether we are a match.
Two to three opportunities: specific, prioritised, yours to keep.
A recommended next step, even if that step is not us.
The audit is free and commits you to nothing: nobody follows up with a call you did not ask for.