Spending 200 hours per video (with a fulltime job) and getting 50 views. how do you grow doing research and graphics heavy content without dumbing it down?

I make long-form political analysis videos on India. no team, no budget, just me sitting with 40 tabs open for weeks trying to get every fact right before I write a single line of script. each video takes me somewhere around 150-200 hours between research, scripting, VO, and edit.

and honestly? it's getting kind of demoralizing.

my last video (also my first video) before this one got like 50 views. and half of those were friends I personally sent it to. the thing is, impression CTR was around 10% which is supposedly decent, meaning the people who saw the thumbnail actually clicked. youtube just... didn't show it to anyone. that's the part that stings. it's not that people saw it and didn't care. they never even got the chance to see it.

you spend weeks on something, mass check every claim, rewrite the script four times, record the VO and the video at 2am because that's when your house is quiet, spend dozens of hours creating motion graphics and editing and then the algorithm decides 200 people is enough. cool.

if you look at my profile you'll see I've been posting this on r/chennai and r/tamilnadu and vijay fan subs too. yeah. that's where I'm at. manually posting on subreddits and DMing instagram fan pages because the algorithm won't show it to anyone. I know how that looks but I genuinely don't know what else to do.

anyway I'm not here to just rant. I just put out a new one on how Vijay actually won Tamil Nadu and I think it's the best thing I've made so far. everyone's doing the "prashant kishor genius" take or the "tamil nadu loves film stars" take and I think both are lazy. I go into the 15 year ground machine vijay built through VMI, how both DMK and AIADMK blew up their own positions at the same time, why kishor's playbook worked here but flopped in bihar with his own party. there's actual structure to this win that nobody's really talking about.

would genuinely appreciate two things:

1. honest feedback on the video — don't be nice, be useful

2. if you've managed to grow a channel doing research-heavy stuff without turning it into clickbait garbage, how did you do it? because I refuse to dumb this down but I also can't keep making stuff for 50 people forever

not dropping a link because sub rules, but the channel's in my profile. or just ask in the comments and I'll DM it.