From ThuisbatterijNederland to Jay's Desk: what 151 videos and 1.7 million views taught me

125,554 views. 38 likes.

81,756 views. 1,222 likes.

Both from the same channel, the same period, made by the same person. The top one was a Black Friday deal. The bottom one was called "the honest explanation".

I knew there was a gap. I didn't know it was that big.

The facts first

Two years ago I started as a freelancer at ThuisbatterijNederland. One camera, some ideas, and a plan to make videos about home batteries. Before long I was standing in front of that camera myself.

The first video went up on 17 October 2024. "What is the lifespan of a home battery? The surprising answer!" The last one landed on 31 July 2026, the day before this article.

In between: 151 videos, 1,703,741 views, 20,800 subscribers.

That's work I'm proud of. It's also work I did together with a team, and that channel carries on.

We're parting ways. That's it.

What's left is the question of what I do next. For years I had no answer to that, and the numbers from those two years finally gave me one. So before writing this I pulled the entire public dataset.

All 151 videos, with views, likes and comments. Not from memory, not from an old screenshot, but live via the YouTube Data API on 1 August 2026. Exactly how is at the bottom, so you can check the maths.

Two years in numbers

Look at those two bold rows. An average of 11,229 views. A median of 2,577. The best-performing video sits at 125,554, nearly fifty times the median.

That's how YouTube works. A handful of videos carries the reach, the rest builds the library. You just never see it when somebody puts "1.7 million views" in a bio. So here it is.

The eight most-watched videos:

Read it again, but only the right-hand column.

What I saw there

I sorted all 151 videos by keywords in the title. "Discount", "deal", "Black Friday" in one pile. "Explanation", "why", "honest", "mistake" in the other. Blunt method, which is why I'm saying it out loud. The pattern is big enough to survive the bluntness.

Three deal videos. 195,036 views between them, the highest average reach of any category. And five comments. Not five thousand. Five.

Twenty-two explainer videos. Under a quarter of the channel's reach, and 35% of all likes come from there. Plus 45% of every comment.

Deal content gets reach. Someone searches on price, clicks, checks the discount and is gone again. Nothing wrong with that. In a market where people spend thousands of euros a sharp deal is genuinely useful information, and those videos did exactly what they were meant to do.

They just don't build anything. Five comments on 195,000 views.

With the explainers the opposite happens. Less reach per video, and then people stay. They like. They respond. They ask the follow-up question. They come back for the next one.

Honesty doesn't get you views. It gets you people who stick around.

Once I had that in black and white, the rest fell into place.

Where it started

I was used to presenting, just in a different form. I used to stream. Entertainment, social, talking for hours to people watching live. That's a craft of its own and no course teaches it.

That turned out to be exactly what was useful here. Presenting is one thing. Making something presentable is a second. And then combining it so somebody actually wants to watch, that's what finishes it.

I just like explaining things. Digging into something until it makes sense to everyone. With home batteries that met a market that was asking for it. Lots of technology, lots of money, lots of nonsense, and very few people calmly explaining it without selling you something in the same breath.

And the strangest part? It worked.

People appreciated it. The honesty, the openness, saying "no" sometimes instead of only "buy from us". Customers coming into the showroom and saying it out loud. People who'd watched the channel before their purchase and then recognised me. A quick chat. That compliment that it's well made, that does something to you.

More views. More comments. More questions.

That was the feeling. The numbers above are the check afterwards.

The proof

I'd always wanted to do this myself. Except I'm a perfectionist. Too much of one. Without a deadline over me it stayed at "someday".

"Would this work?" "Would people actually watch?" That doubt held me back. For years.

Until a couple of videos answered it.

The factory tour in China was the first. Not so much the video itself, more the whole experience. The visit, the technology, seeing how these things actually get made. The nerd in me went completely loose.

The second was the one about home batteries from China, "what most Dutch people don't realise". Researched on my own initiative. Not because I had to. Because I wanted to.

That one now sits at 89,466 views and 1,023 likes. Mountains of comments. Fully organic, no ad budget, no promotion. A like ratio of 1.14%, well above the channel average of 0.85%.

And the most appreciated video on the whole channel? "Home battery too big? It'll cost you thousands (the honest explanation)." 1,222 likes. The video with "the honest explanation" in the title became the most appreciated of them all.

That tells you something.

I built it for an employer, with that deadline pressure, and could finally really make it. You watched. And it showed.

That's what gives me the confidence to do it my way now. Not the reason I'm going, but the answer to what comes after.

The ceiling

The moment you're on a payroll, you're informing people about a market your employer sells into. Wij van WC-eend, as we say here. The duck recommending duck brand.

Nothing wrong with it. That's how it works, at every brand channel in every industry. Cars, mattresses, solar panels, home batteries.

It does mean there's always some commercial interest in play. Not as instruction from above, just as the physics of the situation. Fully open, fully in-depth, without one eye on what it means for sales: that has a ceiling.

That ceiling is gone now.

That's not an accusation and it isn't why I'm leaving either. It comes with the position, and soon I won't hold that position. It does change what I can make from here.

The honest risk

A few weeks ago a customer came by. What he said stuck:

"You do it well, I hope you all keep going for a long time. Do you have people who already follow you?"

That hit the core of it. Because I was about to leave.

Those 20,800 subscribers are the result of work we did together. But it isn't my channel. Not my brand. My face, yes, and that stays there. I just don't get to keep harvesting from it. And that deadline pressure, because you have an employer, is gone too.

So now I have to do it myself. And that's where the challenge sits.

I'm not going to pretend it sorts itself out. As I write this, Jay's Desk is at a few hundred subscribers. You don't take two years of accumulated reach with you when you go. That stays behind, as it should.

What changes now

I don't sell home batteries. Which means "don't buy this" and "wait a bit longer" and "this brand is overselling it" can simply be said, without a revenue target watching from somewhere.

There may be partnerships, that's how this corner of the market works. If there are, you'll hear about it. You know the feeling: you watch a video and your gut says "somebody paid for this". I don't want to do that to you. I already thought that mattered at ThuisbatterijNederland and we did it there too. I just want to take it a step further myself.

Every video gets its full article here. The numbers, the sources, the method, the calculations. What you see above, a dataset with its workings underneath, is the format. The video is the accessible version. This is the complete one.

And it won't stop at batteries. Energy is the home base, not a cage. Technology, developments, market news, anything I dig my teeth into that's worth sharing.

What's coming first

Plug-in batteries.

That corner of the market is moving harder than the rest right now. The models are arriving fast, smaller and smarter and cheaper per kWh each time. And the question nobody is calmly answering is whether this stays the entry-level category or just becomes the standard.

I think the latter, and I'll show you exactly why. The data, the market, the new models.

The written version will be here, with all the numbers.

Pull up a chair.

How I got these numbers

So you can check the maths.

Channel statistics. YouTube Data API v3, channels.list with part=statistics, channel ID UCvdg0fwjFobZ_9a7pYJTaag. Measured 1 August 2026: 20,800 subscribers, 1,703,741 views, 151 videos.

Video dataset. playlistItems.list across the uploads playlist, then videos.list with part=snippet,statistics per batch of 50. Returned: 152 video items, together 1,706,817 views, 14,444 likes, 3,052 comments. The small gap against the channel statistic (151 versus 152, and 1,703,741 versus 1,706,817) is normal. YouTube doesn't update channel statistics in real time and not every upload item counts towards videoCount.

Period. Oldest video 17 October 2024, newest 31 July 2026. Distribution: 14 videos in 2024, 78 in 2025, 60 in 2026.

Deal versus explainer split. My own classification on title keywords. Deal: discount, deal, Black Friday, sale, promotion, offer, mega. Explainer: explanation, why, how, what is, honest, don't realise, mistake, need to know, difference, reason. Anything matching neither goes to "other". Crude method. Treat the exact percentages as indicative; the factor-thirty gap between them, less so.

Videos referenced. "Home batteries from China: what most Dutch people don't realise" (89,466 views, 1,023 likes). "Home battery too big? It'll cost you thousands (the honest explanation)" (81,756 views, 1,222 likes). "Black Friday Deal: Extra Discount on the Anker Solix Solarbank 3 Pro!" (125,554 views, 38 likes). All measured 1 August 2026 and publicly checkable.

The video alongside this piece. "Twee jaar ThuisbatterijNederland. 20.000 abonnees. En ik begin opnieuw.", 31 July 2026, youtube.com/watch?v=8nfrXr4MKGQ, in Dutch. The figures quoted in it come from a 16 July 2026 snapshot (20,300 subscribers, 1,634,444 views, 148 videos) and therefore sit slightly below the ones above.