Hey all, I'm aware I and have researched some of these but it's often one persons view point so coming to Reddit asking for a groups opinion will hopefully prove to be valuable. Apologies if some of these seem silly but I've never done anything on social like this.

To give some background, I work full time and would like to build something that's mine, work hard on it and do it for passionate reasons. I'm well aware I'm doing this for fun but would like to build upon it and completely get that I will make mistakes, and it is a learning curve.

1. My first question is content, I enjoy gaming so this will be a content filler not so much live streams but Information, walk throughs and benchmarks. But I find things that happen around the world fascinating, like history and conspiracy. Can these topics form part of one channel, can a or has a successful channel done this?

2. I have a laptop, and Arctis 1 wireless headset. The laptop is i5 11400h, 32gb ram and a RTX 3060 130w, along with 2.5tb SSD and a 8TB external HDD. Will recording be ok and sound for the headset or should I upgrade?

3. Given my hardware what software, OBS or shadow play? And with sound do I record at the same time or do some gameplay then record the talked about content after?

4. How does music work, can you play copyright music for a few seconds or is it a big no no and as such what do people use?

5. The holy grail, subs how do you get subs if you have good content is it a case of having a good title the YouTube algorithm picks up, do you advertise? I know there is no magic formula but curious how people grew.

6. Have you done stuff outside of YouTube that's helped?

7. Any suggested hardware and software you have used?

I appreciate I have asked alot so honestly anything you can assist with is great. TIA