We have a question specifically about "WHEN" viewers engage with a video. For example... Once you have built a loyal audience, regular viewers tend to 'auto-like' a video in the first 10 seconds through habit and, I guess loyalty. On the other hand, new viewers may naturally like the video a few minutes in after they decide they like the content itself rather than the creator. So, does TH-cam 'weight' the value of a like (or indeed other engagement signal) when they are triggered later in a video as that would seem to suggest increased viewer satisfaction? Or am I overthinking this?
I get the impression [ha] that you are approaching metrics as “things to try and directly change” rather than as _feedback_ about the associated content. I could be wrong, but I think that in the TH-cam context, their value is in the latter. Hypothetically, even if the relative timing of a ‘like’ influenced its weight in the algorithm,* a like’s significance is fundamentally rooted in what it represents: audience satisfaction. Even if you figured out a way to measure _and_ influence the ‘weight’ assigned to likes, the moment you successfully manipulate that metric is the moment the metric loses its significance as a driver of views. In manipulating the metric you would be decoupling it from audience satisfaction, instead correlating it with, for example, whether a creator asked their audience to click “like” earlier or later in a video. Which is not something TH-cam is optimizing for. Curious to hear your perspective. *For the sake of this conversation I am making some assumptions that I don’t think represent reality, such as conceptualizing the algorithm as deterministic and transparent.
I would like this answered as well. ❤️ Additionally, I have a question about ad's effects on videos organic reach. I have run ads for a how to video recently, and I thought that the ad's performance was not going to affect the video's overall performance in terms of organic metrics. I thought the two were seperate. However, I think, I think, the negative metrics from the poorly targeted audience ( I have narrowed it after this ), affected view duration, and any other engagement metrics, which seemly lowered my ranking for tags, and removed my organic views to 0. Any answers and clarity in how seperate, ads, and non ad views are related ?
@Real World Police I do not think VidIQ is apporaching metrics that way at all. ❤️ It is important to know whether asking someone to leave a thumb up or thumbs down in the begginng, middle, or end of a video, has any impact on that engagement for the youtube algorithm. It is not manipulation, but rather trying not to shoot one's self in the foot, by knowing what not to do, instead of doing the exact wrong thing. ❤️
@@TechWeLove You completely missed the point... If the algorithm is working properly, the answer is that it makes no difference. If it’s not working properly, there is no chance that TH-cam is going to tell you, because that would allow you to game the algorithm. You’re welcome to disagree, but I am checking out. Have a good weekend.
@@TechWeLove For what its worth I find the more ads I put on a video the better it performs (up to about every 2 miniutes) I pity my poor audience sometimes.
It would be terrific if a "diagnostic" tool existed in analytics that helps creators figure out which factors Rachel mentioned are having the biggest impact on low impressions for a channel. Thank you and great job Rachel and Creator Insider team!
Competition part really surprised me. The example Rachel said is 100% my channel. All numbers are high, but my videos are not recommended at all. So I need to "beat" the competition's quailty. But it's like mission impossible when you actually have a better quality, better thumbnails and titles and just standing there like "how the heck?" after months of analysis. Probably need more.
Yes I would like to know if there's any actionable measure we can take to rank higher and perform better against the competition. I too have had videos with a great CTR, AVD, and overall engagement yet still have dismal and subpar results in terms of viewership.
I hadn't uploaded for 4 months and then randomly one day my impressions and views shot up. Across all of my videos the views from the browse feature had shot up. It stayed like that for two months until I uploaded a new video for the first time, it instantly dropped all impressions across my entire channel back to the levels they were originally. So it went 200 views a day up to 2,000 views a day for 2 months then uploaded a new video and back to 200 views a day
Interesting. I am in that 'up' at the moment and dreading releasing a new video. I am not sure I can produce another one as good as my last until travel bans are lifted, and I am really not sure that putting out weekly mediocrity will help my channel.
@Norm Macdonald Rumination This is exactly why I uncheck the box to turn of subscriber notifications etc whenever I publish a new Shorts video. I don't feel that my subscribers need to know that I uploaded a new piece of Shorts content for the very same reasons you have mentioned.
Does YT treat all channels the same, or are some favoured for being easier to place advertising on...and others flagged as 'borderline' as their subjects are less appealing to advertisers?
I think that has something to do with it, but most of the reason is algorithms not known to anyone outside of Google (TH-cam). You can follow ALL of these factors and still receive relatively, or even absolutely, few views.
@@jeffzest8393 This is why I call out these so called "TH-cam guru/experts" that sell these TH-cam coaching and evaluation services at exorbitant prices. You know the ones I'm referring to. These people are con artists selling a false hope through snake oil and smoke & mirrors.
The way you describe competition really doesnt bode well for new youtubers. When it comes to talking about movies it feels like youtube has decided that the first ten big channels to talk about movies deserve the entire pie.
It is hard to get views if you are not the top. The only way to compete with the big youtubers is to work your tail off, and make excellent, new content, on a regular basis. You get the few day boost where your video is at the top, because it's new.
How about when you publish one video, that does fairly well, and gets quite a few impressions. Then a few days later, you publish a very similar video i.e. topic, thumbnail, video style all very similar, but the 2nd video doesn't perform nearly as well. I can see the 2nd video got significantly less impressions than the 1st one. What could be the explanation for this? I don't think its seasonality, or topic, only thing I can gather from this video potentially is competition from outside videos?
@@MichaelBordenaro I don’t know really what happened to my channel ..it started growing up and suddenly it dropped down..I started to have 5 subscribers daily, now I have one subscriber every one week. I gave up😀
Same here... I've start uploading videos for new games and barely gatting any views from subs. And I talking about popular games, like Fortnite if you want
@Norm Macdonald Rumination Definitely break is working against. I've experienced the same. From my observation and informatiin from this and previous video. I am cocnluding that viewers getting recommended to your content, need to be familiar with your channel, with you as creator. That's WHY thumbnails need be easy recongnizable by your subs and attractive to new viewera. So thumbnails in a term of discovrry is important. Than it comes to you as creator to keep attention for log audience retebtion. In other words you need to work out side of TH-cam also.
@Norm Macdonald Rumination You forgot that they also later said "We know you've got to stay on that weekly content grind." It's almost as though they forgot they lied to us about that or something.
This is probably the best, most important video to watch if you really want to grow your channel. Teaches you everything you need to know about how to get your video recommended. Great advice
I have a specific question regarding this topic: you talked about experimenting with new content. So let's say you are a gaming TH-camr and you want to make a video on a different game. If you look at the video's performance you can sometimes see that even though the AVD is good (meaning that the people who chose to watch the video found it interesting enough to watch it for a long time) the video is still performing relatively bad because ''less average viewers are watching'' (according to YT studio, so less CTR because the regular viewers arent as interesting in this new game). So your new video usually gets reccomended to your ''regular viewers'' but if they are not as interested in watching this new video as your other 'regular' videos that they do usually watch, that means that your new video instantly gets low CTR and impressions, because the people who usually get the video reccomended to them, choose to not watch this video... So my question basically is: how are you supposed to attract new viewers with new content, if your new content gets instantly suppressed by your 'regular viewers' because they like your other content better?
Great question and I think She kinda touched this subject in a previous video saying performance will be evaluated differently for each traffic source, so for example performance among subscribers, external traffic and recommendations would be separated. The question there was if traffic from paid advertising that might have lower performance would hurt the video, but the answer was that youtube would evaluate it as a different source and therefore it would not hurt it, the same way at least. And that's great! But I'd be curious too to hear if a video needs to show potential first among subscribers to even get a chance to get recommended in the first place. If youtube would give the video a chance from the start and try to recommend it to see if people like it, according to what She said it would be enough for the video to be succesful there only and there would be no need for it to be liked by subscribers. Then again, if the competition is high then maybe there is not much room for videos that are not liked by all sources. Just speculating.. Hope She'll pick your question!
@Emil Pohjalainen But I'm not totally convinced that paid advertising cannot hurt video performance, during, and after the ad campaign is done. In terms of viewer retention my ad views tanked my average view duration from 90.5 % to 76.4% for lifetime retention. It doesn't seem to separate it ? Basically, I feel burned by my recent ad campaigns. I spent about $20, and all I think I really did was ruin the video for recommended, etc, because the targeted audience for the ad campaign was too broad, and I feel that retention plummeting did affect the video's reach outside of ads when the ad was done, and/or during. I gained a few subscribers, but it's not worth it, if it was only like 14 subs, but you ruin your video recommendations going forward. I would like them showing a video, showing us that ads do not hurt a video's organic reach, after the ad campaign is done. ❤️
@@TechWeLove I think what She said was that even though all traffic goes under the same metric in the analytics youtube goes deeper than that when evaluating performance. She said it's not the "total" metric that tells the whole story and that the recommendation algorithm do concider performance between traffic sources separately, even when we can't monitor everything it takes into account. Even if a video did bad on other fields if it did great when it was offered a chance in recommendations it would keep getting recommended. I really hope that's true. Sorry to hear that ad campaign didn't work for you! Have you concidered trying again with more focused audience? Good luck dude!
Years ago I heard it said that some YT viewers deliberately give a video a Thumbs Down even if they like it, because they do not want YT tracking what they like. I don't know if that is true or just an urban legend, but I did notice an interesting phenomenon when one of my videos (made in the USA for a predominantly USA audience) suddenly found a huge audience in a foreign country much different than the USA. The percentage of Thumbs Down increased as the percentage of views from this foreign country increased. Do different cultures react differently to the Thumbs Up/Down feature? Hey, I still hope YT will consider using overall channel satisfaction, as measured by the total percentage of Thumbs Up, as a metric for recommending the videos of that channel. Have a nice day--
"if we would only care about CTR and audience retention then you would constantly see the same videos on TH-cam"... This is so refreshing and nice to hear it from TH-cam employees.
I would love a video on ads. It seems my money drops dramatically unless I am constantly putting out videos, which I do at least once a day. Truth be told, I feel youtube and these ad companies are making more off of my content then I do myself. Please clarify exactly how this works so I don't have to leave you for the many upcoming platforms. Thanks kindly, Sandy
@@creatorinsider Sorry my question isn't about the recommendations system but my question is that If a video is performing well with only a few tags, but I wanna add more tags, will it affect the performance of the video?
Yeah, I feel like the only way to break through the noise is to get on someone else's radar who has greater numbers, and then gives you a signal boost.
But if you are a new creator and literally get no impressions, youtube ranks you as low click through and low percent viewed because you have 0% and then you continue to get zero impressions. So I'd be curious how you improve your stats when you don't have a giant following to start with and are starting from scratch.
Bottom line: YOU have to drive your own traffic to your channel/content yourself in whatever way(s) you can. TH-cam isn't going to do it for you in this instance for the same reasons you have mentioned. If you have a following on another platform (eg. Facebook, Twitter, etc.) then you need to use it to your advantage to direct and drive traffic to your YT. Post your video links to relevant forums elsewhere on the internet (just don't be spammy about it).
My question is that Why does TH-cam suddenly recommend videos which are like 6 years ago and under a minute out of nowhere which I'm not even interested in?
Hello Rachel & Creator Insider Team💐, Thank You very much for unboxing the recommendation System 👌& expecting this kind of Videos🏆, it would be much helpful for all Creators to grow their channel👑👍
I've officially decided that I'm gonna stop listening to allllllllll of the second hand information allllllllll over the internet, the world, and even youtube (no pun).. and just ONLY take information from..(well) TH-cam (this channel)!!! *Rachel gives the most concise, articulated, and straightforward information* ..by FARRR. (But again, to be fair she literally makes the machine that go DING!) lol. But nonetheless this will be one of my only water wells. She gives the tea indeed. THANK YOU!! GAME CHANGER!
So basically, you can only control everything up until you upload it to TH-cam and just let the algorithm do the rest and hope you win the lotto with the right audience. There’s no point of over thinking. Just be passionate about what you do and hope it resonates with the right crowd.
Thanks for the awesome video! I love this type of stuff. Understanding exactly how the system works is the best way to learn how to grow a channel. I knew a lot of this stuff already, but I still got a few really great nuggets!
Excellent! Pivoting is very difficult, but I like how you explained how sometimes a topic just isn't getting interest. And good CTR and AVD won't change what viewers actually wants to watch. This explains my gaming channel where I played niche games where the player base dropped over time. Good video, thanks. Looking forward to part 3.
I'm learning so much from the video and comments. I feel like I'm in a room full of hammas with mega subs. I'm just a baby. I'm grateful that TH-cam is pushing out my videos. I wish I could nail down what I'm doing right. I'm thinking the "competition" aspect is tough in my niche, too. Awesome comments below. Thank you all for asking great questions that I too had.
Very informative. I hope this changes a lot moving forward for how I see recommendations. However, you guys need to enable the option to select not interested from a particular shorts channel if we don't want to be seeing it
Are there any studies showing that a newly created channel does better than an old one? For example I have been posting on my channel for 10 years and I see others with similar content growing much faster than me. Should I start a new channel and continue on or is my content just not as good. Would love some insight on this if possible or maybe this is already a video out there. Thank you!
This is all great advice However the most important way to be successful in life is to do what makes you happy. You can chase the youtube algorithm to your grave. I post videos that make ME happy and bring peace to my life. I'm so happy that I don't have to stress out about all this stuff. Good luck to you guys. Find your happiness and success will follow. Much love to all
Rachel, great information as usual. Competing with the world isn't something I want to think too much about. One thing that might help is A-B thumbnail testing because I often feel pretty clueless on how to win against the millions of other videos and creators out there. With the pandemic I shifted my content a bit, which hasn't been good at all for my channel based on viewership dropping, but it is what it is. I guess what I'm making right now is pretty niche.
Thank you for uploading this, we were curious as to how impressions worked, this video was very informative! Does it matter if impressions are high but click through rate is low?
Is will get recommend but that will do nothing if the viewers don't click on your video and it will get recommend Iven more if your click thry rate is bigger from what I understood
In the past month I've seen duplicate videos on my home page - sometimes 3 or 4 duplicates... what's going on with that? This seems like a glitch from everything I've heard as with that real estate being so limited, it makes no sense to show any one video more than once. Has anyone else noticed this?
I honestly have learned so much from you and I appreciate the way you put this together and explaining everything. I always click as soon as I see this channel upload and if it's you I know I am gonna add it to my library and watch it frequently to keep me on track. The whole team of you all are awesome team. Thank you so much for always listening to our requests.
TH-cam video recommendation system is flawed. 90 percent of my channel's video recommended on totally unrelated content despite doing everything, tags, tiles etc.. I can see that in channel analytics, thanks for that.
You also have to remember to create a niche, I produced a lot of content (given not the best considering my limited equipment and experience) but as a gamer nothing about my channel particularly stands out. Simple walkthroughs, some how to's sprinkled in, and some commentary here and there. There's a lot of things from a personality standpoint or content standpoint that need to be very unique or help establish an audience all of your own that will help your channel.
nice! I would also like to add that thumbnails are key. I would recommend experimenting with what appeals to your audience. also trends and fads can count! example: Friday Night Funkin would be popular because it is a popular game as of now.
So she is basically saying at 7:44seconds that if your video has high CTR and retention snd its still not performing, that means TH-cam is not giving it more impressions. Why? Because they are giving larger established channels more. So it’s not fair competition.
Thank you for this information. However, I still don't understand how similar channels to mine, who haven't been doing it as long and don't have as many total videos as I do, have way more subscribers and way more views than me? Especially when I think that my channel is more interesting and creative, and the other channels seem to just be copycats of all of the similar (drumming) channels out there. Any further information to help me reach a bigger audience would be greatly appreciated. ✌
But what how does that helps creators in countries where TH-cam is only beginning to be discovered by the population and still would be interested in content that was already covered and watched five years ago and to them its new(s)?
Hi there! I have two questions that I couldn't find on any of Rachel's videos. 1 - How does tagging a place on your video change anything for discovery or recommendation? 2 - Does following other accounts on your niche help the channel in any way? Thank you and keep up the amazing work! :)
Personalisation point 1 is where it all falls down. It ensures self reinforcement. It also means that the Home page keeps churning up the same set of videos over and over and over. Now if you included the meaning of a site refresh into that, then you'd get a damn useful metric, and I'd get to see some new videos on the home page instead of the same set of videos day after day after day after day after day etc. All because you don't teach your algorithm that a refresh means nothing on that page is of interest!
When you say "enjoy," are we to assume that this is measured by thumbs up or down? I'm still unclear about that. If there's no engagement, is that like a thumbs down? edit: i guess you kind of answered my question at 5:53 :)
Related to topic interest, I always feel that older videos are 'clogging' search results and making it nearly impossible to rank or be discovered; even for very narrow search terms. Unless a user looks specifically for videos created in the last year, it seems the results skew toward old videos rather than the best videos. How can a creator overcome this? The topic interest can be there but it won't help if your more relevant video is on page two of search results and the too videos from four years ago have floated to the algorithmic top. Any suggestions or room for changing how results are presented?
I wish that theres no need for impression but permit each video to be viewed then if in 3 days still not getting enough views, it would be best to place those videos to 'non searchable'
Yeah and as a small channel a couple of people who hate you for no reason start disliking your videos with multiple accounts and your satisfaction rate drops below 50-60% and your video doesn't get suggested anymore!
Ok so I've got a video with a great CTR, AVD, and overall engagement. But views are still very low. You said this is most likely due to competition from other videos/channels. What can I do to combat that? Is there any action within my control that I can take?
I had a fairly similar question that your channel commented on with some kind of unhelpful if not borderline rude advice... hope you get a helpful response here.
Is there any possibility for youtube analytics to provide information on Topic Interest? Maybe some kind of average of your tags or some other way to identify.
I’ve watched this video a few times. 37k views but yet a million people will blame the algorithm if they don’t get views. TH-cam is literally telling you how to get seen.
What about the gaming channel if people only watch some specific part like some key movement in timestamps but dont watch whole video if that happened youtube doesn't recommended our videos
I wonder will the algorithm favor the bigger and established channels? How about small TH-camrs who upload frequently. Thanks for the many tips given here and insight into the way TH-cam works.
This helpful but I want to know definitely why the larger channels appear on top of search even if your title is most unique? How do you expect smaller channels to compete if they are not given equal chance. I have done many tests on this with different titles.
I get rather frustrated with personalisation and wish I could just reset it half the time so YT would start from scratch. Why do I keep getting recommended my own videos? It happens all the time. If I want to watch them I know where to find them. Same thing for videos I have already watched. I keep getting them recommended again. I rarely watch anything twice. I also find in search that I always get recommended the same content, even if I have watched it already and it tends to be old videos with high views. It takes real digging to find new content with less views even though often this content is more relevant, up to date and often beter quality but it is hidden from me, unless I filter by date. I often get lots of irrelevant content for a long time simply because I needed to search something that isn't a normal interest. Then I'll get that topic served to me sometimes for up to a week when I was only interested for a short time. Anyway I guess the algorithms are always learning but it's not always a great experience for the user.
thank you Rachel. This insight & information is like another set of eyes/ears on your channel & how to think out of the square. I spent 22 years in the music industry & I love change. I enjoyed your comment about David Bowie. thanks as always :-)
Thank you so much for sharing this useful information! I watched both of the videos and curious about something that was not covered: the time of publishing your video. So I wanted to ask how much the time of the day (or the day of the week) that you publish your video impact the performance or recommendation of it? thanks again!
We have a question specifically about "WHEN" viewers engage with a video. For example...
Once you have built a loyal audience, regular viewers tend to 'auto-like' a video in the first 10 seconds through habit and, I guess loyalty. On the other hand, new viewers may naturally like the video a few minutes in after they decide they like the content itself rather than the creator.
So, does TH-cam 'weight' the value of a like (or indeed other engagement signal) when they are triggered later in a video as that would seem to suggest increased viewer satisfaction?
Or am I overthinking this?
I get the impression [ha] that you are approaching metrics as “things to try and directly change” rather than as _feedback_ about the associated content. I could be wrong, but I think that in the TH-cam context, their value is in the latter.
Hypothetically, even if the relative timing of a ‘like’ influenced its weight in the algorithm,* a like’s significance is fundamentally rooted in what it represents: audience satisfaction.
Even if you figured out a way to measure _and_ influence the ‘weight’ assigned to likes, the moment you successfully manipulate that metric is the moment the metric loses its significance as a driver of views.
In manipulating the metric you would be decoupling it from audience satisfaction, instead correlating it with, for example, whether a creator asked their audience to click “like” earlier or later in a video. Which is not something TH-cam is optimizing for.
Curious to hear your perspective.
*For the sake of this conversation I am making some assumptions that I don’t think represent reality, such as conceptualizing the algorithm as deterministic and transparent.
I would like this answered as well. ❤️
Additionally, I have a question about ad's effects on videos organic reach.
I have run ads for a how to video recently, and I thought that the ad's performance was not going to affect the video's overall performance in terms of organic metrics. I thought the two were seperate. However, I think, I think, the negative metrics from the poorly targeted audience ( I have narrowed it after this ), affected view duration, and any other engagement metrics, which seemly lowered my ranking for tags, and removed my organic views to 0. Any answers and clarity in how seperate, ads, and non ad views are related ?
@Real World Police I do not think VidIQ is apporaching metrics that way at all. ❤️ It is important to know whether asking someone to leave a thumb up or thumbs down in the begginng, middle, or end of a video, has any impact on that engagement for the youtube algorithm. It is not manipulation, but rather trying not to shoot one's self in the foot, by knowing what not to do, instead of doing the exact wrong thing. ❤️
@@TechWeLove You completely missed the point...
If the algorithm is working properly, the answer is that it makes no difference.
If it’s not working properly, there is no chance that TH-cam is going to tell you, because that would allow you to game the algorithm.
You’re welcome to disagree, but I am checking out. Have a good weekend.
@@TechWeLove For what its worth I find the more ads I put on a video the better it performs (up to about every 2 miniutes) I pity my poor audience sometimes.
Let’s open a Donate link to get her a suitable 🎙 microphone 😂
Why don't you buy her one 😂
Noted and purchased!
@@creatorinsider it’s all good. I love it. We’re just here for the info. No frills necessary. 😉
if your channel will be destroy by youtube dont ask why :)))
@@skyline6660 😂😂😂
It would be terrific if a "diagnostic" tool existed in analytics that helps creators figure out which factors Rachel mentioned are having the biggest impact on low impressions for a channel. Thank you and great job Rachel and Creator Insider team!
That is an excellent idea. I would use that a ton. ❤️
This!
Yes, seeing that your impressions are down, but not knowing why can make it very confusing to a creator on what to do about it
That would be very helpful to have! You got my thumbs up!
Creators?????????????????? 99.9999999999999999999999999999% is idiots ..... and world likes it ........
Competition part really surprised me. The example Rachel said is 100% my channel. All numbers are high, but my videos are not recommended at all.
So I need to "beat" the competition's quailty. But it's like mission impossible when you actually have a better quality, better thumbnails and titles and just standing there like "how the heck?" after months of analysis.
Probably need more.
Yes I would like to know if there's any actionable measure we can take to rank higher and perform better against the competition. I too have had videos with a great CTR, AVD, and overall engagement yet still have dismal and subpar results in terms of viewership.
I hadn't uploaded for 4 months and then randomly one day my impressions and views shot up. Across all of my videos the views from the browse feature had shot up. It stayed like that for two months until I uploaded a new video for the first time, it instantly dropped all impressions across my entire channel back to the levels they were originally. So it went 200 views a day up to 2,000 views a day for 2 months then uploaded a new video and back to 200 views a day
Interesting. I am in that 'up' at the moment and dreading releasing a new video. I am not sure I can produce another one as good as my last until travel bans are lifted, and I am really not sure that putting out weekly mediocrity will help my channel.
@@NomadArchitecture I think I would ride that wave and be hesitant to publish new content until that wave dies down.
@Norm Macdonald Rumination This is exactly why I uncheck the box to turn of subscriber notifications etc whenever I publish a new Shorts video. I don't feel that my subscribers need to know that I uploaded a new piece of Shorts content for the very same reasons you have mentioned.
TH-cam controls impressions. You are at the mercy of TH-cam. No matter what you do...
Does YT treat all channels the same, or are some favoured for being easier to place advertising on...and others flagged as 'borderline' as their subjects are less appealing to advertisers?
Competition...something we have no control over.
I think that has something to do with it, but most of the reason is algorithms not known to anyone outside of Google (TH-cam). You can follow ALL of these factors and still receive relatively, or even absolutely, few views.
YES. So at the end of the day nobody really actually knows what the F is going on....
@@theadventurebiker Exactly.
@@jeffzest8393 This is why I call out these so called "TH-cam guru/experts" that sell these TH-cam coaching and evaluation services at exorbitant prices. You know the ones I'm referring to. These people are con artists selling a false hope through snake oil and smoke & mirrors.
The way you describe competition really doesnt bode well for new youtubers. When it comes to talking about movies it feels like youtube has decided that the first ten big channels to talk about movies deserve the entire pie.
It is hard to get views if you are not the top. The only way to compete with the big youtubers is to work your tail off, and make excellent, new content, on a regular basis. You get the few day boost where your video is at the top, because it's new.
How about when you publish one video, that does fairly well, and gets quite a few impressions. Then a few days later, you publish a very similar video i.e. topic, thumbnail, video style all very similar, but the 2nd video doesn't perform nearly as well. I can see the 2nd video got significantly less impressions than the 1st one. What could be the explanation for this? I don't think its seasonality, or topic, only thing I can gather from this video potentially is competition from outside videos?
That happened to me. I have two similar videos, one has 3200 views, the other one has 60..it’s very hard to guess how the algorithm works!
@@-hanaobeid4044 Whoa that is a huge discrepancy, much bigger than mine. My first one is sitting at 3900 views and the other at 1300🤷♂️
@@MichaelBordenaro I don’t know really what happened to my channel ..it started growing up and suddenly it dropped down..I started to have 5 subscribers daily, now I have one subscriber every one week. I gave up😀
@@-hanaobeid4044 That is the nature of youtube unfortunately it can be like that. But don't give up if you really want to grow the channel!
@@MichaelBordenaro thank you for your advice.
LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE this series!!!!! 👍
So glad it's helpful!
Got the feeling whenever I experiment with new content...it does the opposite.
I‘m still trying. Thanks for the insights
Same here... I've start uploading videos for new games and barely gatting any views from subs. And I talking about popular games, like Fortnite if you want
@Norm Macdonald Rumination Definitely break is working against. I've experienced the same. From my observation and informatiin from this and previous video. I am cocnluding that viewers getting recommended to your content, need to be familiar with your channel, with you as creator. That's WHY thumbnails need be easy recongnizable by your subs and attractive to new viewera. So thumbnails in a term of discovrry is important. Than it comes to you as creator to keep attention for log audience retebtion. In other words you need to work out side of TH-cam also.
@Norm Macdonald Rumination oh, sorry to hear that. Saw the same video and got hopeful. Back to getting stressed out then 😅
@Norm Macdonald Rumination You forgot that they also later said "We know you've got to stay on that weekly content grind."
It's almost as though they forgot they lied to us about that or something.
Massively helpful. ALL content creators should watch this and stop complaining when their CTR and watch % is high but still get low impressions
This is probably the best, most important video to watch if you really want to grow your channel. Teaches you everything you need to know about how to get your video recommended. Great advice
I have a specific question regarding this topic: you talked about experimenting with new content. So let's say you are a gaming TH-camr and you want to make a video on a different game. If you look at the video's performance you can sometimes see that even though the AVD is good (meaning that the people who chose to watch the video found it interesting enough to watch it for a long time) the video is still performing relatively bad because ''less average viewers are watching'' (according to YT studio, so less CTR because the regular viewers arent as interesting in this new game). So your new video usually gets reccomended to your ''regular viewers'' but if they are not as interested in watching this new video as your other 'regular' videos that they do usually watch, that means that your new video instantly gets low CTR and impressions, because the people who usually get the video reccomended to them, choose to not watch this video... So my question basically is: how are you supposed to attract new viewers with new content, if your new content gets instantly suppressed by your 'regular viewers' because they like your other content better?
Excellent question. I have thought about this a ton. I hope she can address this. ❤️
Same experience here. And similar opinion I gave in the previous video. Hope we can get some explanation.
Great question and I think She kinda touched this subject in a previous video saying performance will be evaluated differently for each traffic source, so for example performance among subscribers, external traffic and recommendations would be separated. The question there was if traffic from paid advertising that might have lower performance would hurt the video, but the answer was that youtube would evaluate it as a different source and therefore it would not hurt it, the same way at least. And that's great! But I'd be curious too to hear if a video needs to show potential first among subscribers to even get a chance to get recommended in the first place. If youtube would give the video a chance from the start and try to recommend it to see if people like it, according to what She said it would be enough for the video to be succesful there only and there would be no need for it to be liked by subscribers. Then again, if the competition is high then maybe there is not much room for videos that are not liked by all sources. Just speculating.. Hope She'll pick your question!
@Emil Pohjalainen But I'm not totally convinced that paid advertising cannot hurt video performance, during, and after the ad campaign is done. In terms of viewer retention my ad views tanked my average view duration from 90.5 % to 76.4% for lifetime retention. It doesn't seem to separate it ? Basically, I feel burned by my recent ad campaigns. I spent about $20, and all I think I really did was ruin the video for recommended, etc, because the targeted audience for the ad campaign was too broad, and I feel that retention plummeting did affect the video's reach outside of ads when the ad was done, and/or during. I gained a few subscribers, but it's not worth it, if it was only like 14 subs, but you ruin your video recommendations going forward. I would like them showing a video, showing us that ads do not hurt a video's organic reach, after the ad campaign is done. ❤️
@@TechWeLove I think what She said was that even though all traffic goes under the same metric in the analytics youtube goes deeper than that when evaluating performance. She said it's not the "total" metric that tells the whole story and that the recommendation algorithm do concider performance between traffic sources separately, even when we can't monitor everything it takes into account. Even if a video did bad on other fields if it did great when it was offered a chance in recommendations it would keep getting recommended. I really hope that's true.
Sorry to hear that ad campaign didn't work for you! Have you concidered trying again with more focused audience? Good luck dude!
Years ago I heard it said that some YT viewers deliberately give a video a Thumbs Down even if they like it, because they do not want YT tracking what they like. I don't know if that is true or just an urban legend, but I did notice an interesting phenomenon when one of my videos (made in the USA for a predominantly USA audience) suddenly found a huge audience in a foreign country much different than the USA. The percentage of Thumbs Down increased as the percentage of views from this foreign country increased. Do different cultures react differently to the Thumbs Up/Down feature? Hey, I still hope YT will consider using overall channel satisfaction, as measured by the total percentage of Thumbs Up, as a metric for recommending the videos of that channel. Have a nice day--
"if we would only care about CTR and audience retention then you would constantly see the same videos on TH-cam"... This is so refreshing and nice to hear it from TH-cam employees.
You guys are becoming my "I must watch that new video as soon as I get it recommended". I just stop whatever I'm doing to see your videos =)
Wow! Thank you! Really glad these are useful
@@creatorinsider yeah they really are, much appreciated
Now this is where the interesting TH-cam background info stuff is
😭😭 Thank you! no guessing, just clear explanation from TH-cam 👏 👏
I would love a video on ads. It seems my money drops dramatically unless I am constantly putting out videos, which I do at least once a day. Truth be told, I feel youtube and these ad companies are making more off of my content then I do myself. Please clarify exactly how this works so I don't have to leave you for the many upcoming platforms. Thanks kindly, Sandy
Does seeding affect impressions?
I've thought about this for a long time.. Thanks for the video.. I'm gonna watch it till the end
Awesome! Leave questions you have so we can try and cover anything that's not clear in a future video
@@creatorinsider Sorry my question isn't about the recommendations system but my question is that If a video is performing well with only a few tags, but I wanna add more tags, will it affect the performance of the video?
The mic quality makes this feel like a zoom call.
all these things are making difficult for a new creator to start as compared to earlier
big youtubers will get bigger and bigger
Yeah, I feel like the only way to break through the noise is to get on someone else's radar who has greater numbers, and then gives you a signal boost.
But if you are a new creator and literally get no impressions, youtube ranks you as low click through and low percent viewed because you have 0% and then you continue to get zero impressions. So I'd be curious how you improve your stats when you don't have a giant following to start with and are starting from scratch.
Bottom line: YOU have to drive your own traffic to your channel/content yourself in whatever way(s) you can. TH-cam isn't going to do it for you in this instance for the same reasons you have mentioned. If you have a following on another platform (eg. Facebook, Twitter, etc.) then you need to use it to your advantage to direct and drive traffic to your YT. Post your video links to relevant forums elsewhere on the internet (just don't be spammy about it).
Moving at a great pace. And Finding the eyes for your channel
My question is that Why does TH-cam suddenly recommend videos which are like 6 years ago and under a minute out of nowhere which I'm not even interested in?
Hello Rachel & Creator Insider Team💐, Thank You very much for unboxing the recommendation System 👌& expecting this kind of Videos🏆, it would be much helpful for all Creators to grow their channel👑👍
I've officially decided that I'm gonna stop listening to allllllllll of the second hand information allllllllll over the internet, the world, and even youtube (no pun).. and just ONLY take information from..(well) TH-cam (this channel)!!! *Rachel gives the most concise, articulated, and straightforward information* ..by FARRR. (But again, to be fair she literally makes the machine that go DING!) lol.
But nonetheless this will be one of my only water wells. She gives the tea indeed. THANK YOU!! GAME CHANGER!
When is Part 3 coming out Rachel? 09:49
So basically, you can only control everything up until you upload it to TH-cam and just let the algorithm do the rest and hope you win the lotto with the right audience.
There’s no point of over thinking. Just be passionate about what you do and hope it resonates with the right crowd.
Time to pray to the TH-cam God 😆
no basically dont do youtube its a joke now,you have a better chance at twitch or facebook
More of these videos please. This is very enlightening information. Thank you!
Thanks for the awesome video! I love this type of stuff. Understanding exactly how the system works is the best way to learn how to grow a channel. I knew a lot of this stuff already, but I still got a few really great nuggets!
Excellent! Pivoting is very difficult, but I like how you explained how sometimes a topic just isn't getting interest. And good CTR and AVD won't change what viewers actually wants to watch. This explains my gaming channel where I played niche games where the player base dropped over time.
Good video, thanks. Looking forward to part 3.
I feel like youtube should show estimated impressions for keywords so people will know weather to give it there all on the subject or topic
Thanks for taking out time & sharing such important info Rachel... Very helpful to all TH-cam Creators... Keep posting ...
I'm learning so much from the video and comments. I feel like I'm in a room full of hammas with mega subs. I'm just a baby. I'm grateful that TH-cam is pushing out my videos. I wish I could nail down what I'm doing right. I'm thinking the "competition" aspect is tough in my niche, too. Awesome comments below. Thank you all for asking great questions that I too had.
Good morning 🌄🌅
Very informative.
I hope this changes a lot moving forward for how I see recommendations.
However, you guys need to enable the option to select not interested from a particular shorts channel if we don't want to be seeing it
The auto play icon used to be below the video and now it is part of it (next to closed captions) and it has been set to on again.
According to you what is a good CTR % and Average view duration? Pls reply.
Are there any studies showing that a newly created channel does better than an old one? For example I have been posting on my channel for 10 years and I see others with similar content growing much faster than me. Should I start a new channel and continue on or is my content just not as good. Would love some insight on this if possible or maybe this is already a video out there. Thank you!
What is "signals like sound effects"?
This is all great advice However the most important way to be successful in life is to do what makes you happy. You can chase the youtube algorithm to your grave. I post videos that make ME happy and bring peace to my life. I'm so happy that I don't have to stress out about all this stuff. Good luck to you guys. Find your happiness and success will follow. Much love to all
With over 76k real subscribers, i got so frustrated with the huge drop in viewership on our channel. Thanks for this video
Thank you so much, Creator Insider.
Rachel, great information as usual. Competing with the world isn't something I want to think too much about. One thing that might help is A-B thumbnail testing because I often feel pretty clueless on how to win against the millions of other videos and creators out there.
With the pandemic I shifted my content a bit, which hasn't been good at all for my channel based on viewership dropping, but it is what it is. I guess what I'm making right now is pretty niche.
Yeah, I would love A, B, thumbnail testing as well. I am HORRIBLE with thumbnails. ❤️
@@TechWeLove They have mentioned working on the feature, but haven't seen anything lately.
Why would my video show up recommended on a video published in 2009 with 59 views?
This answered lots of my questions because I have a few videos with high CTR and AVD but low impressions and views. Thank you
Thank you for uploading this, we were curious as to how impressions worked, this video was very informative! Does it matter if impressions are high but click through rate is low?
Is will get recommend but that will do nothing if the viewers don't click on your video and it will get recommend Iven more if your click thry rate is bigger from what I understood
In the past month I've seen duplicate videos on my home page - sometimes 3 or 4 duplicates... what's going on with that? This seems like a glitch from everything I've heard as with that real estate being so limited, it makes no sense to show any one video more than once. Has anyone else noticed this?
I honestly have learned so much from you and I appreciate the way you put this together and explaining everything. I always click as soon as I see this channel upload and if it's you I know I am gonna add it to my library and watch it frequently to keep me on track. The whole team of you all are awesome team. Thank you so much for always listening to our requests.
TH-cam video recommendation system is flawed. 90 percent of my channel's video recommended on totally unrelated content despite doing everything, tags, tiles etc.. I can see that in channel analytics, thanks for that.
This Topic Is Very Helpful For Better Reach
Where is the third video?
A very useful tool " video enhancement" in Studio video editor is missing plz again restore it.
Thanks
You also have to remember to create a niche, I produced a lot of content (given not the best considering my limited equipment and experience) but as a gamer nothing about my channel particularly stands out. Simple walkthroughs, some how to's sprinkled in, and some commentary here and there. There's a lot of things from a personality standpoint or content standpoint that need to be very unique or help establish an audience all of your own that will help your channel.
nice! I would also like to add that thumbnails are key. I would recommend experimenting with what appeals to your audience. also trends and fads can count!
example: Friday Night Funkin would be popular because it is a popular game as of now.
This helps so much! Thank you for doing these videos!!
Glad it's helpful!
YESSS THANK YOU RACHAEL ❤️ I will absolutely make content with this info in mind. I appreciate it 👑🙌🏻
steven he.... HERE! omg
This is genuinely a FANTASTIC window through all the nonsense talked about the algorithm. Thank you for taking the time to put this together.
omg the audio quality lmao
I don't really understand how Google trends work, could you make a video on it or maybe it's because i use it on my phone
So she is basically saying at 7:44seconds that if your video has high CTR and retention snd its still not performing, that means TH-cam is not giving it more impressions. Why? Because they are giving larger established channels more. So it’s not fair competition.
Thank you for the clarification! Much appreciated 🙋♀️
Thank you for this information. However, I still don't understand how similar channels to mine, who haven't been doing it as long and don't have as many total videos as I do, have way more subscribers and way more views than me? Especially when I think that my channel is more interesting and creative, and the other channels seem to just be copycats of all of the similar (drumming) channels out there. Any further information to help me reach a bigger audience would be greatly appreciated. ✌
But what how does that helps creators in countries where TH-cam is only beginning to be discovered by the population and still would be interested in content that was already covered and watched five years ago and to them its new(s)?
Does likes give impact to viewers satisfaction? What impact will it offers actually?
Hi there! I have two questions that I couldn't find on any of Rachel's videos.
1 - How does tagging a place on your video change anything for discovery or recommendation?
2 - Does following other accounts on your niche help the channel in any way?
Thank you and keep up the amazing work! :)
Personalisation point 1 is where it all falls down. It ensures self reinforcement. It also means that the Home page keeps churning up the same set of videos over and over and over. Now if you included the meaning of a site refresh into that, then you'd get a damn useful metric, and I'd get to see some new videos on the home page instead of the same set of videos day after day after day after day after day etc. All because you don't teach your algorithm that a refresh means nothing on that page is of interest!
Thank you Rachel! You don't know how helpful this information is to small creators like myself :)
Good information. Thank you!
When you say "enjoy," are we to assume that this is measured by thumbs up or down? I'm still unclear about that. If there's no engagement, is that like a thumbs down?
edit: i guess you kind of answered my question at 5:53 :)
Definitely my favourite. Great info and insights which I'm using for a series i'm making.
I have few videos with CTR 10%-12%, watch time 50%+. They still do not get much of impressions. Is there explanation for that?
Thanks for info! 😊☺️
Related to topic interest, I always feel that older videos are 'clogging' search results and making it nearly impossible to rank or be discovered; even for very narrow search terms. Unless a user looks specifically for videos created in the last year, it seems the results skew toward old videos rather than the best videos. How can a creator overcome this? The topic interest can be there but it won't help if your more relevant video is on page two of search results and the too videos from four years ago have floated to the algorithmic top. Any suggestions or room for changing how results are presented?
WAAAAH. Make better content. The older videos are being recommended simply for the fact that they're better in one way or another.
I wish that theres no need for impression but permit each video to be viewed then if in 3 days still not getting enough views, it would be best to place those videos to 'non searchable'
Yeah and as a small channel a couple of people who hate you for no reason start disliking your videos with multiple accounts and your satisfaction rate drops below 50-60% and your video doesn't get suggested anymore!
Why is it that some of my videos with higher click-through rates don't get as many impressions as videos with lower CTR?
This was very helpful. Thank you 🙏🏼
Ok so I've got a video with a great CTR, AVD, and overall engagement. But views are still very low. You said this is most likely due to competition from other videos/channels. What can I do to combat that? Is there any action within my control that I can take?
I had a fairly similar question that your channel commented on with some kind of unhelpful if not borderline rude advice... hope you get a helpful response here.
This is great information. But what's the solution for @7:33 when all you can see is your data.
Is there any possibility for youtube analytics to provide information on Topic Interest? Maybe some kind of average of your tags or some other way to identify.
I’ve watched this video a few times. 37k views but yet a million people will blame the algorithm if they don’t get views. TH-cam is literally telling you how to get seen.
What about the gaming channel if people only watch some specific part like some key movement in timestamps but dont watch whole video if that happened youtube doesn't recommended our videos
Dear Ma'am,
Thank you for the wonderful information. Now I have understand it more clearly.
Thank you
Lets goooooooo!!!!!!!!
I wonder will the algorithm favor the bigger and established channels? How about small TH-camrs who upload frequently. Thanks for the many tips given here and insight into the way TH-cam works.
This helpful but I want to know definitely why the larger channels appear on top of search even if your title is most unique? How do you expect smaller channels to compete if they are not given equal chance. I have done many tests on this with different titles.
I get rather frustrated with personalisation and wish I could just reset it half the time so YT would start from scratch. Why do I keep getting recommended my own videos? It happens all the time. If I want to watch them I know where to find them. Same thing for videos I have already watched. I keep getting them recommended again. I rarely watch anything twice. I also find in search that I always get recommended the same content, even if I have watched it already and it tends to be old videos with high views. It takes real digging to find new content with less views even though often this content is more relevant, up to date and often beter quality but it is hidden from me, unless I filter by date. I often get lots of irrelevant content for a long time simply because I needed to search something that isn't a normal interest. Then I'll get that topic served to me sometimes for up to a week when I was only interested for a short time. Anyway I guess the algorithms are always learning but it's not always a great experience for the user.
thank you Rachel. This insight & information is like another set of eyes/ears on your channel & how to think out of the square. I spent 22 years in the music industry & I love change. I enjoyed your comment about David Bowie. thanks as always :-)
Thank you so much for sharing this useful information! I watched both of the videos and curious about something that was not covered: the time of publishing your video. So I wanted to ask how much the time of the day (or the day of the week) that you publish your video impact the performance or recommendation of it? thanks again!
Thank you for the information. Very HELPFUL!!
This video was helpful and informative. Thank you for sharing. 😃❤️
I never thought about the competition side, thanks for all this insight. I will make use all this info & put it into practice.
I'm keeping it real now, Ma'am. This is gold!
Thanks for sharing this info! Helpful to learn as much as I can about this!