- Hey, insiders.
It's Rachel here, and I work on YouTube analytics.
Today I wanted to talk about seasonality.
These are known periods during the year
when a lot of channels experience
higher or fewer views than usual.
These periods are known or expected.
So today I wanted to share some examples
of what that looks like on your own channels,
how to use analytics to identify it yourself,
and talk a little bit about how to act on this information.
There are two main types of seasonality
that you may encounter.
The first is audience seasonalities.
This is about how many people are online watching YouTube
during different times of year.
The second is topic-level seasonality,
so the same amount of people are online watching,
but their interest in different topics
shifts from period to period.
And some topics just have
stronger seasonal trends than others.
For example, camping would be a topic.
If you make videos about camping or outdoor stuff,
probably gonna do better in the summer
versus other times of year.
That's an example of topic-level seasonality.
Okay, (clapping) so let's look at some examples.
The one I wanted to start with is back to school,
because I feel like a lot of channels
are experiencing this right now.
You might notice that your videos
are taking off a little bit slower than usual.
Their early viewership,
or the views they get in the first few hours after release,
are just a little bit lower than what you're used to.
So the chart I'm going to bring up
is actually what this looks like for a lot of channels.
This is a small group of channels
experiencing back to school seasonality.
What happens during the summer
when people are out of school,
sometimes they're on summer holidays,
is that a lot of channels have more consistent viewership
because your audience is around watching every day,
so that's that smooth line during the summer.
Then in mid-August, you see viewership drop a little bit,
and shift towards the weekends on Saturday and Sunday.
And this is really representative
of people's schedules starting to change.
There are two lines on this chart, by the way,
because this is 2019 and 2018.
I'm just illustrating how you can find this
on analytics by doing a year over year comparison.
One thing I want to caution against
is removing or deleting videos
just because it got fewer views in the first few hours.
If this is because of back to school seasonality,
the underlying reason is not because
it's a bad video or it flopped.
It's just because viewers aren't around yet
on YouTube to recommend that video to.
If this is happening, the two main points
I want to caution against is one, it breaks notifications.
So if you upload a video
and then we send out notifications for it,
viewers click through, and the video's not there.
It's a really frustrating viewer experience.
The second one is that it can actually
potentially hurt your recommendations.
And let me caveat this.
If viewers have already watched your video,
and then you remove it, and then you re-upload it,
and then we offer it to them again,
they're more likely to ignore it
or not watch it that second time if they've already seen it,
and that's definitely not a good signal
for the recommendation system.
What's likely happening, if you have experienced
back to school seasonality in the past,
is your viewers just aren't around on YouTube
to recommend that video to yet.
Another example of audience-level seasonality
is around holidays.
Holidays are interesting because they can lead to
both positive and negative seasonal trends.
So during Christmas and New Year's sometimes,
when people are taking lots of breaks,
or during the summer holidays, like we mentioned,
a lot of people have more time to watch YouTube.
However, during specific holidays that have festivals,
or when people are with their families,
or they're out celebrating somewhere,
then you might experience short-term drops in viewership.
An example of this that we see a lot of the time
are channels with heavily Muslim audiences
seeing drops in and around Ramadan
that lift about seven days during Eid
to mark that end of the fast.
This is sometimes what it can look like.
And so here you can see that seven day temporary drop.
And again, the best way to identify this
is by doing a year over year comparison.
So the blue and the purple lines are two years.
You can compare it yourself.
If you see a temporary drop,
you can just use a little shorthand
and do compare year over year.
Another type of content with strong seasonality
is exercise and workout videos.
So I find this chart really interesting.
It's pretty much as expected,
but every New Year's people set New Year's resolutions,
and these small bumps up every year,
so you can see them on the chart, these little increases.
These are New Year's resolutions.
These are January 1st.
So you can see that exercise and workout
definitely has very strong seasonal components to it.
The third example I have is around SFX
or special effects makeup, which I'm really into myself,
and tends to peak every year
in and around October and Halloween.
So I'm gonna pause here
and tell you to think about your own channel.
What type of content do you make around what topics
that might have really strong seasonal patterns?
What's important is that you plan in advance,
and think about what your audience
is gonna be interested in during different times of year,
and how their interests shift.
If you learned anything from this video,
I hope it's that click-through rate and average reiteration
are not the only factors that are gonna explain
how many impressions your videos are getting,
and how many people are watching your videos.
There's also external factors like seasonality.
About how many people are on YouTube,
and how interest shifts between topics,
that also are really important factors
in how many people watch your videos at the end of the day.
Understanding your audience,
what they're interested in,
and how their interests are changing over time
is really the key to YouTube success.
So I hope this was helpful, and as always keep it real.