- What are the roadblocks
that are preventing creators from growing?
What's keeping them from getting more views
and more subscribers?
I wanna go straight to the source.
I went to YouTube themselves, sat down with them
and ask them what are these big mistakes?
And in today's video,
you're gonna meet Tom, from Creator Insider,
and he's going to share with you exactly
what those things are.
(graphics crackling)
This is Tom. Hey Tom.
- Tim, it's always a pleasure.
I'm glad that we're able to reconnect.
- I know you've seen a lot of data on the platform,
and you've seen a ton of creators
you've been working on the product behind the scenes.
Based on everything you see,
what are some of the common mistakes
that creators are making,
that's really preventing them from getting the traction
and the growth they really want on YouTube.
- There's a few classes of challenges,
we've seen creators face.
The first one, are the literal, literal roadblocks,
they may have a video that's not suitable for advertising,
and they'll upload and publish,
the video will be determined inappropriate for advertising,
even if they appeal it,
a lot of their views have already been kind of consumed.
The second one is challenges
that sometimes they encounter with folks
who are making claims around copyright.
Copywritten music or whatever.
Those are so the two biggest ones
that we see people have struggles with
and there's just general kind of performance optimization,
things that not every creator does, unfortunately.
- What would some of those best practices be?
- The obvious thing,
which is make as good videos as you can.
There's a lot of work you can do around the settings,
but if the core video is not compelling,
the best tags, the thumbnails
and titles is not gonna change that.
We were talking to MrBeast,
he really spends a lot of time,
making sure those first 30 seconds are great,
and then he really kind of edits it well
so that you are very unlikely
to drop off before the video is over
and then there's always a very clear,
kind of payoff at the end.
I think youtubers often think of us as this new media,
the new platform and there are new formats,
but you know how man,
interpret stories and tell stories,
like has not changed for thousands of years for a reason,
and whether it's video or poems or whatever
it's probably pretty consistent.
So that's the first thing is like make the video
as good as one can.
But once you have the video as good as you can get it,
it's interesting how important the thumbnail game is,
sometimes people have a great video,
and then they'll spend 10, 20 seconds
on their thumbnail.
And, unfortunately, that really holds back,
that video's potential, and then also the title.
If you worked in the ads business,
there are people who spend their whole life perfecting,
short catchy titles,
and they get paid a lot of money to do it.
That's part of the challenge being a YouTube creator,
you have to be great at a lot of things,
on camera, then the editing marketing the video,
in some ways, a creator is like an entrepreneur,
their channel is like a startup,
and every video is like a new product launch.
And if you think about that,
well if I had a marketing team for this video,
like we would definitely make sure thumbnail, title,
description, promotion of the video,
on various platforms would be tip top.
If you have to boil it down into numbers,
this bears out in the click through rate,
and the average view duration.
A lot of people think like,
there's like a million factors to the algorithm,
there are, but there's two that really matter.
And that's the click through rate
and the average view duration,
that really drives the likelihood
of a video getting recommended.
I think the other challenge
that some creators have
is the expectation that they could become a success
within a few uploads.
What most creators who've been at it for a while know,
is that it's a long, kind of journey.
There are many paths to success on YouTube,
some of it is these overnight successes,
but many times it's through sort of this exploration
and journey and when you look at,
even some top creators, their earlier videos,
like they may have actually
been going after a different approach,
and then you see like they found their market fit.
I would say them from a mindset point of view,
embrace kind of the journey,
be open to the feedback
that you're getting from your viewers,
and the performance of the videos.
If you do 10 videos and video number eight,
really does well, is there a chance that it's just random?
I suppose, but most likely,
there was something about that video, the story,
maybe the way it was positioned,
maybe the thumbnail, the title, some combination.
But try and and pick up that signal and learn from that
and kind of parlay that into your subsequent videos.
Interestingly enough, a lot of people
aren't as open to that kind of data and information.
They may conclude,
oh, there's something wrong with notifications.
We're aligned here in terms of our interest
if you have great content,
it's in our interest to promote it as much as we can.
I've noticed some creators,
they are thinking about their videos,
and their channel, kind of in this vacuum,
like it's just, they upload it to this black box
and then who knows what happens.
It's less common for some creators
to put themselves in the shoes of a viewer
and say okay, let's say you make a video
about hiking in Switzerland.
You might be surprised how many creators
who make that video will not look
at other hiking videos in Switzerland on YouTube already.
Because that, effectively, is when we try
and recommend a video to a viewer,
we'd have to see of all the hiking videos
which one should we show this viewer.
And if you upload something
that isn't really compelling or is kind of,
not as useful as the other stuff,
it may not perform as well.
And for some reason I noticed
that a lot of creators don't spend
that much time understanding the market,
and understanding like what alternatives does the viewer
that I won't have,
and how do I make something that's really unique
and compelling so that it stands out?
- You do a lot of recon work,
just by watching the other videos
before you make one
to see what's in common between their titles
and their thumbnails, their opening hooks
and opening 15 seconds
and what is the story going in this one versus that one,
sometimes we'll find some really helpful patterns,
that we'll be like, "Oh, I was gonna go this direction,
but maybe I should consider this instead."
At least know what you're up against
before you make that video and publish it.
- Whenever I talk to some of the top creator,
I find that they all spend significant time
on YouTube as viewers, always looking
and seeing what's going on, what are the trends,
like what's working, what isn't working.
It's time consuming to do your own channel,
but you do have to carve out some time
to put on your viewer hat and say like,
well, what else, like if I have this thing about cooking,
like what other cooking stuff is out there?
And it'll help you kind of figure out like,
what's the bar for me to be competitive,
and then, ideally, what's also the unique angle
that no one else is getting that I can bring to the table?
- Tom and I actually talked for almost 45 minutes
about this and a lot more,
if you wanna hear our full conversation,
there's a link down below to our podcast recording,
check it out.
But in the meantime, you definitely need to subscribe
and check out Creator Insider,
Tom and his team, other YouTube employees
are dedicating their time to teaching you
how this platform is working.
You can just click over right there,
you go check out their channel
and watch this video here about viewer satisfaction,
very important when it comes to discovery on YouTube.