- So then is your channel in a downward spiral?
Are you getting less views and less subscribers,
even though you haven't changed a thing.
Here it happens to us as well, managed for stray.
At the start of every month through V community tab,
I ask everyone to sum up their previous month on YouTube.
I had to be honest recently and gave myself
a miserable two out of 10,
October, 2021 was a bad month for the vidIQ channel.
In fact, October, 2021 was the worst month,
both in terms of views and subscribers for almost two years.
That's a little embarrassing, isn't it?
Especially considering we are a channel that prides itself
on creator obsessed YouTube education.
This isn't supposed to happen to us.
Now, this is all set within the backdrop
of something very special.
That's about to happen on the channel.
We as a community are gonna hit an incredible landmark,
but to be honest, from a personal perspective,
it feels like I'm limping over the line a little bit.
Now this does prove what I've been saying all year.
Subscribers are not a reliable measure of channel growth.
People can smash that subscribe button as much as they want,
but if they don't watch subsequent videos
they are not helping out the channel,
And I've sensed somewhat of a cooling off
on the channel over the last six months,
but September and October are where things really hit hard.
So I think it's clear from the analytics
that the channel is in what you might call a recession,
but here is the crucial thing.
What do we do next?
Do we just continue to observe
and hope everything turns around?
Or do we ask this critical question, why?
And you should be doing more than just watching this video.
You should ask how the challenges I am tackling
on the vidIQ channel relate to the challenges you need
to tackle on your channel.
Because by the end of this video,
I want us all to have an action plan
on what we're going to do next.
Well, YouTube does continue to improve the way
it tells you what affects your channel
through words rather than numbers.
And it does highlight here that fewer uploads
have led to fewer views.
And that sounds like a very logical cause
and effect reason, doesn't it?
But as a quick side note,
YouTube keeps telling us that taking a break will not affect
your channel when clearly for most creators it does.
I think YouTube needs to be a little more clear
with this distinction.
Yes, I don't believe taking a break penalizes
your YouTube channel from a technical point of view,
but it sure as hell does affect your YouTube audience.
If you are publishing videos and your audience
can get similar content from somewhere else,
then you may be forgotten while you're taking a break.
But let me also stress that
I'm not gonna tell anybody to keep making videos
and just burn themselves out.
So yes, fair point YouTube, fewer videos means fewer views,
but it always goes a lot deeper than that, doesn't it?
And this is a real crux of the issue, traffic sources.
What YouTube is saying here is that views from search
and external sources have significantly dropped
and perhaps even worse,
YouTube isn't recommending our content
as much as it used to.
Let's tackle search first,
as you can see from the middle of summer,
there has been a slow and gradual decline in views
from these two sources.
And there is one very obvious reason for this,
back to school.
Now I don't take this to literally mean
that because students have gone back to school,
nobody's watching YouTube,
but I think it's a catch all phrase for people,
at least in the Northern hemisphere,
getting busy this time of year.
- Every September, we get this question a lot.
What typically happens in September
and I've shown this chart in a previous video
is viewer schedules start to change.
That's the beginning of the school cycle
and a lot of creators often have a steady decline
in and around this period with viewership,
then starting to spike on the weekends
or Saturdays and Sundays.
- These seasonal shifts work with us or against us
at the start of every year,
we see an increase in viewership
because people make resolutions
such as starting new YouTube channels.
And then there are global events
which well, change everything.
When the global pandemic hit last year
and billions of people found themselves stuck at home
with nothing to do,
many decided to watch YouTube, learn from it
and even start their own channels.
From a purely analytical viewpoint,
this was a boom period for YouTube education channels.
But thankfully the world is starting to reopen.
People can go about their daily lives
and be busy once again,
which ultimately puts vidIQ
from a search traffic perspective,
where we were two years ago.
So for me, there are three learnings there.
Yes, as of time of recording,
this tends to be a slow period for the channel.
And yes, we know that traffic should accelerate
at the start of the year,
so we should be preparing content right now
to meet that search demand.
But from a long-term perspective,
do we always want to be slaves to search traffic?
Of course you want you to recommending your content
be it through browse, suggested
or plunking it at the top of a search results,
but it doesn't really mean anything,
if you burn through verse viewers after one video.
Which is why I continue to return to this metric
and by extension this number, which is now hidden away
some what's in YouTube analytics.
How do you turn new viewers, into return viewers,
into sticky viewers, into dedicated supporters,
into diehard fans, viewer satisfaction.
Sadly, there is no viewer satisfaction metric.
It's a combination of a great many things
that to YouTube's credit,
they have been talking about in their blogs,
videos and educational material all year.
YouTube are been very intentional about this.
They don't wanna talk about a specific metric
or a specific benchmark number that you need to reach.
They want to encourage you to think of YouTube as a platform
for an audience rather than a system
that is trying to be hacked.
And I know if you're a regular viewer,
you've probably heard me say
that several times already this year,
but I really believe that to be true now
because I am slowly but surely trying
to craft vidIQ videos to satisfy you even more.
And that starts with watch time and audience V duration.
Generally speaking, the more of a video is watched,
the more satisfied the viewer is likely to be.
For myself I've set targets that include audience V duration
of above 70% after 30 seconds
and higher audience V duration.
than typical for the video as a whole.
I'm also working hard on how to get viewers
to keep on watching until the end.
And instead of abandoning the video,
they go on to watch something else I have suggested
from the vidIQ channel.
As you can see, I've already made significant progress
in these three areas,
but I think it's gonna take several months
and many more videos to prove out whether
or not viewers are more satisfied
and YouTube is gonna recommend this content more.
And once I feel I've got a good grasp
on these three areas,
there's another three, I wanna focus on.
Title, (mumbles), intro.
I wanna do a lot more planning on those three concepts
before I even press record.
Now I just seem to wing it.
So I don't know if you've ever noticed that elements
of storytelling while yes, this is YouTube education.
Ed Lawrence from Film Booth has proven
that you can inject elements of storytelling
to keep the viewer engaged whilst also educating creators.
I'm a great admirer of his work.
And then a hook, that you plant on the first third
of a video that keeps viewers watching till the end.
I wanna experiment with that as well.
As a creator on YouTube, the learning never stops.
And that's because of one simple irrefutable truth.
YouTube never stops learning.
- We change the recommendation system
and make improvements hundreds of times a year.
What we optimize for doesn't typically change.
So every time we make an update,
we usually get better at predicting what viewers
are most likely to watch and enjoy.
- So, as I said, at the very beginning of this video,
the reason you may be getting less views and subscribers
is because you haven't changed anything.
YouTube's recommendation system isn't designed to benefit
or penalize any particular channel,
but as improvements are made to benefit the viewer,
it may mean that your content is less suited because YouTube
has found a better alternative for that viewer.
What this basically boils down to,
is that YouTube is getting better
at getting people to watch more videos and for longer,
which means that we as creators need to get better
at what we do.
You know what this number is more a reflection of
the fact that we've never given up.
We continue to learn so that we can continue to create.
We've enjoyed high moments of success along
with battling through lows.
One of which we're going through right now,
but we are relentless.
And that's a mindset of pretty
much every single successful creator
on the YouTube platform.
So don't be surprised if by this time next year,
the vidIQ channel is an entirely different beast.
And if you're still watching this time next year,
Then I've achieved exactly what I set out to do.
I've turned you a sticky viewer.
So let's get back to your failing channel.
What is your game plan to stop that from happening?
Do let us know in the comments below.
And if you wanna know how I dramatically increase
the click-through rates on my end screens,
then do make sure to check out this video over here,
hashtag sticky viewer.