- How often should you upload videos to YouTube?
Can you upload too often, too infrequently?
What is the perfect uploading schedule for my channel?
Well, as always, it depends.
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- I think we'll start with the technical answer to this one
and yes, there is a point where you can upload
too much content to YouTube
and this all comes down to notifications.
So let me ask you a question.
How many notifications do you think you can receive
from a channel you're subscribed to in a 24 hour period?
Give the answers in the comments below
and I'll answer that in about 30 seconds.
Notifications are of course very important to your channel.
These people who have put faith in your content
by pressing that red button are getting those notifications
because it is assumed that they want to watch your content
and people visiting your new video for at least certainly
the first three to six hours are mostly coming
from your notifications, from your subscribers
that drive up that initial video velocity.
The more clicks you get on your videos,
the more watch time you get,
the higher audience view duration
can all be positive signals to YouTube
in the early stages of your video, which means that YouTube
will share your content with more people.
So yes, notifications are important
and you want to make sure that every single subscriber
who clicked on that notification bell is notified
that you have new contents which is why you should post
a maximum of three videos every 24 hours
because that's the most notifications a subscriber can get
from a channel in that period.
And of course the very worst thing you can do
is bulk publish videos all at once.
So if you are going to release three videos a day,
then stagger them in the morning, afternoon
and in the evening.
Nobody wants three notifications or video releases
from the same channel all at once.
But of course, anything more than three videos a day
on a YouTube channel is on the extreme end of things.
So let's talk about the 99.9% of people who still need
this upload question answered.
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- Let's jump to the other end of the spectrum
where you as a creator think
you don't create enough content.
Can posting too infrequently harm your channel?
And again, the answer depends on your audience.
For example, a younger audience of say 18 or below,
probably has a little bit more time on their hands
and they're more connected to the digital world.
So they're likely to be on YouTube
and other social media platforms every single day.
And if you're a gaming channel,
that fits right into your wheelhouse.
Posting a video every single day, potentially more,
is going to get along just fine with your audience.
But on the other hand, what if you're a very busy mom
who also works during the week and is so busy
that they have maybe an hour or two on a Sunday night
to see what's going on in the world of YouTube
with their favorite creators.
It all does depend on creator and audience cadence.
There's probably a good chance that your watching habits
on YouTube as a creator are aligned to a certain extent
to your target audience.
So you can ask these questions yourself a little bit.
How often do you go on YouTube
and for how long do you watch video content?
And are you the type who are loyal to a certain channel
and will wait for new content to come out
or do you get restless when there's gaps
between video content and you move on
to something else to satisfy your needs.
That's probably how your audience reacts to content as well.
Now these are gonna be somewhat wild generalizations,
but again a gaming channel maybe post a video once a day,
a vlogging channel, maybe posts once or twice a week
and an animation channel probably doesn't post for
a couple of months so we have huge gaps between content.
Is there any way you can fix that?
And the answer might be yes.
With the turmoil that Tiktok is currently in,
YouTube is trying to step into that place
with their new YouTube Shorts feature.
In order for your video to be considered a short,
it has to be in a vertical video formats
of less than 60 seconds and include hashtag shorts
in the video title or description.
So certainly for channels that have longer gaps
between uploading that regular content,
this may be a viable alternative
to feed a little bit of your content to your audience.
It might be behind the scenes or a sneak peek
into a future video, YouTube Shorts,
start researching it and maybe do a little bit of testing.
(upbeat music)
- Let's go back to audience cadence.
And that's mom who's really busy who can maybe
only visit YouTube once a week.
If you're publishing it several videos a week,
it might be that they just don't have time
to watch all of your content.
And so that's when you need
to start reviewing audience cadence,
and you can do that through some YouTube analytics.
In the YouTube creator studio,
we're going to go to analytics
and on the main channel analytics page,
we're going to the audience tab and changing the time period
to the last 90 days as this is the maximum amount of data
that can be recorded for unique viewers,
and average views per viewer.
Now, what we're gonna do is swap out the subscriber count
here for the channel views so that we can see the channel
got 7 million views over that 90 day period,
but 4 million of those views that came from unique viewers
or visitors to your content.
And so what that means is that a average viewer
watched 1.7 videos on our channel.
Obviously you want to get this number as high as possible
with ideally each viewer watching all of your videos.
And it would be awesome if some of you could share
these figures of your own analytics in the comments below.
And I will say this, the data is a little difficult
to interpret because if you see this graph,
not a single one of his numbers is above 1.7.
So how can that be the average?
I'll leave out to YouTube imagination.
Now, first of all, unique viewers
can be an indication of content consistency.
If you're producing really consistent content
all of the time and hitting that target audience
with everything that they want to watch,
you would expect that number to rise.
But if you're producing all sorts of weird and wacky stuff
that the viewer didn't necessarily sign up for,
then the unique viewer account is probably going to be lower
cause they'll watch one video, see the next thing
and decide it's not for them and move on.
Now then, when it comes to upload frequency,
if you're uploading videos at the same cadence
as when your audience watches content,
then they have the opportunity to watch all of your content.
However, if you're producing far too much content
that your audience doesn't have time to watch,
then there are going to be gaps in the videos
that they watch and your unique view account
may start to decline.
As your channel grows and you produce more content,
it can take a lot more to influence these analytics,
as you saw from my graph, which was fairly static.
But what you can test doing is maybe adding an extra video
a week to your content or removing a video
a week to your content, because it may be that you're doing
all of these extra videos, but nobody's watching them
because they just don't have time
because the upload frequency doesn't match
their watching frequency.
(upbeat music)
- Another thing that can influence
your upload frequency is quality.
And we get to that discussion of quantity versus quality.
Yes, everybody makes a video with the intention
of it being the highest quality possible.
Having said that, there are times when quantity
may be more beneficial and that is at the start
of your YouTube journey.
Uploading more frequently gives you
more shots at the target,
especially when you're not quite sure
how the YouTube process works.
So after you've done 50 and a hundred videos,
you'll start to get an idea of what works best
for you and your audience and you can tune your videos
with higher quality in that regard.
But you're only gonna get that experience
if you create content.
At the same time, YouTube has more data from you
to play with so it can understand how to serve
your content to the best audience.
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- There are also often time sensitive opportunities
which means that you might not be able to put in
the best quality for your content but you need to get out
as much information as possible before everybody else
floods YouTube with the same content.
Being first can sometimes be super powerful on YouTube.
Let me put it this way.
If you're a tech channel and you publish content
on a regular schedule of every Monday and Friday,
let's say the iPhone 12 is announced on a Tuesday.
Are you gonna wait until Friday to publish your faults?
Or are you going to try and publish your immediate reaction
on the Tuesday evening?
Yes, some channels can get away with waiting a little while,
but that's because they have an established audience
who trust the creator and know that
they will provide unique, valuable information
that they can't get anywhere else.
But for most people, time is of the essence
when it comes to a trending topic.
I will also say this, never put all of your YouTube eggs
into one video and hope that
that is gonna be the one that goes viral.
Anybody who's been creating content on YouTube
has this familiar story.
They've put all of their time, effort and energy
into a video thinking this is gonna be the one
that takes their channel to the next level.
And they release it,
but it doesn't perform as well as they expected.
And they're a little disheartened by that.
Next month, they put together a couple of videos
that took them nowhere near as long,
and they think nothing more of it.
And then those videos turned out
to be the most popular ones on the channel.
That happens to everyone.
So in my personal experience, at least,
it's best not to attach too much personal emotion and hope
and faith and trust into one video and spread it out
across many videos over a longer period of time.
(upbeat music)
- Also think about your capacity to create video content.
For example, let's say you can make five videos a month.
Should you publish those at five videos?
Well, what if life gets in the way
or you wanna take a vacation,
maybe it's a good idea to publish four videos
and have that non time sensitive video held back
in case you need to release it while you're off on vacation,
or you just need a break from YouTube for a couple of weeks.
If you have a bit of slack in your upload frequency,
it means that you continue to maintain your upload frequency
and your audience remains satisfied.
So with all of that being said, I hope you understand,
at least some of the theory about
how often you should upload to YouTube.
But of course, all of this leads on
to the next question about uploading.
When should I upload and publish my videos to YouTube?
And the answer is it's in this video right over here,
so do check it out and of course enjoy
the rest of your video making day.