If you're a creator making videos uploading them onto youtube and trying to grow an
audience around that content, you may have asked yourself along the way several times
how come i'm not seeing the success that i'd really like to see what if youtube success
was actually closer than you think my name is daniel and i've actually been on youtube for
over 10 years and i've worked with virtually every size and type of creator there is along the way
one particular point of conversation that always seems to come up with all different size creators
is the idea of having that one viral hit that takes off on your channel and really propels
it forward you've probably thought about that right having that one video that drives
millions of views and gets thousands of likes and comments and makes all kinds of money
and really establishes you as a creator on the rise but what if i told you that's rarely the way
that most creators find success if we take off our creator hats for a minute and start thinking more
like a consumer or someone who comes to youtube every day just to watch videos and enjoy them
it's easy to see why certain numbers start to hold a lot of value how many subscribers
a channel has how many views their new video got how many likes how many comments all those numbers
that are visible from the outside looking in in a lot of ways our brains have been trained to judge
how good or successful something is based on numbers when a musician releases some music we
used to count how many album sales they had now we start to count how many downloads they have
or what ranking they have on spotify or itunes when a new movie is released we start looking
at things like how many tickets they sold in the opening weekend was it a hit or was it a
failure based on only a couple of days of being out in front of the audience that might enjoy
it but is the same true when it comes to youtube videos let's dive into that for a minute here's a
successful video for my channel it's got almost a million views it's got thousands of likes and
comments it's got all the metrics that would make us think this is a successful video plus it comes
from a channel that has over 200 000 subscribers so all the numbers from the outside looking in
look pretty good but do you know which number may not have jumped out to you immediately as a viewer
time the amount of time it took for this video to reach this level of success time is a metric
that's not only undervalued but most likely misunderstood by most of the viewing audience
let me dig out the metrics for the video i just showed you this is what it looked like
right when i published it to my channel are these the kind of numbers that would quantify
it as a successful video on youtube i'd venture to guess no at least looking at them out of context
if this video was held to the same standard we do movies and judge it just by its opening days
of release you might think it's a failure you might get the completely wrong impression about
where this video might end up based on its initial launch let's crawl ahead in the lifespan of this
video as you can see over time its performance gets remarkably better but the question is why
why did youtube start loving this video more than it did when it was first released well
that's actually a trickier question to answer and it involves a deeper understanding of how youtube
actually works when you look only at the largest channels on the platform these are channels who
have been around for years building communities and viewership and engaging with audience over a
very long period of time so that they have a lot of people who have clicked the subscribe button
hit the notifications bell watched a lot of their back content recently in short they've
built very strong engaged communities around their channels so when those channels launch a new video
there are plenty of people ready there to consume that particular content
and send traffic data back to youtube about what they thought of that video youtube can interpret
that traffic data and get a better understanding about that video and who the right audience is
for it so that they can start recommending it to people who have no idea who this channel is or
haven't seen that video before now when a smaller channel releases a new video often it takes them
a lot longer to gather that same amount of traffic data about their new video youtube wants to make
sure that that video can perform just as well when it's pushed out to a much larger audience
as it did when it was served to a smaller group of really invested viewers that follow your channel
that's often why we'll have videos that we worked on pretty hard and we think the topic
is excellent the ctr seems pretty good the average view duration is strong and the engagement metrics
all look good but yet that video doesn't seem to be taking off the way we think it should
one of the ways to actually get that video to perform better is to make more content
let me show you what i mean as i scroll forward in the lifespan of that video
look what happens there's another surge in views in this video halfway through its lifespan and
that's because i started making more relevant high-performing content on my channel that helped
move this video farther along every time someone watched things like this youtube would look
back into my back catalog and try to find other relevant strong performing content
that they could recommend to that viewer this ability to publish strong content consistently
over time actually helped this video perform better itself so if you're a small creator
that's been working really hard on your content and you think you're doing all the right things
give yourself something that maybe you haven't time time to become a better creator with every
video you publish time for each of your older videos to start to perform with a larger target
audience time to start building out a larger catalog so that when you do have a video that does
better than the last youtube has more content on your channel to reach from to serve that viewer
next now if you're a creator who's struggling with how to make better content check out the
video that i have on screen now because i think that one will really help keep creating. Peace.