Maximising views from related videos

lsherran

lsherran

Liking YTtalk
Hi all,

Apologies if this has already been covered, I couldn't see it anywhere else in the forum, but recently I seem to have been benefiting a lot from traffic from related videos. This would appear to be a great strategy for views and growing your channel, but I'm trying to nail down the specifics of how it works.

Initially this started with a video I created about a tattoo cover up - I used VidIQ and was able to optimise the SEO so it ranks quite well for a few good keywords (i.e. it's #4 for "tattoo coverup"), however the traffic from related video searches is now the primary source. 3-4 months later and it's still getting around 150-300 views per day from related videos. Unsurprisingly this is now my most popular video.

More recently, my last 2 videos have had really big spikes in traffic approximately 12 hours after publishing, which only last 3-4 hours. My last video posted on Sunday night has had nearly 2,600 views, peaking at 730 views in one hour. Again, seemingly all from related videos. These 2 videos have now both settled down after the initial spike to 3-5 views per hour.

My question is this; has anyone else experienced anything similar, and how can do we just ride the wave of traffic if and when it comes, or can we maximise/extend the period of the spike?

Reading the limited posts on this online, it would appear that the description plays a big role in this. While the description counts as a small factor in SEO compared to say tags, the description seems to be used for related videos.

I would be really interested to hear if anyone else has had any experience and/or success with this.

THANKS!
 
Nice dude sounds like your getting some traction!

YouTube's algorithm looks at the past 24 and 48 hours along with 28 day metrics of your videos and channel. This means the best time to post is right after a video pops as this will drive up your metrics over a short period of time; telling YouTube they should promote your other videos more often.

This is probably the reason why you're seeing spikes in the 2 recent uploads.

As far as siphoning traffic from related videos goes I believe your video and channel tags will help this.

A strategy is to go in your analytics for your video that is popping and go to traffic sources, you'll be able to click through the YouTube tab to see what videos are sending you the most traffic. At which point you can change your tags accordingly.

However, be careful of changing anything on your published video after it is popping as changing a tag or description will signal YouTube to 're-crawl' your video which may cause their system to reconsider the traffic to that video.

Cheers,
Ryan
 
This happened to me too and I have a bit of a theory.
Just like you said the video that this happened to is still getting a ton of views per day and I've confirmed that it's definitely through recommended and related videos. So my theory is that if your video slowly starts gaining a good amount of views then youtube will slowly start recommending it to other people who search for similar things. So then you start accumulating a ton of views and it's recommended to more people and the cycle kind of just continues. Like a snowball effect. In both of our cases, I'm pretty sure the videos are being offered in related/recommended videos because it's niche content. When I posted my recent video which is similar to the niche of my original super recommended video, I also started getting the same effect. I'm pretty sure if you wanted to ride the waves there you could definitely start making similar videos (if you aren't already). I've also noticed that the videos in the endscreen of that video are driving people to watch those as well, so I would definitely make sure your endscreen content is pointing towards similar niche content.
 
Thanks for replying @MintApocalypse! Yes that sounds like a very similar experience, and I think you're right about the niche content. Are you aware of anything different you did to the video with the high views such as changes to the description/tags/etc? It's great that some of these videos have "lightning strike" spikes in traffic, but I feel there must be a way to extend this further...
 
Actually its a video I thought would do poorly because it was a 30 minute long cosplay tutorial. I had been considering scrapping it because of its length, but a viewer asked how I did it so I threw it together for them. Tagging wise I used my same process, which I believe is just typical SEO stuff. I was really surprised when I started getting so many views. I'm personally really thinking it's niche content stuff, at least in my case.
 
@Obsurdity hi mate thank you very much for your input, that's really interesting! I think I missed your post yesterday so apologies for the slow response!

The way you described the algorithm definitely makes sense in this situation given the timings of my recent uploads. What I've noticed is that one of those videos now has very minimal traffic (about 24 views a day), and so I have updated the description and tags. This may have had a negative effect given what you've said about re-considerations after re-crawling, but I'll see how it goes.[DOUBLEPOST=1491983343,1491983091][/DOUBLEPOST]@MintApocalypse video length is another interesting point. Most of my videos are around 5 minutes long, but the first video to experience the spike was >15 minutes! I read an article recently explaining how, and I quote, "the average length of a video ranking on the first page of YouTube is 14 minutes, 50 seconds". Although the suggestion is that shorter videos are preferred on YouTube for the viewers, from YouTube's perspective they want videos that will increase the average watch time.
 
lsherran said:
@MintApocalypse video length is another interesting point. Most of my videos are around 5 minutes long, but the first video to experience the spike was >15 minutes! I read an article recently explaining how, and I quote, "the average length of a video ranking on the first page of YouTube is 14 minutes, 50 seconds". Although the suggestion is that shorter videos are preferred on YouTube for the viewers, from YouTube's perspective they want videos that will increase the average watch time.
Click to expand...
Oh, this is very interesting! I've been noticing that the bigger youtubers have started making longer content, I thought it was just because they felt like it, but it would make since if the algorithm changed or something. I know youtube wants to up watch time rather than views so maybe this is a way of them doing it.
 
lsherran said:
@Obsurdity hi mate thank you very much for your input, that's really interesting! I think I missed your post yesterday so apologies for the slow response!

The way you described the algorithm definitely makes sense in this situation given the timings of my recent uploads. What I've noticed is that one of those videos now has very minimal traffic (about 24 views a day), and so I have updated the description and tags. This may have had a negative effect given what you've said about re-considerations after re-crawling, but I'll see how it goes.

I't may even make sense to drive some organic or bought traffic to a video as fast as possible first then change something in the meta data. This may work in your favor and the algorithm will promote your video. That's just a theory however, I plan on testing this soon.

[DOUBLEPOST=1491983343,1491983091]
[/DOUBLEPOST]@MintApocalypse video length is another interesting point. Most of my videos are around 5 minutes long, but the first video to experience the spike was >15 minutes! I read an article recently explaining how, and I quote, "the average length of a video ranking on the first page of YouTube is 14 minutes, 50 seconds". Although the suggestion is that shorter videos are preferred on YouTube for the viewers, from YouTube's perspective they want videos that will increase the average watch time.
Click to expand...

Yup, long videos are the way to go. YouTube doesn't care about % watched (only average watch time). Therefore a 50 minute video with 10% average watched duration is going to outperform a video that is 4 minutes with a 100% watch time (assuming they perform the same with all other metrics)

Another added bonus that I have noticed with long videos (specially 30+ min) is they have a higher probability of being added to a playlist to be watched later; this is a great ranking signal.

I got one 40 minute video that is current in round 200 playlists at this time and I attribute a LOT of its success to that.
 
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