Question about audience retention!..

[AshAgokin]

Hey guys!

I recently started a new yt channel, I've read a lot of posts and seen a lot of videos about what to do but I still have a couple of questions I'd like to hear some opinions on..

1) Should I advertise my videos or not?
I tried putting ads on my videos a couple of months back and while I got an increase in views and a couple of subs every once in a while I realized my audience retention was suffering. Even though I thought otherwise, I was possibly not targeting the right people..

Eventually I thought I was hurting my channel rather than helping it and decided to quit the ads, let my audience retention go back up making my content more "valuable" to the yt algorithm in hope of it being suggested more often to the right people, because obviously youtube knows better than me who they are.

So my question is should I give it another shot with the ads and try to finetune their settings or am I hurting my channel? Should I just wait it out?

Question nr. 2) Does a bad performing video affect the channel as a whole? Should I hide older videos that have low audience retention scores? I've read a lot of conflicting opinions on this one..

 

[BrettMikaluk]

Can't really speak to question 2.

I've put ads out before and really didn't see a difference between that video and my others. I think that realistically those ads are for YouTubers that are between 50,000 and 100,000 subscribers that average probably between 100,000 to 200,000 monthly views organically. I wouldn't worry about them until then.

That's my opinion anyways!

 

[PictureFIT]

Does it hurt the channel? No one can say for sure, but it definitely doesn't help. I've discussed this with a few YT Partner Managers along with a few seminars at the YouTube space. WATCH TIME is your bread and butter. Increase that and you're good to go. As long as people aren't just clicking on your video and then immediately clicking away, if the video helps increase watch time, then it should be helpful.

Not a big fan of YouTube ads. Don't need it if you make good content.

 

[AshAgokin]

Can't really speak to question 2.

I've put ads out before and really didn't see a difference between that video and my others. I think that realistically those ads are for YouTubers that are between 50,000 and 100,000 subscribers that average probably between 100,000 to 200,000 monthly views organically. I wouldn't worry about them until then.

That's my opinion anyways!

Not sure I understand your answer, I have a feeling you're talking about monetization? What I mean is advertise my videos in order to gain views and subscribers!

Does it hurt the channel? No one can say for sure, but it definitely doesn't help. I've discussed this with a few YT Partner Managers along with a few seminars at the YouTube space. WATCH TIME is your bread and butter. Increase that and you're good to go. As long as people aren't just clicking on your video and then immediately clicking away, if the video helps increase watch time, then it should be helpful.

Not a big fan of YouTube ads. Don't need it if you make good content.

I'm not a fan of yt ads either. In my little experience they've never been helpful other than to inflate views because people rarely ever engage with the content. They prefer discovering things on their own rather than being "forced" to see something.

But the thing is, I spend so much time creating my content and the feeling of "not being seen" can get very frustrating..

 

[EVO]

Worry about watch time and make great content. The views/subs will come without the use of Adwords.

 

[BrettMikaluk]

Not sure I understand your answer, I have a feeling you're talking about monetization? What I mean is advertise my videos in order to gain views and subscribers!

That's what I mean, how often do you see youtubers with a couple hundred subscribers advertising their channel? hardly ever. It's not a viable way of growing a channel in my opinion.