A Test - Does Promoting = Less Views?...

You are on the right lines with your experiment. (I wonder if it was one of my threads or posts that you saw?)

1 month isn't enough time for this at all. YouTube's algorithm will sit up and take notice of your video if the video has a higher than average audience retention over a significant number of views. But obviously those views will take longer to get than usual if you haven't promoted the video. Being patient involves waiting more than 1 month. I have been doing YouTube for 2 years and I did a similar experiment myself about 18 months ago. As soon as I saw the results, I immediately stopped promoting (apart from announcing each new upload ONCE only on my own Twitter) and I now have 100k subs and I do YT fulltime.....

YouTuber1978 said:
This is 100% the smartest thing you've done. Just be patient and give it time. And by patient I mean be prepared to wait 3-6 months if you're a small channel (under 2,000 subs). This will definitely pay off in the long run.
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This guy gets it. ^^
 
@Crown The majority of my older videos, even quite a few of my newer/more recent ones were done that route and I've had little to no success and zero growth. It was only after I started promoting was there a noticeable difference. And this isn't over the span of months, it's the span of years. :/ Soooo, either it's me, the concept, or something else/some combination of things.
 
Crown said:
I have been doing YouTube for 2 years and I did a similar experiment myself about 18 months ago. As soon as I saw the results, I immediately stopped promoting (apart from announcing each new upload ONCE only on my own Twitter) and I now have 100k subs and I do YT fulltime.....
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Correlation does not necessarily equal causation. Content is the most important factor in whether a channel gets recognized by the suggested video algorithm, right? If all of your videos have high retention and lead to longer session times, the algorithm is supposed to reward you with higher ranking. Therefore, if you have quality content there is no real reason to believe that the views you would get from putting it in front of people who want to see it (via targeted promotion) will result in any less retention or shorter viewing session than the views you would get while not promoting at all.

What I'm saying is, if you have quality videos, they would have been picked up by the algorithm eventually whether you promoted or not. Conversely, @just Moto 's results are not conclusive either, since we do not know the quality of his content.
 
WilliamRayWalters said:
Correlation does not necessarily equal causation. Content is the most important factor in whether a channel gets recognized by the suggested video algorithm, right? If all of your videos have high retention and lead to longer session times, the algorithm is supposed to reward you with higher ranking. Therefore, if you have quality content there is no real reason to believe that the views you would get from putting it in front of people who want to see it (via targeted promotion) will result in any less retention or shorter viewing session than the views you would get while not promoting at all.

What I'm saying is, if you have quality videos, they would have been picked up by the algorithm eventually whether you promoted or not. Conversely, @just Moto 's results are not conclusive either, since we do not know the quality of his content.
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I agree content is king and good content will drive high audience retention which in the long term will drive more views than a video with low retention.

For the discussion about promotion, let's define promotion first. I'd define it as the creator actively advertising the videos and in some way or another asking people to "check it out". The viewer is in some way being "coerced" into clicking. The creator is active and the viewer is passive. Even if that promotion is "targeted", when people click on your video promotion, they are not doing so 100% of their own accord. You are getting a lot of what I call "curiousity clicks". They aren't necessarily in "YouTube mode" when they click and they may not even much time ahead of them. Compare that to someone who is already on YouTube and is on a YouTube binge. He / she is actively looking for YouTube vids to watch. When he she / clicks on a video, it's pretty much 100% their choice to do so and it's way more likely they have time ahead of them and they're not just clicking out of curiousity. In that scenario, the creator is passive and the viewer is active. My findings over a very large sample size with many videos have been that even "targeted" promotion results in a very poor retention rate compared to zero promotion and in the long term that will result in fewer daily views. The problem is that creators are impatient and they mistakenly think that lots of views after promotion is good. I don't know about anyone else, but I don't want to have to promote my vids like a madman left, right and centre every few days just to get a boost in views only to see them drop off forever and ever when I stop promoting them. I prefer to just publish my videos, have few views in the beginning and then to see them increase over time.

Just to add to my previous post, in my case, my video flatlined at around 50 views per day for 5 months but it had amazing retention in a very popular niche and I was confident it would pick up. After 5 months, it started appearing in the suggested videos list and it jumped overnight to 800 views per day (all via suggested vids) where it has stayed ever since. I have repeated this many times over.

kami said:
@Crown The majority of my older videos, even quite a few of my newer/more recent ones were done that route and I've had little to no success and zero growth. It was only after I started promoting was there a noticeable difference. And this isn't over the span of months, it's the span of years. :/ Soooo, either it's me, the concept, or something else/some combination of things.
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Like everything, you have to combine with other techniques. The first thing would be to do some preliminary SEO (adwords keyword tool) to ensure that the topic is a HOT TOPIC. ie There's no point trying to get in the suggested vids list if it's not a topic that has the potential to pull in a lot of views. :)
 
Crown said:
Like everything, you have to combine with other techniques. The first thing would be to do some preliminary SEO (adwords keyword tool) to ensure that the topic is a HOT TOPIC. ie There's no point trying to get in the suggested vids list if it's not a topic that has the potential to pull in a lot of views. :)
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Rereading my post, I sounded more angry than I am, so just to clarify, I'm not upset or anything xD I have somewhat recently began altering a TON of my older video's tags, because that's something I never took into an account back then, which I'm sure was a large factor (as with other SEO related doohickies) in my views. I know a lot more now than I knew then, and the quality is certainly much better. I'm sure a lot of it is my own fault, haha.

The most successful way of promotion for my channel, from what I've found, is just commenting on other related channels (on topic for the video) or responding to people's questions on there. I'm not blatantly promoting my channel, I'm just participating in the conversation. Most of my recent subs have come in from that and they're the ones watching/interacting with my videos. I'm not sure if you count that as promoting, but had I not made those comments, I wouldn't have had the increase that I did in views/subs/etc. :)
 
kami said:
Rereading my post, I sounded more angry than I am, so just to clarify, I'm not upset or anything xD I have somewhat recently began altering a TON of my older video's tags, because that's something I never took into an account back then, which I'm sure was a large factor (as with other SEO related doohickies) in my views. I know a lot more now than I knew then, and the quality is certainly much better. I'm sure a lot of it is my own fault, haha.

The most successful way of promotion for my channel, from what I've found, is just commenting on other related channels (on topic for the video) or responding to people's questions on there. I'm not blatantly promoting my channel, I'm just participating in the conversation. Most of my recent subs have come in from that and they're the ones watching/interacting with my videos. I'm not sure if you count that as promoting, but had I not made those comments, I wouldn't have had the increase that I did in views/subs/etc. :)
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Hey no worries. You didn't come across as angry at all. :) A tip I'd give you would be to make a video where you do the SEO first and you use the results of your SEO to choose your topic rather than the other way around. So use some keyword tools to come up with a shortlist of really popular topics and then choose one of those popular topics. So SEO will actually drive your video topic if you see what I mean. Then, make a totally awesome video about that topic and then do some very basic SEO - keyword in title, description and tags but don't go overboard, just keep the description natural, and then publish and sit on your hands for a few months. Hopefully your active subs will bring in your early views to get the ball rolling.
 
Crown said:
Hey no worries. You didn't come across as angry at all. :) A tip I'd give you would be to make a video where you do the SEO first and you use the results of your SEO to choose your topic rather than the other way around. So use some keyword tools to come up with a shortlist of really popular topics and then choose one of those popular topics. So SEO will actually drive your video topic if you see what I mean. Then, make a totally awesome video about that topic and then do some very basic SEO - keyword in title, description and tags but don't go overboard, just keep the description natural, and then publish and sit on your hands for a few months. Hopefully your active subs will bring in your early views to get the ball rolling.
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Ah, good xD Figured I'd mention it just in case though, tone is hard to read. Thanks for the tip! I'll definitely keep that in mind and try it out when I can. It's difficult when you already have so many topics you wanna hit, that you have to put them aside for something like you mentioned. (#hardlife) But I definitely would love to test it out and see how it goes. The hard part is then finding out what's popular and then what's plausible for me, haha.
 
Crown said:
I'd define it as the creator actively advertising the videos and in some way or another asking people to "check it out"
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My promotion primarily consists of adwords advertising. They are already immersed in the Youtube experience, going from video to video, and they see a relevant thumbnail/title (my ad) on the right at the top of all of the other suggestions. It is the same subject matter as those other suggestions. Once they actually click and get to my video it's no different than if they clicked any other of those suggestions. No?
 
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My promoting retention and YouTube search retention seems to be around the same but I do agree that with suggested views, the retention is higher by a few 10-15 seconds and its a big bonus if people binge watch my videos with the playlists I made since that has a higher retention than every other sources except maybe from browse features(subscribers).
 
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