FartingOnThings
I've Got It
Well, this looks interesting. Can you show the relative retention of both videos? Are they above average or not?
A Test - Does Promoting = Less Views?...
- Thread starter just Moto
- Start date
just Moto
I Love YTtalk
Maybe it was posted within too close a time frame to the first? Maybe too similar in content and title. Although looking at the pic below you can see the external links I posted for the first is high.
I know the first one is now a "suggested" video and pulling alot of views from there as well as having ranked for certain long tail keywords. As mentioned, too many factors and it may be coincidental. The channel has more than doubled in size since starting this test and it looks as though it's being allocated a certain volume of watch time/traffic each month. I'm hoping the second video ranks eventually but there have been many posted since similar in content/lenght/title/tags etc. and promoted that have blown it out of the water.
WilliamRayWalters
I Love YTtalk
I'm curious about where or at least generally what kind of promotion you are doing. Those relative retention numbers are awfully high for any promotion that exists off of youtube. It may be simply the nature of your videos and the people who are enthusiasts that if you put this kind of video in front of them they will watch most of it, even if it's a long video. Also, and I hate to keep bringing this up but I feel it is always glossed over and ignored, is the fact that Youtube tells us that videos which lead to longer session times will be rewarded. So if your low % retention videos (the ones you listed on the another page in this thread) attract the kind of person who is just going to go from those types of fail videos one after the other, it's likely that the overall viewing session will be long, which could be the reason that those videos still do well despite low retention.
I know that certain videos will suck me into an area of Youtube where I can watch an hour straight of a certain type of video. A great example is bullies getting their asses kicked. Boy are those fun to binge watch. I'll watch 50 in a row if I'm in the right mood haha.
One more question. The video on top is the promoted one and the one underneath is the non promoted one, right? From the beginning, how many views/day difference were the two videos getting? Was video #1 getting twice as many views? Also, can you exclude the data prior to video #1 getting picked up by the suggested video algorithm? I'd like to know the relative retention of the two videos prior to the influx of what we would assume would be higher retention views via suggested videos.
This is a solid thread, by the way. It's good work you're doing.
just Moto
I Love YTtalk
Yes the first video (BLUE LINE) is the promoted one.
Audience retention prior to the first one ranking suggested:
One thing to note, yes these are fails videos, and as such people may see a clip they like and go back mulitple times and watch it again and again leading to viewership OVER 100% for that person which is the case in many videos.
Places I promote include reddit, niche specific web forums, facebook, instagram, some sports video sites, and a few others, ultimately I would get 50 links out to the video within the first few days across the web. I also made a website blog to post a video too then post that link to my facebook page with a play button over the picture so people would click it because facebook typically wouldn't show a youtube video in news feeds.
Audience retention prior to the first one ranking suggested:
One thing to note, yes these are fails videos, and as such people may see a clip they like and go back mulitple times and watch it again and again leading to viewership OVER 100% for that person which is the case in many videos.
Places I promote include reddit, niche specific web forums, facebook, instagram, some sports video sites, and a few others, ultimately I would get 50 links out to the video within the first few days across the web. I also made a website blog to post a video too then post that link to my facebook page with a play button over the picture so people would click it because facebook typically wouldn't show a youtube video in news feeds.
RichGuitarGamer
I Love YTtalk
let us know what happens bro!
This is something I was thinkin about the other day tbh!
This is something I was thinkin about the other day tbh!
WilliamRayWalters
I Love YTtalk
This is pretty interesting because we have this discussion on here often, whether promotion hurts your channel. This is only one example in one niche, but it, at the very least, shows that promoting early on in the life of a video does not prevent it from getting picked up by the suggested video algorithm. Now, it's possible that 3 months from now the non-promoted video gets picked up by the algorithm and ranked even higher or on a more popular video and gets twice as many views. Entirely possible. But at least for this video it shows that promotion didn't kill its chances.
Out of curiosity, what happened on day 53 or so that gave video#1 that initial bump in views?
Also, it's impossible to draw solid conclusions from one small test like this. It's simply too small a sample size. We need a couple other people with established quality content to run the same test but in different genres to truly determine whether promotion does or does not hurt a video's chances. It's pretty amazing to me that your retention was almost identical before you got picked up by that suggested video algorithm to afterward. That is not typical, at least not within the few genres of my channels. My suggested video source is always higher than my external, usually by a pretty good deal. I don't really promote externally much though, so wherever it's being promoted might not be nearly as targeted as your promotion was.
You know what'll happen. We'll figure this all out by this time next year and the day after Youtube will announce that they are moving away from retention and session length as the primary ranking criteria.
just Moto
I Love YTtalk
I laughed at that, I thought exactly the same thing...
The views came from "Browse Features". Looking at the analytics for 4 or so days around that time it was when a number of other videos were running hot and I guess video 1 was being shown along side in the browse features.
Promotion is very niche targeted, some good audience retention from some places 40-70%... Reddit is the worst with 29% for the last quater. I've just about dropped it all together and as the channel heads to a stage where promotion is becoming less important, higher quality content spaced out accordingly (1 - 2 weeks) seems to be the right way to go and hope my subscribers do all the promoting.