Active subscribers?

[Tac0cann0n]

Hey guys, I have a few questions for you all.

My channel (as of right now) has 79 subscribers. I'm happy with this, and every few days or weeks a gain a few subscribers. For the most part, they are random, since I don't really like posting my channel everywhere for advertisement. I just want loyal subscribers who want to view my content all the way through.

My videos are pulling around 50 per two weeks or so. I was also curious on the retention rate of my video being around 20%. This may be from my three older videos, all which have 5,000+ views, but have been out for several years.

So, how do you guys keep the retention rate of your subscribers up? Is it with shorter videos? Calls to action? I'm curious to see how you all deal with that.

Secondly, I was wondering about your techniques for retaining loyal subscribers. For me, YouTube isn't really about getting thousands of views. I honestly want to get to 500 and then I'll be happy. The thing is, I feel like promoting or asking people to check me out just leads to them subscribing.... and then never watching.

Anyways, I figured I'd ask you all on your thoughts. Any tips, ideas and insight would be appreciated!

 

[Chris Raynerson]

Are you sure you are getting most recent audience retention? Look through each of your new videos and see what the audience retention of each of those are.

 

[Tac0cann0n]

Are you sure you are getting most recent audience retention? Look through each of your new videos and see what the audience retention of each of those are.

I see what you mean now. Somewhere around 30-35%, Not bad, but I'd like it to be around 50%. Any ideas?

 

[PositivelyBrainwashed]

If you're goal is to get lots of loyal subscribers, I think it's a lot easier to think big. I don't think it's reasonable to aim for getting 50% of your subs loyal. There will always be subs who'll forget about you, too busy at the moment, or only like certain videos you make. It's a lot easier to aim to get more views knowing that 10%-20% are going to be loyal.

 

[Tac0cann0n]

If you're goal is to get lots of loyal subscribers, I think it's a lot easier to think big. I don't think it's reasonable to aim for getting 50% of your subs loyal. There will always be subs who'll forget about you, too busy at the moment, or only like certain videos you make. It's a lot easier to aim to get more views knowing that 10%-20% are going to be loyal.

Alright, that makes sense when looking at the numbers. So do you think that 500 subscribers is a reasonable goal to set?

 

[Chris Raynerson]

So I'm going off of what I see and have no clue on the in-depth details of your work. I recommend you watch your videos in the analytics tab on audience retention and pay attention to where people drop off.

The "How To Be Notified" video, I literally thought you were going to give an actual tutorial on how to be notified of subscriptions. By 15 seconds, I stopped because I realized that's not what this video is but rather you just self-promoting yourself. I basically get dupped. That will hurt your audience retention. Make your titles relevant to the topic of your video and though you see big youtubers click-bait, don't. Not because click-baiting doesn't work... it does, but not for small youtubers like you. So that'd be me tuning out at 25%.

"Wider Than Oprah" i stopped at 45 seconds, so that's 11%. I literally stopped when you did a mock PewDiePie transition. That screams ripoff and made me turn out. I also say you could cut out a lot of the parts where no one is talking. A trick you could use is to cut the audio a bit so it sounds like you guys are talking to each other back-and-forth yet leave the video intact. If you have to have silence in between talking, there should be music in the background. Complete silence is unsettling, mostly used in horror films. Unless I'm suppose to be scared, don't do that.

"Jingle Jerry" was better, I got through a lot easier. 1:56 so that's 34%. That wasn't that bad honestly. Could cut out a lot of the times when you guys are just saying the f-word. Nothing wrong with saying it, but saying it over and over and not making a coherent point should just be cut out. The memes didn't bother me, liked the weed one. The words on the screen randomly popping up I could of done without.

I hope that helps you in some way.

 

[Tac0cann0n]

So I'm going off of what I see and have no clue on the in-depth details of your work. I recommend you watch your videos in the analytics tab on audience retention and pay attention to where people drop off.

The "How To Be Notified" video, I literally thought you were going to give an actual tutorial on how to be notified of subscriptions. By 15 seconds, I stopped because I realized that's not what this video is but rather you just self-promoting yourself. I basically get dupped. That will hurt your audience retention. Make your titles relevant to the topic of your video and though you see big youtubers click-bait, don't. Not because click-baiting doesn't work... it does, but not for small youtubers like you. So that'd be me tuning out at 25%.

"Wider Than Oprah" i stopped at 45 seconds, so that's 11%. I literally stopped when you did a mock PewDiePie transition. That screams ripoff and made me turn out. I also say you could cut out a lot of the parts where no one is talking. A trick you could use is to cut the audio a bit so it sounds like you guys are talking to each other back-and-forth yet leave the video intact. If you have to have silence in between talking, there should be music in the background. Complete silence is unsettling, mostly used in horror films. Unless I'm suppose to be scared, don't do that.

"Jingle Jerry" was better, I got through a lot easier. 1:56 so that's 34%. That wasn't that bad honestly. Could cut out a lot of the times when you guys are just saying the f-word. Nothing wrong with saying it, but saying it over and over and not making a coherent point should just be cut out. The memes didn't bother me, liked the weed one. The words on the screen randomly popping up I could of done without.

I hope that helps you in some way.

Yeah it definitely does! I'll be sure to edit more of the audio silence out for sure. I didn't mean for the how to be notified video to be a bait and switch. If you watch to about 25 seconds, I actually do give a tutorial... but like you said since it seems like I am self promoting in the beginning it looks like a turn off. I'll pay more attention to the audio, and transitions. Thank you!

 

[Kush Patel]

The thing with retention is that if your videos are shorter, then your retention should be higher. My videos are never under 10 minutes, so my retention is garbage. Also cause I'm new.

 

[Tac0cann0n]

The thing with retention is that if your videos are shorter, then your retention should be higher. My videos are never under 10 minutes, so my retention is garbage. Also cause I'm new.

I've been focusing on creating shorter videos as well. I just need to hone in on the content I want to create. Editing is key... well for me anyways adding in all sorts of b******t. I'll probably take it easy on that since Camtasia sometimes crashes when I go to render it. Any other advice would be rad

 

[javacentral]

The thing with retention is that if your videos are shorter, then your retention should be higher. My videos are never under 10 minutes, so my retention is garbage. Also cause I'm new.

I've noticed that with just how I watch videos. If I see a 10 minute video, I sometimes nope out of it just because I don't feel like watching something that long, even if it has good content. That's why I try to keep mine at most around 5 minutes