subversiveasset
Posting Mad!
Very often, I hear the complaint from YouTubers or their audience members that their sub box is broken because it doesn't show all the videos by people they are subscribed to.
While it's certainly possible that there's a bug that YouTube hasn't figured out yet, I think part of this is a misunderstanding about what YouTube's default behavior is. As a related example: everyone should know by now that subscribing to a channel doesn't automatically send notifications for every video that channel publishes to your notification bell or to your email. By default, YouTube will only show notifications for a random selection of channel "highlights," rather than every video. (To change this, subscribers have to opt in to receiving all notifications in the bell/app/email by "ringing" the bell and checking the option to receive all notifications.)
This has obviously led to many YouTubers placing explicit calls to action telling people not only to subscribe, but also to ring the bell.
However, even without ringing the bell, there is a place where subscribers should be able to see all content from channels they are subscribed to in chronological order. This is the subscriptions page, often shortened as sub box.
It's important to note that the subscriptions page is separate from the YouTube home page. The subscriptions page only shows content from channels one is subscribed to, and it should show all the content from subscribed channels. However, the home page is a mixture of content from YouTubers that a person is subscribed to and non-subscribed channels. Additionally, not all subscribed content will go to the home page.
So, here's a question: How can you tell if your subscribers, on average, know the difference between the subscriptions page and the home page?
Here, we can check this by putting a filter on in YouTube analytics and checking traffic sources.
From your Creator Studio (you can get there from the browser version of YouTube by clicking your profile icon, then clicking Creator Studio), go to your Analytics page, and particularly the section of Analytics for Traffic Sources.
By default, YouTube will show data for both Subscribed and Non-Subscribed audience members. For the analysis that I'm looking for though, non-subscribers will distort our data -- so filter to just show Subscribers.
From here, if you scroll down on traffic sources, you'll see what percentage each traffic source makes up from your subscribers. If you feel comfortable with sharing, please let me know what percentage of watch time you get from "Browse Features" vs the other categories. For me, it looks like this:
In other words, for the last 28 days (there is another option to change the time period, if you would like), 41% of the watch time I got from my subscribers was from "Browse Features".
But what is Browse Features, you may ask? If you click on the link, you will get further detail:
Again, if you feel comfortable, I would love to hear from you what percentage you get from "Subscriptions" vs "Home Page". Here's my break down:
So, you can see that of the 41% of subscriber watch time coming from Browse features, 63% are coming from the Subscriptions page, while 28% are coming from the home page.
I don't have hard data from YouTube as a whole, which is why I would like to know if you are seeing anything different. My hunch is that many users don't know the difference between the subscriptions page and the home page. If your users don't, then you would likely see a much lower percentage of Browse Features traffic coming from the subscriptions page, and a much higher percentage coming from the home page. The risk here is that not every one of your videos will show up on every subscriber's home page, so if your subscribers are generally watching from the home page's recommendations, then this may pose problems.
Anyway, I hope maybe this helped you think in a different way about YouTube Analytics. Please let me know if there are any tips you you have making analytics work better for you
While it's certainly possible that there's a bug that YouTube hasn't figured out yet, I think part of this is a misunderstanding about what YouTube's default behavior is. As a related example: everyone should know by now that subscribing to a channel doesn't automatically send notifications for every video that channel publishes to your notification bell or to your email. By default, YouTube will only show notifications for a random selection of channel "highlights," rather than every video. (To change this, subscribers have to opt in to receiving all notifications in the bell/app/email by "ringing" the bell and checking the option to receive all notifications.)
This has obviously led to many YouTubers placing explicit calls to action telling people not only to subscribe, but also to ring the bell.
However, even without ringing the bell, there is a place where subscribers should be able to see all content from channels they are subscribed to in chronological order. This is the subscriptions page, often shortened as sub box.
It's important to note that the subscriptions page is separate from the YouTube home page. The subscriptions page only shows content from channels one is subscribed to, and it should show all the content from subscribed channels. However, the home page is a mixture of content from YouTubers that a person is subscribed to and non-subscribed channels. Additionally, not all subscribed content will go to the home page.
So, here's a question: How can you tell if your subscribers, on average, know the difference between the subscriptions page and the home page?
Here, we can check this by putting a filter on in YouTube analytics and checking traffic sources.
From your Creator Studio (you can get there from the browser version of YouTube by clicking your profile icon, then clicking Creator Studio), go to your Analytics page, and particularly the section of Analytics for Traffic Sources.
By default, YouTube will show data for both Subscribed and Non-Subscribed audience members. For the analysis that I'm looking for though, non-subscribers will distort our data -- so filter to just show Subscribers.
From here, if you scroll down on traffic sources, you'll see what percentage each traffic source makes up from your subscribers. If you feel comfortable with sharing, please let me know what percentage of watch time you get from "Browse Features" vs the other categories. For me, it looks like this:
In other words, for the last 28 days (there is another option to change the time period, if you would like), 41% of the watch time I got from my subscribers was from "Browse Features".
But what is Browse Features, you may ask? If you click on the link, you will get further detail:
Again, if you feel comfortable, I would love to hear from you what percentage you get from "Subscriptions" vs "Home Page". Here's my break down:
So, you can see that of the 41% of subscriber watch time coming from Browse features, 63% are coming from the Subscriptions page, while 28% are coming from the home page.
I don't have hard data from YouTube as a whole, which is why I would like to know if you are seeing anything different. My hunch is that many users don't know the difference between the subscriptions page and the home page. If your users don't, then you would likely see a much lower percentage of Browse Features traffic coming from the subscriptions page, and a much higher percentage coming from the home page. The risk here is that not every one of your videos will show up on every subscriber's home page, so if your subscribers are generally watching from the home page's recommendations, then this may pose problems.
Anyway, I hope maybe this helped you think in a different way about YouTube Analytics. Please let me know if there are any tips you you have making analytics work better for you