it's probably more complicated than just luck
$100 ? that's a lot, spend it on your health, in the mean time try to use free promotion assist tools
lets start with the basics, here are a few forum tips:
You can make it easier for every1 here to find your channel by putting a link under name(age) - read my signature on HOW TO below this msg
Also have a look at forum rules
https://yttalk.com/threads/yttalk-rules-quick-and-easy-to-read.127266/
My content is good, the watchtime is good, in fact one of my best videos has 20% above average retention but the CTR was low at the begining so it became stagnant and didn't get recommended, even if the CTR went higher later on, it didn't get picked up. The thumbnail was good. It's a bit of a crapshot really, you have to get lucky in the window of opportunity where they give you tons of impressions when you upload it for the first hours and have enough people clicking to get past a certain treshold of CTR that supposedly activates the algorithm to share your video in the recommended section.
I also don't like that in the new YT Studio they don't give you a separate chart for subs gained and subs lost, just the net result of subs gained and lost, so I don't know if people are unsubing at an abnormal rate because of this video or not (im not sure if that would cause the algorithm to not pick it up too, but it could be that my channel is too big and the organic amount of subs lost has to be compensated by more traffic, and if the video is not recommended then that traffic isn't there to compensate for subs lost). Just another useful thing that they removed. Im saying this because this video made me lose subs (this video individually, the overall gained subs from other videos is positive). And again, since I don't have the separate charts, im not sure if this is normal or not.
Im not willing to share my channel tbh, I want privacy. It's a rather big channel, even tho im anonymous I don't want attention.
I would like to discuss the Promotion thing in YT. Im willing to test with $100. It's not much if it really works in getting the video in the recommended section again, assuming it lasts. Has anyone tried this?