To better understand how this works, think of it like this. Youtube is an ad company. Your video is a Billboard on which Youtube can display their ads. How people get to your videos are like highways. You control the external highways (where you share your video links) and YT controls where travelers go on their internal highways. YT determines who goes down what road based on two factors.
1. What that viewer's interest are.
2. What content matches that viewer's interest the best.
Considering that there is no niche on YT that there is not a thousand other people in, and they are probably better then you are, how do you draw attention to yourself? Well, the truth is, there is only one answer. HARD WORK. For a new Youtuber coming into the market today, it is a long uphill battle to get anywhere. There are two things you can do to help yourself.
1. Produce good content on a constant basis. It is better to make 5 videos and release them one week apart than to release them all on the same day. YT wants to professionalism, and consistency says, "I am a Professional".
2. Working your butt off outside of YT to drive traffic to your channel. Use friends and family first, then Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc, etc. This is getting harder as most places HATE YouTubers trying to use their platform to draw people away from their site and they will BAN you so fast your head will spin off your shoulders if they catch you. So, you have to make it appear organic.
Just accept that you are not going to be an overnight success. Just accept that you may have to invest years before your channel will take off. You have entered the Youtube World, which is the most highly competitive venue on the planet. You are competing against multi-million dollar operations with entire studios and expertly trained personnel. Only the strongest will survive!
I don't understand where this idea of sharing your stuff outside of yt comes from. Has this been tested? Wouldn't YT value higher stuff that goes viral within the platform itself vs stuff that got posted elsewhere?
Also, i have some videos with great retention, but if you don't win the CTR lottery during the first days, the video basically dies and gets stuck (no recommended = no views).
Even if the CTR went higher over time as I drove traffic to it from endscreens, and the retention was above average compared to my other videos, and it was a solid 15 minute video, same thing, it never took off, even with a similar CTR of other videos that did took off and had worse retention, all variations of the same niche. So my conclusion is that the first days are key and the CTR that matters is the one obtained from the impressions that YT itself gives to you, not the ones you can achieve from using other videos you have via endscreens, or being shared on facebook, or perhaps it counts but at a lower tier than actual YT recommending it on the recommendation feed.
To me it's a bit of a crapshot. I work my a** on an animation for a month, release a video and doesn't get recommended, wereas other dudes in my niche are doing half assed stuff that is getting tons of views.
Also, it's impossible to upload frequently if you upload quality 10+ minute animations. It takes a month to finish one. So basically, there's an incentive to do half assed content, unless YT makes every single video you upload a viral success that gets recommended so you can live off this passive income stream while you work on another highly edited video. This is why most people end up doing gameplays or vlogs or other stuff where you can upload more frequently and thus play the CTR lottery more frequently. There's basically no incentive to "work hard" in the sense of working a lot on a single video. Unless you call releasing a ton of half assed content hard work. For instance, Alan Becker does super complex stickman animations that takes age to create, every single video he uploads is a viral success. Meanwhile other similar channels work as hard and can't make a living out of it because the algorithm doesn't promote them, there's no point in working for 1 or 2 months in a video if it doesn't get recommended. So he can afford spending months without uploading because he recieves infinite passive income from previous uploads wereas others are stuck, so the incentive to work hard is lost. And even if you "made it" and managed to grow a "big" channel like myself, it's still a crapshot, having a lot of subs doesn't mean getting your video recommended. There's clearly different tiers of channels rated internally, some channels seem to be loved by the algorithm and every damn video is a 1+million view success, then others seems like it's a lottery everytime you upload. And then there's others that are stuck in a limbo and haven't been able to get a video that takes off for years and eventually leave because it's too frustrating. They have tons of subs but their videos no longer take off. And after p-score being revealed the feel of constant paranoia of your channel being shadowflagged for some reason is too strong and you become anxious, imagine the feel of working hard while not knowing if your channel has been tagged to secretly throttle your videos.
Thanks for all opinion.