How much does the first week of upload matter?

Lightsen

Lightsen

Animation Yey!
I'm just curious if the first week of upload determines the lifetime performance of a video.
(This topic is just for random discussion)

First answer these questions:

Which of your videos did the best in their first week?

Which of your videos has performed the best in it's lifetime?

is it the same video? if not, how did your best performing video do in it's first week?

(how to find this section in analytics -> how to find this.jpg )

I thought that the first week really determines how a video will do in it's lifetime, and I've confirmed it with my own channel, but I'm curious to see if its the same all around.

Can a video get a boost much later in it's life if it had a bad start?

my answers:

Which of your videos did the best in their first week?
"Twitch plays pokémon animated (1) the misadventure begins"
Which of your videos has performed the best in it's lifetime?
"YOU DON'T HAVE ENOUGH MONEY TO TRAIN ME"
is it the same video? if not, how did your best performing video do in it's first week?
not the same video, but very similar first weeks, both got around half their views from a couple of external sites. I think the first one did better as I had a much larger sub base by then.
 
Timing is literally the most important thing when it comes to views and growth. It's also the main thing most people ignore as important. Right place, Right time can pretty much add thousands to hundreds of thousands of extra views onto your upload.
 
TheBatteryChicken said:
Timing is literally the most important thing when it comes to views and growth. It's also the main thing most people ignore as important. Right place, Right time can pretty much add thousands to hundreds of thousands of extra views onto your upload.
Click to expand...

Yeah but how do you find the right time and right place. It's doesn't really strike me as something you can do deliberately. All I can think of doing is making my content as well as I can so that if the right person sees it they might want to share it with their millions of fans.
 
It's interesting, because the common "wisdom" is that weekends are good for uploads, but my weekend views are quite low, while weekday views are quite high. So I've been keeping to my upload schedule, just trying to aim for consistency. It's been definitely helping in terms of (fairly slow) growth, but I'm not sure I'm optimizing as much as I should.

Then again, if I worry too much about timing and optimization, this is going to become more complicated and difficult than my day job, and I really don't want that.
 
coliwob said:
Yeah but how do you find the right time and right place. It's doesn't really strike me as something you can do deliberately. All I can think of doing is making my content as well as I can so that if the right person sees it they might want to share it with their millions of fans.
Click to expand...

By being very observant, keeping up with current news, current trends, Event's and holidays coming up. YouTube themselves tell creators to focus on tent pole events. It's quite easy to change jokes and content so it's relatable to very current events, that way you raise the likelihood of the right person seeing it and maybe sharing it with millions of fans.

Personally I don't even care too much about doing this, I actually prefer to just focus on making what I want, But I also never question why I'm not growing or getting more views because I honestly don't care too much. I've seen hundreds of creators who have made super high quality content that honestly could be put on TV, but then after a year or 2 they have stopped because the slow growth finally got to them and wore them down. If they had done the odd video now and again that was more relateable, odds are they would have gotten very popular.[DOUBLEPOST=1456498830,1456498760][/DOUBLEPOST]
xingcat said:
It's interesting, because the common "wisdom" is that weekends are good for uploads, but my weekend views are quite low, while weekday views are quite high. So I've been keeping to my upload schedule, just trying to aim for consistency. It's been definitely helping in terms of (fairly slow) growth, but I'm not sure I'm optimizing as much as I should.

Then again, if I worry too much about timing and optimization, this is going to become more complicated and difficult than my day job, and I really don't want that.
Click to expand...

Who told you weekends are good for uploads ? People go out on weekends, Weekday evenings are the most common time that people are at home from work looking to waste time consuming entertainment.
 
I did a "best time to post" analysis with TubeBuddy, and found that Saturday afternoons were the best time for me. There was a blog post from TubeFilter that went through the best times and days to post for all of 2015...I don't know if they've done this for 2016, but they argued that while Saturday has the top viewership, there's still good viewership on Thursday and Friday, so posting on Thursday and getting Thur/Fri/Sat traffic is a good strategy. Monday through Wednesdays were shown to be the worst for viewership.

However, I will say that I do not really have content that must be posted at a certain time. I get regular search traffic through youtube for weeks/months after originally posting a video.
 
TheBatteryChicken said:
By being very observant, keeping up with current news, current trends, Event's and holidays coming up. YouTube themselves tell creators to focus on tent pole events. It's quite easy to change jokes and content so it's relatable to very current events, that way you raise the likelihood of the right person seeing it and maybe sharing it with millions of fans.

Personally I don't even care too much about doing this, I actually prefer to just focus on making what I want, But I also never question why I'm not growing or getting more views because I honestly don't care too much. I've seen hundreds of creators who have made super high quality content that honestly could be put on TV, but then after a year or 2 they have stopped because the slow growth finally got to them and wore them down. If they had done the odd video now and again that was more relateable, odds are they would have gotten very popular.[DOUBLEPOST=1456498830,1456498760][/DOUBLEPOST]

Who told you weekends are good for uploads ? People go out on weekends, Weekday evenings are the most common time that people are at home from work looking to waste time consuming entertainment.
Click to expand...
Fair points. Still it is largely out of our control as creators. Kind of forgot about all the things you said for a second there even though I made a video for pancake day the other week even.
 
Ok! I was just thinking about this. I noticed that Fridays, so far, are my best days. Not to mention uploading about trending topics right away would definitely help me boost views.
 
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