Is Organic Growth Within the YouTube Ecosystem Dead?

I agree, watchtime, average view duration and audience retention all seem to be important within this modern iteration of YT algorithm. I've had videos with higher than average CTR grind to a halt less than 24 hours after upload because those other metrics were sub-par.

CTR still matters very much though for that initial burst of traffic from Homepage minutes and hours after uploading the video. One well thought out and crafted thumbnail and title can net you 5-10x better results than 10 videos that get average CTR but slightly better watchtimes, average durations and retention.

You have to combine catchy title, eye-stabbing thumbnail and a video that keeps the viewers watching it for as long as possible and then preferably clicking through to your channel or another one of your videos you recommend during the current video or in the end screens. And then watching another one of your videos, and another one, and another one, pumping up that channel-wide watchtime.

Me personally, I have around average CTR (6.6% channel wide) with some high double-digit CTRs recently on a few of my newer videos. My watchtime is decent for my size I think (almost 40k hours atm) and average watch time is decent too (5:50), but my audience retention is absolute crap (10-15% on most of my videos). I'm in the process of rehauling my new videos in 2020, making changes in an attempt to fix these crap metrics. My latest video hit 43.5% Audience retention, highest ever, but the CTR has been lower than my channel's average and the average view duration has been low too because the video is only 8:40 long. Not to mention the topic itself and the entire idea behind the video is not really that popular within my target audience - I kinda had to do it because it was requested by one of my patrons. So there are factors beyond the metrics themselves for sure. You can literally have 2 videos with almost identical CTR, average view duration, retention, likes, comments etc... yet one of them is probably going to significantly outperform the other one due to volatile trends.

So, there really are many factors you have to simultaneously juggle if you want to get that mini-viral/semi-viral effect on Homepage when new viewers just spill over the entire channel. My channel's a living proof that it's doable - I did almost absolute 0 external promotion, and the few times I did, I gained like 2-3 views, so basically irrelevant. The growth is still slow, but it's there and it hasn't stopped for a single day the past year and a half.

Is it hard? Yeah, quite.

Dead? Absolutely not.

Lightsen said:
In the past, external sites were the best thing to boost your traffic. now in 2020 I say absolutely not.
just consider that watchtime is the number 1 factor, not views, and it all makes sense.
(this does depend on your type of channel though, as things like how to's are more likely to just be a one view then leave type of channel, so other sites are vital help)

Because YouTube focuses on watchtime, they will be looking less at the amount of views, and more at how long each of those viewers watched for, also if they stay on youtube or immediately leave.
if you get 50k views from facebook, it's likely that most of them will not watch for long at all. leaving you terrible horrible watchtime and retention statistics, which tells the algorithm that this is a bad video.

if your gonna go external, you have to HAVE TO find people that will watch your vid all the way through, not just random internet people. try finding the niche, and start small, like friends/fandoms etc that you know will enjoy your content. once youtube picks up on it the organic growth is easy.
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organic growth on youtube is not dead. infact its your most powerfull way to grow your channel. its also the hardest nut to crack too though no short cuts. but they give you all the tools you need in your analytics.
 
DreamlandExclusive said:
So far it seems that most of my traffic has come from other websites and apps. To my dismay
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This is purely based on what I heard and read regarding this modern YT algo, but if you are getting crap retention/watchtime (highly likely with views coming from Reddit, FB, forums...) and those views don't convert into more channel and YT views in general, you might be killing off your chances in the YT algorithm completely.

From my perspective, this at least seems to make sense - I've noticed a few of my older videos from 2018 and early 2019 are getting a bit more daily views lately and I'm sort of cruising at around 1k views/day at the moment. I've done nothing for that to happen, it just seems like YT algo slowly trickles more and more impressions for those videos, deems them worthy enough to be shown more and higher in search results.

It's hard for me to get into Homepage and almost impossible to get into Suggested from videos that are not my own. Those 2 definitely seem to be the only way to "blow up" your channel quickly within YT itself as the only source of traffic. I've pretty much failed 85 times so far to "rank" highly in those 2 traffic source categories for more than 2-3 days (new uploads only, then it quickly fades into single-digit/low double-digit views per day).

YT Search still delivers a very consistent number of daily views to me even when I don't upload anything new. I've heard YT search is only around 20-30% of the total traffic on YT and getting smaller and smaller, but it's the only thing I've managed to capitalize on so far.

I still dread the inevitable day when my videos stop getting views because the topics will surely stop being attractive. For now, I'm lucky because there are a lot of new people who are just starting to play D&D, but once it stops being the "hip & cool" thing I'll have to rely on something else.

2020 is the year I have to make a change in anticipation of the inevitable. Hopefully, I manage to figure out the formula before it's too late.
 
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