Is YouTube Ghosting / Shadow-Banning / Killing Channels?!?

OliverAge24

OliverAge24

Active Member
Hey everyone,

I need your YouTube help!

I took maybe 6-12 months off from YouTube. My videos previously were getting around 5,000 to 50,000 views from my 150,000 subscribers.

Now, I returned on the 27th February this year, and have been doing weekly videos since then. I've increased the video length, retention and watch time, started adding Closed Captioning, switched from annotations to Endslates and tried to stick to trending topics - basically everything that is supposed to work with the new algorithm changes...

The quality of the videos themselves has been as high, or higher even, than before I took a break...

The problem is, the views on the videos have been hemorrhaging crazily:

27th February - 17,500 views
6th March - 14,500 views
13th March - 4,400 views
15th March - 14,000 views
20th March - 8,000 views
27th March - 5,500 views
29th March - 2,300 views
3th April - 2,000 views

It's like YouTube is no longer suggesting my videos, no longer promoting them to my subscribers, and just generally ghosting my content.

If anybody has any theories, ideas or advice at all, I'd very much appreciate it. I'm going to continue creating content, as I really enjoy doing it, it just feels like such a shame to have put so much work into building my channel, only for it to just fizzle out to obscurity.

Maybe the type of content I'm creating is just no longer what YouTube wants to showcase?

Cheers,
Oliver
 
Hi Oliver!
Firstly i just want to fangirl and say i love your content and have watched you for years.

Ahem now onto your answer - Youtube is a bit strange when it comes to promotion. I am subbed to your channel and watch basically all your stuff however occasionally i will have to go onto your channel to view your content because it has not appeared in my sub feed.

From what i have learnt youtube LOVES promoting frequent content when we took a month break from youtube a while ago we received a handful of complaints saying videos were not appearing in sub feeds.

What i deduced from this is that users who watch your content often will be more likely to get updates about your videos when users who don't will not if that makes sense.

In addition you were gone about a year without any warning (as far as i know) so it is likely a lot of your subs have lost interest and/or have subbed to new channels that push your videos down in the sub feed.

I hope this answer helps if you have more questions i will try to help you out keep up the good work. :)
 
Hey DigiBox,

Thanks a lot for the insight and watching my content! Glad you have enjoyed it!

That all makes sense with people having moved on, forgotten about my channel or just not receiving updates.

I guess the bit that's really confusing to me is that, when I first came back the videos were doing pretty well, and it's sort of got worse since then, even though I've been really consistent (1 or 2 videos every week since then).

Maybe if I just continue to be consistent, it will start to climb again at some point rather than dropping each video?

Cheers,
Oliver
 
Hey,

Yes probably see the thing we did with our channel (which is highlighted in the channel) is we switched from a video every 2-3 days to a video every week or a model that we call "when it's done" at first the videos did garbage.

But then they started to pick up and we are through the roof in regular videos compared to our old ones.

Another thing im not sure if you are aware but youtube does not give one about views anymore it is about watch time and viewer retention. If you go into your analytics you can see how much engagement you have.

For example if someone watches for say 5 seconds and then leaves it will stay as a view and count to the view count but youtube won't really see it as a worth while video because users are clicking off.

The more watchtime you have the more likely your videos are to be posted and shared about.

Another thing you might want to try is share your content climbing out of a hole really isn't easy especially when you reduce uploads but bump quality i would recommend try sharing to reddit like r/videos or tumblr or twitter anywhere you can get people to watch it slowly more engagement will happen and soon everyone will be drawing really good once again!

I know these tips sound like im talking to someone who has just started youtube but honestly i feel it's things everyone should know.

Hope that advice helps :)
 
The long break could've effected your views. Oftentimes subscribers move on. I've been fairly infrequently making YouTube videos on my channel for the past few years, and while I have over 400 subscribers, only around 20-30 of them are active (probably less). YouTubers who subscribed to me so long ago, before all the content changes I made, before all the breaks I made, probably just aren't active on YouTube anymore. That's probably why they're not seeing my videos. Either that, or they aren't interested in the content I now post and don't watch.
I'd suggest to just keep making videos. Work on good tags for your videos, good descriptions, thumbnails, and titles. Keep doing that, and I think things will pick up soon enough.
Although, Youtube did kinda get into a lot of crap while you were on your break, so that might be part of that.
 
I used to be a sub of your channel a couple of years ago - You are a funny dude. Why did you take such a huge break?
 
There's a YT glitch that's being reported for some time now, funny thing YT denies that it exists. There is proof that A LOT of videos don't make into the subscribers feed. I suggest you look into that.
Best of luck mane!
 
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