Quality vs Quantity.

dweebie

Member
I got myself to the point where I was uploading a new video every other week. The videos turned out to be on the garbage side, and I wasn't happy with them looking back on it. Jokes were fewer and further between, videos were much shorter and I left out big parts of games that I should have talked about. Took a break to really hone in what I was doing with it. My view counts are stagnating, it feels like any progress I made is waning. Cut to the present and I'm working on a video that I feel is much much better. If I quit the bi-weekly upload schedule in favour of longer and much better videos will my channel suffer?
 
The thing is, it depends. Quantity is better for some channels so they can interact with their fans more, such as JeromeASF. On the contrary if you focus on quality people will come back, but not as much. Even if you make the best video in the world, not everybody wants to wait. One example of this is Alan Becker who made the Animation vs. Animator his stuff takes time, but in the end he found a way to mix a long wait time and have good quality. In short try and make as good a quality as possible, but try and keep your videos frequent enough so people won't go looking at other stuff and potentially forget you while waiting.
 
Unfortunately the algorithms are going to be against you if you upload less.

With subscriber burn, Youtube can only show so many subscription/video feeds that may interest that viewer. If they're only clicking on your subscription feed once a month than Youtube is going to rank the ones that get clicked more consistently higher. That's a guarantee.

How often you upload plays into subscriber burn. Unless you're big like H3H3 and have this kick a** stigma going for you, how often you upload is always going to affect how fast your subscribers burn out into inactive subscribers. H3H3 gets away with it because for the longest time he's been viewed as the moral authority of Youtube, he's got established social media like his twitter & subreddit. Being a fan in a big fan community also inspires fans to be more passionate. Smaller channels don't have any of this going for them.

If you want to upload less then you got to find a way to organically drive traffic to your content.

How often you upload also affects how ADs pay out now. There's a reason animators moved off the platform or moved to other projects like Egoraptor and GameGrumps.

Somehow the conversations between Youtube and advertisers made ads more reliant on the "brand". Before this ads just considered overall frequency and pretty much everyone got the same rate for the same ad. It was up to your MCN to get you better rates.

Now they persuaded Youtube to review each brand as an advertising outlet. They're concerned with watch time and retention as well as viewing sprees where viewers keep watching video after video consecutively.

If you have higher production values then you ultimately have a slower rate of production when it comes to the duration of your content. So the algorithms currently favors longer content that gets uploaded more frequently. Ads pay better on longer content that gets uploaded more consistently. You look less like a team player to the "advertisers" if you upload less frequently and your videos aren't as long.

That's why Egoraptor is all about Game Grumps now and will seldomly upload to his Egoraptor channel.
 
According to the algorithm it's about quantity, and most of the people don't care about quality anyway
 
It depends. If you go every 3 weeks and can create evergreen, gateway vids, then it's well worth it. Or vids of that nature, the views aren't coming mainly from subscribers but search and suggestions. If you're waiting months for a video then it's just too long, even if it is amazing
 
The thing is, it depends. Quantity is better for some channels so they can interact with their fans more, such as JeromeASF. On the contrary if you focus on quality people will come back, but not as much. Even if you make the best video in the world, not everybody wants to wait. One example of this is Alan Becker who made the Animation vs. Animator his stuff takes time, but in the end he found a way to mix a long wait time and have good quality. In short try and make as good a quality as possible, but try and keep your videos frequent enough so people won't go looking at other stuff and potentially forget you while waiting.
Great advice, personally I try and spend as much time as possible editing for two days then upload. I get two videos a week with content I am proud of
 
the slow uploads can work, it worked for my channel, but it took a very long time to grow.

if you go for quality, to make a living, you have to get a semi viral hit every upload.
somehow this has worked out alright for me so far, but now I'd recommend building audience on other sites too, so your subs don't forget about you or assume your inactive.
 
I would say it depends...Playing the quality game may yield a stronger and firmer subscriber base in the long run as people will know you for quality and will slowly keep coming back, though it may be a grind to gain subs. whereas by contrast quantity is favored by the algorithm and will work much better as a short term solution but is limited by the fact your content wont be much good. if you upload 3+ videos a week your more likely to be favored by the search engine which means you likely to get more traffic which in turn opens the possibility of more subscribers...but if that audience think your content is no good then you'll hit your limitations fairly early on and just hang around a particular sub a view number indefinitely, and thats before we get onto the possibility of zombie subs...I suppose striking a reasonable balance between the two would be the ideal scenario...say uploading twice a week every week...

I currently upload once a week because I try and aim to make my videos as detailed as possible and that kind of research and production takes time to turn around...occasionally I might get enough free time to get a 2nd video up a week though I'd be lucky if I did that every couple of months or so...

EDIT: I should also say that I started producing youtube videos about 2 months before I actually started uploading them, which allowed me to get a decent bit of padding between creating and uploading so that; should the need to research a film more closely arrive, Im able to :) it also helps cover sick days xD
 
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