Traffic Sources Experiment - Internal vs External

[Lightsen]

There has been a lot of discussion and mentions of promotion.

Does it hurt your retention rate or channel in the long run?
is it a great source of traffic?
Where should I promote?
How often?

- I thought I'd use my own analytics to give a comparison, and show what I have experienced.

*PLEASE NOTE* - I do not upload every day, week or month. my uploads are very far apart and therefore trends, and subscriber count will make this an uneven experiment, but still, interesting results I hope!

External promotion:
I have two video's that were picked up by sites and got a nice boost in views within their first week.

Video 1:
Got picked up by site, most views I had ever had in a week!

Video 2:

Also got embedded in a site, another video that did really well for me!

So I assumed that yes you need to have a lot of lucky external promotion to get a viral video.

But then my latest video:

Almost entirely internal promotion.
It made me wonder if because it hadn't been picked up buy sites much if at all, that people who viewed it on youtube had better retention time? that may be the reason I got so many home page views? good retention rate.

no doubt external promotion (in the right places) is very very helpful.

But remember your video can still get a huge boost from youtube's own algorithms.
Watch time and retention rate is the most important I think.

 

[Entityofsin]

That's really interesting information. I've thought about doing this with gaming content with websites that have blogs who need material to feed to their site visitors and that would increase the traffic to my own content. That's a possibility if you can consistently create content every week and provide material for a website that you want to build a relationship with. They do the marketing to the website and visitors see your content. It's a pretty old method to building an audience on a channel but it works wonderfully.

So I guess it depends on whether or not your content is being shared by others on websites or not to make it a determining factor of how people are finding your content. It isn't like one source of traffic is better than the other. Both are good.

Still very interesting! Thanks for sharing it!