Putting YouTube Guru Advice to the Test – Organic Growth Experiment Results
YouTube is fascinating. Lots of the “usual advice” just doesn’t work, and I think I have figured out some reasons why.
I have been running an experiment to test one of the theories and, while not scientifical in the slightest, it did give some interesting results.
For the last 30 days I have run a “stealth” channel that I kept secret to see if the advice to not promote your channel was sound.
Does Promoting Your Own Videos Hurt Your Reach?
As the theory goes, YouTube needs to figure out its own viewer profile for your content. By sending external traffic you throw off the learning process.
The counter argument, which I leaned toward, is by sending people to watch a video, you would be helping YouTube figure out who to show your content to in future.
I do have a flaw in my thinking here, and I will get to that in a moment.
First, let’s look at the results:
Is 28 views good or bad? I would not be happy with one viewer per day total, but seeing as there are only two videos on the channel (since deleted) it is not as bad as it could be. In fact, only one of the videos got any views at all, so this is all from one video.
And look at that, unique viewers is actually 18, so some viewed more than once. Perhaps bookmarked and came back?
Interesting.
10 of the views were in the last 48 hours. Does this mean it is finally finding its audience? Either way, the channel is gone now, but perhaps with more content and more time this channel would have grown purely organically?
Where were these viewers coming from?
Over half of the external traffic came from ChatGPT! OK, so half of not many is nothing to build a strategy around, but I did not expect ChatGPT to beat organic search. Funny they regard YouTube website as not part of the internal YouTube referrals.
So not much traffic then – you would think the experiment is a bust, right? Theory debunked?
Hold on, we need to compare against my actual channel on this topic …
My actual channel with more videos on there barely beat the stealth channel!
That is both sad, and also potentially confirmation of the theory, or confirmation that this channel is sunk.
Remember, the channel is over a decade old and repurposed – I only recently changed it to be the channel for this website. It seems I really do need to start over afresh.
Let’s look at where the traffic for the channel comes from ..
ChatGPT beats both Google and LinkedIn!
I know some of you will be thinking “Chris, this only proves you are bad at YouTube“, which would not be wholly incorrect (I am bad at YouTube), but my other channels do a lot better comparatively and with a lot less effort.
My little retro computer channel with only 18 videos total got more views in the last 48 hours than my chrisg channel did in 28 days:
It also gained 25 subscribers over the last month even though there has not been any fresh content since 2021 apart from one video that I posted in June.
- RetroGameCoders has 1,618 subscribers and had 71.3 hours watch time.
- MakerHacks has 3,375 subscribers and 37.5 hours watch time.
Hmmm I am not the best at math but I can see that one of the three channels has, purely from an audience point of view, more momentum than the others.
Can we draw any firm conclusions? Probably not conclusions as such, the numbers are too small and the causes are not certain, but I have thoughts.
YouTube Lessons Learned
The fact a straight re-upload of my latest video to a fresh YouTube channel beat my supposedly main channel without any promotion tells me that my channel is busted. I should have created a fresh blank slate rather than repurpose a really old “family and friends” account.
I’m still not convinced that you should “avoid promoting” YouTube videos, but I do have a theory that might support the idea at least while your videos are fresh on the platform.
What I and many people forget is that each form of content has different parts of your audience, and the venn diagram circles do not overlap as much as we assume.
Just because you read my articles like this one does not mean you will also want to watch my videos, chat with me on Bluesky, or shake my hand at an event. Heck, people who do often enjoy your stuff do not see even half of what you send out. Weirdly this is something I often remind my wife about her Instagram when she says “I can’t post about that again they already saw it” but I don’t learn the lesson myself.
What YouTube Wants Most of All
The strongest signal to YouTube would be people who spend a lot of time on YouTube choosing to spend a lot of that time on your content, watching video after video.
Getting people to randomly watch part of on video, especially if they are not usually the kind of person who would ordinarily do so, is not going to juice the algorithm very much and might very well confuse it.
I’m starting to even believe it is not really that important to have fantastic click through rates, subscriber counts, or even view percentages, if you do not deliver the watch hours.
From what I can tell looking at my own channels and those of clients, YouTube mainly rewards people watching a lot of your content in terms of minutes and hours, even if that is from grazing over a small percentage from individual videos.
This leads me to the related but also significant idea in its own right reason why my Retro channel might be doing better math-wise than the others.
Yes, niching, or focusing on a specific niche, definitely does play into this, but I think there is another more important aspect in terms of YouTube especially that applies in all our content endeavours.
“Serial” content.
Create Anticipation and Progression
Twenty years ago I came up with the idea of “Flagship Content” to explain the idea of growing an audience with a big draw that allows you to attract people that you then funnel to your less eye-catching but still valuable stuff.
With flagship content you craft something compelling and gives people a solid reason to pay attention, and once you have their attention you do whatever you can to make them happy and engaged enough to stay a while and hopefully come back.
In YouTube terms you might think of this as a video that “does numbers”. Great! More people get to know you and your channel.
The better approach, however, and the one that YouTube really rewards, is for that one video that caught their attention to be part of a series.
At a minimal level, as you have no doubt heard from me before, it’s always good to have an obvious call to action for any content you put out there. I don’t mean the “make sure you like and subscribe and ring the little bell” cliche of YouTubers, I mean “watch this next”.
Actually, I really mean “Here’s why you will want to watch this video next”.
Don’t just tell them what to do next – Give them a compelling reason.
With my clients I call this a chain. Each piece is linked. It becomes even stronger when the viewer feels eager to see the next piece, like binge-watching Netflix or reading a page-turner.
On my retro channel the majority of my videos are one series, and I think that has been significant in how it gets more attention despite fewer subscribers, fewer videos, and less broad appeal.
What Next?
I don’t have a platinum YouTube play button so I do not feel qualified to tell you what to do, but I know what I plan to concentrate on.
For my chrisg channel I think I will start over on a fresh channel with a new plan. Better now than when more people subscribe and the pain of moving increases. It’s also an opportunity to take a step back and really consider what I want to do with it.
On my retro channel and maker channel I will create more series, and actually post videos because my nervousness around “performance” has really held me back from a brilliant platform. I need to focus more on progress than aiming for perfection.
Mostly though I need to double-down on works, and my retro audience really connects with me better than anything else I do or have ever done. It’s my least monetizable but most engaged audience. Go figure.
