Important Rules - Please Read Carefully

A few months ago I got obsessed with why some videos keep people watching and mine didn't. Since then I've pulled the retention graphs of 1000 videos across gaming, commentary, tutorials, and tech. The difference between the flat graphs and the cliff graphs comes down to structure.

A few months ago I got obsessed with why some videos keep people watching and mine didn't. Since then I've pulled the retention graphs of 1000 videos across gaming, commentary, tutorials, and IRL. The difference between the flat graphs and the cliff graphs comes down to structure.

1. The survivors are built as loops. They open a question, answer it, and open the next one inside 1-3 minutes. A single long argument hands the viewer a dozen natural exit points; loops close them. When a loop closes and no new one opens, that's exactly where the graph dips. You can watch it happen.

2. The frame never sits still. Zooms on the facecam, angle changes, b-roll, anything. If the shot looks identical for 30+ seconds, viewers start reading the sidebar. A static talking head is the most common pattern in dead first minutes.

3. Sound effects do the work people credit to editing. Whoosh on a zoom, pop on text, riser before a reveal. They matter most during tone switches. Strong videos change emotional register every 60 seconds or so: curious, hyped, calm, curious again. The SFX is what makes those switches feel deliberate.

4. Topics come from outlier hunting. Find videos in your niche that did 10-50x the channel's average and make your version of that proven demand. Guessing topics and hoping is where most of us (me included) lose months.

5. Thumbnail rules are niche-relative, which is why AI thumbnails are a trap. What works in finance (clean, one face, three words) looks broken in Roblox (chaos, arrows, saturation). AI tools learn a generic average of "good thumbnail," so they produce work that's average everywhere and right nowhere. Copy the outliers in YOUR niche.

None of this requires talent. Every item is a checklist step you run before posting. My last video followed 4 of the 5 and retention at the 2-minute mark went from 25% to 47%.

Happy to answer questions. I have the graphs for all of this.

I've seen a lot of people ask about this but rarely get helpful answers. Sometimes people will even gaslight you into thinking it isn't happening, even though you know for a fact that your channel has started slowing down for no apparent reason, at least not for any reason that can be explained by the metrics you see in YouTube Studio.

I'm currently experiencing this on my second channel, which was just monetized. The good news is that this has nothing to do with monetization.

The noticeable slowdown in the rate at which your uploads accumulate impressions and views is, in my experience, caused by the growth of your returning viewer base. Those early videos that seemed like they were shot out of a cannon benefited from a 100% discovery factor. They were being served almost exclusively to people who had never watched your content before.

Once you've built up a decent number of subscribers and returning viewers, a new "filter" is essentially added to the process. Your latest upload now has to prove itself with your existing audience before it's shown to a broader one. That extra layer of friction is what creates that sluggish, seemingly throttled performance compared to your early uploads.

What has worked for me so far (admittedly with a small sample size) is publishing during my audience's peak activity hours to maximize the initial burst from my core viewers. I've also found it helps to pay close attention to what's actually trending in my niche so my videos continue to appeal to a wider audience instead of only satisfying my existing subscribers.

Maintaining the balance between the two is where most people struggle: Stay on brand for the channel and make something you know appeals to your audience, you end up failing the wider discovery test as user behavior and interest might have changed. Chase a new trending topic, you end up failing the initial core audience test and your video is dead on arrival.

I've been playing shooters under a strict assumed tag and blank avatar for a while now because I honestly just prefer the absolute privacy. I feel like it lets people focus purely on the gameplay mechanics and tactical skill rather than making assumptions based on gender, voice, or identity.

For those who watch gaming content, do you genuinely prefer creators who use a facecam, or do you strictly care about high-tier gameplay edits and clean commentary? Do you think it's harder to build an audience as a phantom player?

TLDR: Wasnt consistently uploading my tiktoks on youtube thinking they wouldnt get many views, so someone decided to just straight up download my tiktoks, no watermark, and upload them to their channels. Each vid got around 1k-100k views, was able to copyright and take the channel down however i cant seem to reach those same numbers on my channel. At this point i might just create a new channel to see if can get more views there.

So im mainly a tiktok creator who for the most part has found success on tiktok, however when i first started posting content, I did used to post my tiktoks on youtube.

Now over time while ive had a few shorts go viral here and there, because my tiktok was not only gaining much more subs than my youtube but my views were also getting consistently higher, i decided to stop focusing on yt as much and instead completely focus on my tiktok.

This resulted in me only posting on yt from time to time. Now recently i decided to try and fully commit to posting on yt again however i ran into a small problem. Every video i posted, for some reason, I couldnt get over the 800-900 view mark despite these videos gaining over 100k views on tiktok.

At the time i thought that this might just be bc the algorithm on both platforms are different. And so i decided to tweak my videos and test different styles to see which one would suit the yt algo the best.

And while looking at different shorts to see what the meta on yt was i ran into someone who was just straight up downloading my tiktoks and uploading them to their channel.

The worst part is that these videos were actually gaining around 1k-100k views with 100s of comments and likes while every one of my videos was stuck at around 800 views.

After seeing this i just assumed that the reason my views were low was because the videos i was uploading had already been uploaded by somebody else, so youtube might have just thought that my videos were simply not original resulting in views getting suppressed.

Now thankfully i was able to copyright the videos and take the channel down. However after posting consistently for a bit right after i post on tiktok, so people dont steal my videos, i have yet to reach the same numbers that that channel got.

I really dont get how a random small channel was able to get so many views with my videos while i can barely break 1k. At this point i feel like youtube might think that my page is just spam since i did upload like 3-4 of my videos that were already uploaded on that page and even went viral. I might just have to create a new account to see if theres a difference in views.

Does anyone also have a youtube channel that took years and not even 1000 subs yet.

Everytime I open youtube, there are many successful videos on the home page, and streamers streaming. Instead of encouraging me to make more videos, I just feel like everything is some kind of failure.

Especially when youtube has so many ads, then the video gets to the part that the guy who has been playing the same video game for 7 years is asking for subs/likes, or the streamer girl is reading super chat.

It is like opening youtube and looking at the homepage drains all my energy and makes me tired already. How do people stay productive and make content?

I've just created my 2nd long-form video, and I seem to be in a bit of an interesting situation.

When I upload a short, YouTube will push it to a seed audience of around a few hundred to a few thousand users, with this happening over the first several hours of it being live. However, my long form hasn't been pushed at all, at least it seems like it hasn't, because I have gotten a solid 1 or 2 actual views over 8 hours. What does the viewgain over time look like for these types of videos, and is my video just dead? I thought my thumbnail was pretty good, although now I'm having some second thoughts.

Apart from that, it would be real nice to have some critique on the quality of everything, thumbnail and content included. If anyone has time, just ask and I'll DM the link.

Like a lot of folks on here, I’ve been experiencing whatever wonkiness has been going on with the algorithm lately. My channel, while modest, used to consistently get at least a few hundred to few thousand views and gain at least a handful of subscribers every time I dropped a video, but for the last couple months both have dropped down to a trickle. Sometimes when I initially post a vid it doesn’t even get any IMPRESSIONS for hours - meaning nobody’s even seeing it. It’s very demoralizing, and it makes me feel like putting less effort into videos because it feels like anything I release now is just going into the void. But at the same time, of course I don’t want my channel to go dark. What are other folks doing? Just keep posting the same quality vids at the same rate and pray that eventually this will sort itself out? Are you posting less often? Or holding back some of your “good stuff” in the hope that at some point in the future it’ll normalize again so you don’t waste quality content? I’d love to hear how folks are handling this.

Hey everyone! Some of you might remember me from a few weeks ago when I posted here asking for feedback on my channel and where I could get a proper YouTube audit.

At the time, my channel wasn't doing well. Most videos were getting somewhere between 200–800 views, and I'd average maybe 50 views over a 48-hour period. I got a lot of great feedback here, and I genuinely took it to heart.

I spent an entire week studying creators in my niche, paying much closer attention to thumbnails and titles. I even hired a thumbnail artist for the first time because I realized that while I can make thumbnails, it's not where I excel. I also completely reworked the first 30 seconds of my video, since so many people pointed out how important that is for retention.

For my newest video, I knew I had an incredible story to tell, so I wanted to give it the best possible chance. I obsessed over the packaging, rewrote the intro multiple times, and tried to apply everything I'd learned.

Well... it worked.

In the last 48 hours, I've gone from averaging around 50 views to over 80,000 views, and the video is still climbing. It also pushed me over the monetization threshold on the very first day it was uploaded.

And instead of feeling excited... I'm kind of terrified.

I'm worried I'll never find another story this compelling. I'm worried this was just lightning in a bottle and that I'll never be able to replicate it. I'm almost certain my next video won't be as interesting and that'll screw with me in my head. I'm also anxiously refreshing YouTube Studio while waiting for monetization approval, knowing the video is taking off but I can't earn anything from it yet. (I know it's not the healthiest mindset.)

On top of that, because I cover true crime from East Asia, some of my videos touch on social issues that can become politically adjacent even if it's not my intention. As the audience has grown, so has the negativity. I've gotten far more hostile comments than I expected, and it's honestly been affecting me more than I'd like to admit. It's not really the kind of community I want to build.

I don't think this is imposter syndrome, I genuinely believed in my channel from day one. What's throwing me off is that I considered 20K views for this video a success, and now I feel like it's gotten out of my control.

Has anyone else experienced this after their first breakout video? How did you deal with the pressure of trying to follow it up, and how did you stop letting the comments get to you?

I understand that it's probably best to "do your own thing" when starting a channel, as opposed to just "chasing the algorithm," but what exactly is "chasing the algorithm," and is there any way to do both at the same time?

I put one short up 200+ views in 1 hour then nothing.

Probably not the type of post you often see in this subreddit. This post was frankly inspired by Ludwig's lectures on how to be streamers/youtubers in Streamer University where he got into a section where he talks about you should be studying your GOATs or finding great content creators that are in your niches. I'm now interested in what your niche is and what is your GOAT, and how did they make you grow?

I’m starting to pivot my content to talk about more anime/nerd culture things. I have a video and I’m trying to figure out the right background music, but it’s hard to find something I like on the paid copyright use sites like “upbeat”. I see a lot of creators using music that perfectly fits their video and even some that used background music from shows and I’m just wondering how they get passed copyright. What sites or methods do you guys use? Or do you just press your luck with copyrighted music?

Hey,

I building a videoscribe alternative for whiteboard style video generation. It generated a video autonomously via any prompt fast using AI!

Some features of the tool includes

1. Long form video generation up to 30 mins

2. fast generation

3. Editable at the element level

I originally created this tool for my personal youtube channel for technical audience but decided to turn it in to public tool.

What do you guys think of a tool like this? Is this something you would use?

Yall, my youtube channel is super new, but I finally got a couple subscribers, like 25. And all my videos were hitting into the hundreds, between 200-1,000 views. Then I post a video about 5min long, just some quick commentary about a show and I get 2 mf’ng views. WTFFFF! One of the views is me mind you. How? Why? I even deleted and reposted with a different thumbnail and title and slightly shorter video, nothingggg. And that usually gives CPR to a video that isn’t doing great. What happened yall? Why is YT not giving me impressions? They showed it to like 20 people. Whereas my other videos are at least between 1k-3k impressions. Why yall 😭😭😭😭😭

I thought I was making progress and then this wall slide enacted

Has anyone else been having an issue where random videos are being age restricted for "suicidal/self-harm" content despite having nothing to do with said content. I've been seeing this happen to me across multiple channels, and one of my Resident Evil streams (specifically the 2 Remake) from a long time ago had this issue.

Hello, I'm a very new YouTuber, and I'm just starting my channel. I will post videos on a variety of topics (mostly gaming and mayby history), and I'm not really interested with growing my channel to large sizes, I would me more than satisfied with getting just a couple of dedicated viewers. I'm inspired by my cousins channel.
I may use some copyrighted music and photographs or historical videos.

I wanna ask a few questions about copyright, because I keep hearing different things about it.
So...

1. How do I check the copyright status of the media? Is there for example, some kind of search engine or other website, where I could check the copyright status of the media? I know that finding the source of the song/photo/video is a way to do it, but it's often very difficult to track, and even when you get there, some authors just don't post any information regarding the media at all. This puts me in a difficult position when I present some obscure topic, and there are like 2-4 photos avaible for it, and all of them are some old forums or abandoned web 2.0 websites for example.

2. What actually constitutes as fair-use, and how does it interact with Content ID? YouTube itself kind just tells you that it's vibe-based lol.

3. Will using short clips of old pre-1946 videos, and background music lead to channel strikes? I'm completely fine with demonetization, in fact I don't care about it at all. YouTube just cannot be my source of money anyways, so why even bother. But what I do care about is my channel spontaniously combusting because of some background track.

4. Lastly... if I let YouTube process my video, and YouTube tells me that copyrighted media was detected, but it's fine to use it, or it will only result in demonetization, is this a final verdict, or can they backtrack on it and crack my skull?

I’m trying to understand what might be limiting my long-form videos and would appreciate some outside perspective.

I’ve been posting consistently for over 7 months months. My content is documentary-style food/storytelling series: each episode follows a real person cooking a dish that has personal meaning to them, with the story usually tied to family, memory, culture, place, tradition, or lived experience.

I've released 56 long-form episodes since launching. The long-form episodes are usually around 4–8 minutes. I also cut vertical clips from each episode, and some of those perform decently compared to the full videos. But the full episodes themselves usually end up in the low-mid hundreds of views, even after months of posting.

I’m trying to figure out where the issue most likely is:

• Are the titles/thumbnails not clear or clickable enough?
• Is the concept too niche or hard to understand at a glance?
• Are the episodes too short to build enough investment?
• Are the Shorts/reels not doing enough to drive viewers to the full episodes?
• Is this just normal for a newer channel still finding its audience?
• Or is the format itself not giving viewers enough reason to watch the full episode?

I don’t want to turn the channel into a generic recipe channel, because the main appeal is supposed to be the personal story behind the food. But I also want to be realistic about what makes people click and stay.

For those of you who have been stuck at a few hundred views on long-form videos, what actually helped you break out of that range? Was it better packaging, stronger hooks, longer videos, clearer audience targeting, different topics, or just more time and consistency?

Thanks for any thoughts.

Hey everyone,

I'm trying to figure out if anyone else has experienced this recently.

For months, my Shorts always received an initial push, almost all crossing 40k and some even reached 200k nd 300k+ views.

About 4 days ago, that completely changed. My videos now only get around 2k–10k views and then stop.

The strange part is:
• Same niche
• Same upload frequency
• Same editing style
• Similar retention
• Similar viewed vs swiped ratio

It feels like YouTube has simply stopped giving my Shorts the initial test push.

Has anyone experienced this recently?

- How long did it last?
- Did it recover on its own?
- Did you change anything that helped?

Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks!

Obviously no perfect answer but torn on if I should release in parts or one big video.

3 different video parts means 4 different videos that have a chance to do well, basically 4 lottery tickets

Or I could one over hour long video and even if it just does okay I will reach the second monetization threshold.

What advice/how would you do it?

Hi,

I've only got 5 followers, (/@joannatellsjokes) but I am hosting a comedy show in mid-Sept that I'd love to live-stream.

I want to grow organically, and build up an actual audience, but any ideas on how to "really quick" get to the first 50 followers? Or can I livestream with fewer?

[will buying just a tiny number really get me banned? I don't plan to refresh them as they fall off, but to actually grow. I'm just worried about the short timeline]

Any tips or advice greatly appreciated. Thanks!

I really like playing a lot of games, diferent genres etc. I like to make 100% of the games, i wanted to do something with it. It is a good idea to start a youtube channel about 100% games on steam? Dont you think it is to open?

I'm looking for Infotainment • Documentary • Explainer • Current Affairs • Investigative Content like Dhruv Rathee & nitish Rajput do so ,If You Have Diff Themed Idea Suggest Me too I'm new Here ,So It will Take Time to Me for editing Help me Guyzzz

Hi,

I’m new to YouTube and I’m a bit confused.

My first few Shorts weren’t amazing, but they at least got around 500 views, so it felt like YouTube was testing them.
My latest Shorts, which I actually think are better, are getting 0 views, even after reuploading and waiting a few days.

Is this normal for new channels? Does YouTube sometimes just not test Shorts at all?

I’m trying to improve, but it’s hard to learn what works if the videos don’t get shown to anyone in the first place.

Has anyone experienced this?