Reverse Engineering The YouTube Algorithm

Entityofsin said:
Actually, having a tutorial beauty channel reach the subscriber base you have is an accomplishment by itself. Even us gaming channels can do tutorials and not even reach nearly that much success because of the amount of competition doing the same thing. It's why channels grow off the backbone of single individual games then branch out later after gaining success and try different types of gaming content.

The real problem is, according to social blade, you have roughly around a daily view to subscriber ratio of 8%. This means your daily views is about 8% of your subscriber base. That gives me a pretty good indication that your videos have very little subscriber engagement and this is a statement made without looking at your individual video analytics. It could be higher and I really hope it is but if it isn't, getting your audience engagement levels to higher peaks would be a worth while goal to chase after.

Simply changing up the technique of your video editing in your content production pipeline might make the difference in the long term. Making small changes that your audience isn't going to notice is a huge benefit to you. Also, look into utilizing Google+ Circles and Communities to help centralize your audience in one point of active daily engagement outside of your videos. It also can provide a way for your viewers, fans, and subscribers to be active community members around your channel and content. Making them feel like they're valued and part of something larger than just the channel is powerful.

Try working on stuff like that.
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According to YT my watch time from non subbed vs subbed is 65.6% to 34.4%. Still not as high as I'd like but you're right.. it's low.
 
elleandish said:
According to YT my watch time from non subbed vs subbed is 65.6% to 34.4%. Still not as high as I'd like but you're right.. it's low.
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That seems normal from my own experiences and from what some of my friends have shared with me on their own channels. Keep in mind my gaming channel is inactive and that my experience is from previous channels I've had but deleted cause of MCNs screwing me over by not unlinking me.

Looking into waits to convert those non-subs into subs might be worth the time figuring out. Good luck on that though.
 
Just wanted to follow up with results from this weekend that actually disprove this theory. One of the things mentioned was that the algorithm pre-determines the amount of views you will get based on the previous two uploads. After coming off of a halfway decent video, our next two videos did not perform well. One has just under 11k views and the other just under 8k views. Based on the tubefilter article, you would expect the next video to also perform poorly, but it has 850k views in roughly 48 hours. If the view count was predetermined and the algorithm was supposed to work against us, there's no way this would have happened.
 
This almost suggests that uploading every other day is better than every day because it is the amount of views in the first 48 hours that matters. If you feature your newest video, that will give it the best chance of getting the most views in the first 48 hours, but if you uploaded every day, it would limit the featured time of each video to only the first 24 hours.

Is this correct, or is my reasoning off?
 
Idec Sdawkminn said:
This almost suggests that uploading every other day is better than every day because it is the amount of views in the first 48 hours that matters. If you feature your newest video, that will give it the best chance of getting the most views in the first 48 hours, but if you uploaded every day, it would limit the featured time of each video to only the first 24 hours.

Is this correct, or is my reasoning off?
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This is correct. I find that daily uploaded videos get much less views than if a video is uploaded every 2 or 3 days.
I think this may be subscriber number related - you need to give people a few days to catch up with you.
After the first few days of views, the video starts to rank in search and drive traffic. But that's search traffic, not subscriber traffic. What we want to do is maximize subscriber traffic in the first few days.
When you're small like us, you want as many of your subs viewing each video, so give them 1-3 days to view each video.
If you have hundreds of thousands of subs, this doesn't matter as it seems you need 2k - 5k views for a video "to take off" a bit and rank in search (from our experience with our videos).
 
WolfWraith said:
I've noticed the same thing. I prefer doing 3 vids a week. I notice slightly more views and I'm not overwhelemed or forced to make as many videos within a short time frame.
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Yes agreed. It does make life easier, more time to prepare and film a better video, edit better, and get more views at the end. What could be better?
 
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