Once people discover your videos, what happens next? Well, it depends on how people are discovering your videos. The organic discovery means your content makes its way into their personalized algorithms. They’ll get your videos promoted to them in places like their Homepage feed and suggested videos, to what extent depends on a few things, mainly their level of engagement. Views generated from ads play out differently because the algorithm is blind to views from ads. Here are the key metrics that guide what gets served to people on Youtube:
- Relevance: Is it the type of content the user primarily consumes? If a user watches mostly sports videos there won’t be many opportunities for them to be served a music video. Unless it’s a music video about sports.
- Last Action: Has the user recently engaged with your content? The Youtube algorithm responds to a user’s viewing activity instantly. Watch one video from a creator and when you return to your Homepage feed you’ll see Youtube recommending another. Your videos don’t need to be relevant to a user’s overall activity if they have a history of engaging with them as long as they’re the most recent videos a user has viewed.
- User’s relationship with your channel’s content
- Watch Time: Time spent watching your videos relative to the content of other channels
- CTR: How often they click on your video when it appears as a recommendation by Youtube
- Popularity: Content users spend the most time watching, click the most, and is heavily viewed.
Process
User watches your video for the first time – Last Action
User gets another video from your channel served to them on their Homepage
Do they watch?
- Yes: You remain their last action, their relationship with your content deepens, and more of your videos have a chance of getting served to them through recommendations.
- No: Youtube thinks the user is disinterested in your content and stops recommending it to them.
When they watch, how long do they watch for?
- An amount of time comparable to the time spent watching other videos: Your videos have a greater chance of being recommended.
- An amount of time below the time spent watching other videos: Your videos are less likely to be recommended.
The Youtube algorithm prioritizes content a user appears to have the deepest connection with which is showcased in the form of engagement: views and watch time. Creators have the edge because they upload content more frequently. It’s not just about frequency though, it’s about expectations. The channel of a Youtube creator operates like a TV show. It’s scheduled programming. Audiences know when to expect new videos so they know when to return. Additionally, with a TV show, audiences return for another episode of the show. It could be a good episode or a bad episode, they don’t even know what they’re going to get outside of another episode.
Scheduling content where users know when to return expecting something new can increase retention rates. Let’s say you’re dropping an album, the best course of action would be to drop each track from the album on a scheduled date like Kanye West did with “Good Fridays” in the lead up to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Doing live performances? Schedule it. Dropping freestyles? Schedule it. Releasing cover songs? Schedule it. By scheduling content, you create a TV show dynamic where your audience will tune in just to see what’s next and the next thing won’t require much convincing.
Thumbnails
You can upload custom thumbnails on Youtube. Thumbnails are the face of your video and users decide which video to watch based on which thumbnails catch their eye. Make sure you have an image that’s appealing and calls attention.
Titles
What you title your video is important for most Youtube creators but not as important for recording artists. Titling is all about SEO. As a creator, I might title a video “Top 3 Ways to Promote Music on Youtube” with art, there’s more romance. You’re appealing to something different from the user. You’re looking for emotional triggers, imagination, intrigue, and cultural cues. The title of the song could be terrible for SEO and be fine. Bear in mind that this changes if you’re doing remixes and covers or trying to leverage the popularity of a person, place, or thing.
Notifications
Here we have the Trump card. Users that click the Bell icon on your video or channel are informing Youtube that they want to be informed of your new content no matter what. It doesn’t matter how often they engage with your channel, how long they watch your videos or the amount of time that’s passed since the last time they’ve watched one of your videos. The caveat with notifications is that there’s somewhat of a double opt-in. A user has to have notifications turned on for both your channel and the Youtube app. You’ll commonly find users have Youtube notifications turned off, even when they turn on notifications for your channel. Education becomes important here because you have to educate your audience to ensure they get your videos.
It can ruin the fantasy to have an artist break character to talk about turning on notifications. What may work best for artists is to have the information included in some type of intro or outro. At the same time, maybe you don’t want your fans to go through the trouble of optimizing Youtube notifications and would rather they invest that time in something you control like email or a mobile mailing list.
Subscribers
Unfortunately, Subscribers are subject to the same algorithm as everyone else. Youtube will not prioritize your content over what’s popular or what the user has recently engaged with simply because they Subscribe. That’s why the notification feature and the Subscription feed exist. The Subscriptions feed is a tab on the Homepage dashboard that exclusively features content from channels users subscribe to, most users don’t find their way there because they end up down the rabbit hole from content on the homepage.
Honestly, when it comes to engagement, subscribers are almost worthless. The motivation for getting users to subscribe is Youtube feature thresholds. You can’t monetize your videos unless you have 1,000 subscribers. You can’t get customer support for your channel unless you have at least 10,000 subscribers. Lots of new features are initially reserved for creators with 100,000 subscribers or more. Subscribers also matter to brands that may be looking to partner. When it comes to views, don’t expect your subscriber count to amount to much in that department.
