I used to have a small YouTube channel. Still do, I guess, but don't update it.
One of my videos was very different than all my others and it did, for me, very well. This video earned something like 700k views compared to my average of high hundreds to low thousands.
Like this author, my video was something different than I usually did. Unlike this author my thought was "I've got to start making more content like that new thing!"
However, my approach kind of killed my channel. The reason my video did well turned out to be because a minor YouTuber (significantly more major than me) linked to it and almost all of the views came from him. He never linked to my other videos so when I made similar content it didn't do very well.
When I went back to making my old content that did worse than before too. My mental model was that I had alienated my original audience with the shift to the new kind of videos and then alienated my new audience with the return to the old kind of videos.
In the end, I felt that the random spike in views, and my poor handling of it, ruined my channel and reversed the modest momentum I had built over years. I used to have small but growing numbers of views and subscribers. After this incident I had declining numbers of both.
I had to fix my dishwasher and searched on youtube for people with the same problems. I found some videos and on a whim I clicked on the profile for one of them to see what else they had videos of, and it turns out all of their other videos were video auditions and screen tests. They're an actor and had a single video of them fixing their dishwasher, and their single little dishwasher video had several orders of magnitude more views than any of their other videos.
>it turns out all of their other videos were video auditions and screen tests
my understanding from a friend of mine is you're not putting that up there because you are hoping for some big engagement with the general population, you just want a convenient place to put your portfolio.
>I always wondered what they felt about that.
hopefully it made them feel good. At least I can always be a youtube star!
I useto have a video up on how to quickly keyhole flap skin a barramundi, purely to show a former apprentice of mine how to do it.
I posted and completely forgot about it, then randomly checked it a few years later and it had views in the over 500,000 range.
My other videos(similar things for the same reason), were on 10-15 views haha.
It was very confusing to me, and I always wondered what would happen if I'd made a decent try at making instructional videos, in the end I just deleted the account in one of my anti-youtube moments.
So hopefully that gives you insight into a similar reaction from someone in a similar position.
Some youtubers really take off with random flukes like that, or doing something silly. One guy we used to watch did that, Charles Cornell, jazz musician did some doodling and whatnot on youtube until one day as a joke he put piano to a random youtube meme. That one was picked up by the internet and took off, so he made a couple more, his channel exploded in subscribers and engagement in a short amount of time. He doesn't do the memes anymore, he's got himself a nice new studio (house?) probably off his overnight success and is doing some lessons and, ugh, reactions, and we've mostly lost interest but it was still interesting to see one of the millions of small but hopeful youtube channels suddenly make it big.
That's one of the reason I have not added Analytics to my website. I don't want to create my content based on how shareable it is. I want to create something that I consider to be of high quality. Surely at some point it will be shared for this reason.
I share my site on reddit on a regular basis and I get direct feedback from redditors.
My definition of success is when people share my site because they see it as something very valuable (hopefuly one day...). I can't really miss it since the same questions come back over and over in the subreddit in which I'm active (taht's probably the case for the whole of reddit as well).
I originally was discussing social and political issues I was interested in. My approach was looking at academic research or government reports and putting their findings into the context of my personal political beliefs.
The popular video - I just happened to notice on YouTube that someone completely unrelated was lying about something. They were faking a technical issue and accusing a company of something. I made a video that proved the original was a fake and explained how they did it.
When my new video exploded in popularity I thought "debunking" was the way to go. I also had the problems that I didn't really know any other similar fakes to debunk, so I probably picked things that were either too obvious or I'd pick things that turned out to be legit so far as I could tell and just share my results on that.
I've since removed my attempts at debunking and even my popular video from my channel. Didn't undo the damage though. (Also possible my channel was failing for other reasons not related. It was never clear to me how the algorithm worked).
I'm going to maybe be contrarian and say pivoting and being persistent after the pivot were actually probably the smartest moves to make, and I'm going to be completely speculative and say that maybe there's a chance it was just the strategy and/or execution that was the problem.
In my opinion, there's huge demand and little supply for good, comprehensive, credible debunking videos. I also think the fact that someone linked to it wasn't necessarily a fluke: debunking is basically just investigative journalism, and good, accurate, novel investigative journalism is hard to come by and likely to be shared when it's discovered, if it's concerning some topic of interest to many people.
I'd even say - if you want to and are truly passionate about it, at least - that you should consider trying it again but take a dramatically different approach to what you choose to investigate and publish. Or perhaps hone your investigative skills and tactics, as well.
Doing it on a separate channel might be the best option, though, like you said in another comment.
The pivot might have been smart. It might have been a bet with positive expected value in terms of viewers and subscribers but some combination of luck and my execution went against me and I wound up losing even on the correct strategy.
I may try again in the future, although I will do it on Odysee (or whatever YouTube clone exists when I get around to retrying). I have negative feelings for Google entirely apart from my failed YouTube bid.
I'm not sure how long ago your story's from but I've heard youtubers mention a recent change in the algorithm that made it so subscribers stopped seeing notifications unless they clicked the notification bell thing.
Apparently, from what a few different channels i watch have mentioned, in some cases they started getting half the amount of views or less compared to before the changes.
From the creator studio you can see analytics for your video, including a view that shows you the percentage of your audience you retain at each second of your video. This is useful because you can see what's on the screen as you lose viewers and what content people skip over. You can also see the click through rate on your notifications and watch time. Those were the main metrics I used.
I found that all of my key metrics were down after my failed switch. Fewer people would click on my notifications, if they did they didn't watch as much, and they tended to stop watching as I explained what the video was about. I think that in turn these metrics would signal YouTube that my content was bad so it wouldn't get recommended or rank in search queries
I know YouTube is always tinkering with the algorithm, but in my case the metrics and the timing of my collapse in views, make me think my channel failed because of the content switch.
>I know YouTube is always tinkering with the algorithm, but in my case the metrics and the timing of my collapse in views, make me think my channel failed because of the content switch.
I think that's the worst part of the way YouTube's algorithms work, in your case, at least you have a fairly good idea as to possibly why your channel declined in popularity, but for a lot of people they're left wondering if it's the algorithm or their content.
Before the big YouTuber my videos were getting high hundreds to low thousands for views with the occasional video hitting tens of thousands. After my videos were getting mid double digit views. I found it very discouraging to spend time making content that wasn't really well received and seemed to be moving my channel backwards. For example, I'd post a new video and subscribers would net decrease over it.
In retrospect, I think the smart thing would've been to not post the new content type on my existing channel. I should've just created a new channel for it.
One of my videos was very different than all my others and it did, for me, very well. This video earned something like 700k views compared to my average of high hundreds to low thousands.
Like this author, my video was something different than I usually did. Unlike this author my thought was "I've got to start making more content like that new thing!"
However, my approach kind of killed my channel. The reason my video did well turned out to be because a minor YouTuber (significantly more major than me) linked to it and almost all of the views came from him. He never linked to my other videos so when I made similar content it didn't do very well.
When I went back to making my old content that did worse than before too. My mental model was that I had alienated my original audience with the shift to the new kind of videos and then alienated my new audience with the return to the old kind of videos.
In the end, I felt that the random spike in views, and my poor handling of it, ruined my channel and reversed the modest momentum I had built over years. I used to have small but growing numbers of views and subscribers. After this incident I had declining numbers of both.