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.
