- The first instinct of many people watching this particular video will be to immediately
flock to the comment section and tell me, Roberto, why
are you making a video about how to get more views on YouTube when your channel has
over 300,000 subscribers and doesn't usually pull
more than 10,000 views per video upload, if you're lucky? And to those people in
the comment section, I would say, you can make that comment without watching this
video or you can stay tuned and I can show you exactly why I know what I'm talking about here and how even with less than
one million views, in a month, I can pull 3,000 to $5,000
on this YouTube channel whether I'm getting a ton of views or not. Now, if that's something
that interests you, you can stay tuned and
watch the rest of this video and I will break down how one of my most
successful videos in August specifically popped in
the YouTube algorithm, show you the analytics behind that, and why I got over 100,000 views. And also I will talk about why you're not getting more views on YouTube and how it has nothing to do with some of the quality
of your video content and with small tweaks, you
can actually get more views by focusing on four core things that the biggest content
creators do on a regular basis. Anyway, let's hop into the video. Hey everybody, this is Roberto Blake helping you create
something awesome today. Welcome back to the channel. For those of you who are new here and you clicked on this
title out of nowhere, thank you for your patience, this video is going to be awesome for you if you're a YouTube content creator. For those of you who
have no idea who I am, my name is Roberto Blake,
I'm a creative entrepreneur, I have a social media coaching business, and I also am a public
speaker at events like VidCon, VidSummit and Video Marketing World. I'm a YouTube certified marketer and I just got back from VidSummit. Hanging out with a bunch of
different content creators, friends of mine who have
a million subscribers, friends of mine who
have 1,000 subscribers. And after watching everybody's content and listening to all
the great presentations, there are a lot of things that I took away from this conference
that gave me perspective on how I can relate a lot of the success that me and some of my
friends have had in YouTube so that you can do it too. Now some of the things that
you need to think about is the fact that not all
YouTube channels are the same and they are not all equal
and not all views are equal. What is normal in your
niche or genre of content will not be normal in another
genre or niche of content. For example, a gaming YouTube channel cannot be compared to a YouTube channel that is focused on Harry Potter. A business YouTube
channel cannot be compared to a prank channel. It doesn't work because they have different viewing audiences and the way that people who are say, 13 to 17, watch YouTube is very different than the way people who
are 24 to 34 watch YouTube. Now my audience is mostly older but we have a few young
hustlers in the audience and thank you for watching. And I know that's not super exciting, there aren't enough jump
cuts for you and I apologize. For those of you who are older, I appreciate you taking
time out of your day away from your family,
your kids, your spouse, your job, the business
that you're trying to build to stick with me and
to learn something new that you think can be of value to you. I respect your time and I thank you for spending it with
me each and every day. Over the last quarter, I've been running a series of different experiments
on my YouTube channel. One of the things that a
lot of people don't realize about my YouTube channel
is that instead of trying to do everything I possibly
can to grow the channel, especially since I already
have a silver play button and I don't necessarily
think I'm gonna get a gold, so yeah, why worry about it? The thing is I've been
experimenting with my channel to learn more about YouTube,
learn more about the algorithm, and learn more about my audience. And part of the reason
is that helps me develop the products and services
for my coaching business, it helps me get a lot of interesting data that is useful to the brands
that I do workshops with in my B2B business. So by having a B2C business and coaching and a B2B business that works with brands, whether my YouTube channel
is wildly successful or not, I'm taken care of, I still
have a six-figure business. The YouTube side of what I
do is still very lucrative and even with an average
of 400 to 600,000 views, I can get in a month, 3,000,
$5,000 in ad revenue from that. And so, that's interesting
for a lot of reasons because it has to do with how you can get more views on YouTube and also in a way that correlates to how you
can make more ad revenue. So I want you to stick with me from this because we have a little
bit to unpack here. I know that some of you are impatient and you're like, Roberto,
Roberto, get to the point. But context really matters
because this is stuff that it took me years of collecting data from doing over 1,000
videos to sort through, and talking to friends that
have been on YouTube even longer and doing the back end of channels and auditing channels that have anywhere from 1,000 to a million subscribers. Looking at all that data taught me a lot about how YouTube works
and not just on my channel but on different channels. Let's start with four of
the things that ultimately, are going to determine
the views on your channel because it's not down to just
the quality of your content. Quality content matters, don't
get my words twisted on that but there are so many of you, I've watched your videos,
I watched for example, I watched Devin over at CKID. He does these great rap-based
videos around technology, he's awesome, I watched CJKnowsTECH, I watch Viper, I watched
all these amazing YouTubers, I watched EL JEFE REVIEWS,
I watched these people who have great production values, their content is quality,
their information is solid, and the people who see their
videos, love their videos. It's great, right? But they're not necessarily
always getting the views and they don't necessarily
always grow subscribers even though the people who
see their videos like them. The quality is fine, so why, if quality content is all that matters, why are they not getting views? This is something that many of you as small YouTubers struggle with and I have some advice for you. These are the four things
that really matter. It comes down to the topic, the title, the thumbnail of the video,
and then the video's ability to retain 60% or better
average view duration compared to the entire
duration of the video. I'm going to repeat that again. What is the topic of the video? Nail the title of the video, have a thumbnail that will be clicked, and then the video itself
has to have a 60% or higher average view duration compared to the entire length of the video. If you can nail those four things, your videos will get more views. Now doing this sounds simple
and elementary but it is not because it is hard to pull off even for an experienced YouTuber, whether you have 100,000 subscribers or a million subscribers, you can still make a
video that underperforms. It happens all the time. Now if you're making
something you care about, then you may not worry
as much about the views or if you're making enough money on the videos or on your business, you may not care enough about the views. That's kind of where I'm at. I don't always want to make a title because it just feels wrong, it feels too clickbaity
sometimes and it bothers me. And then there are content topics where I know that this is important and should I take a risk
with making the title that I know people will click on because it's that important? And so then sometimes I'll do that. An example was the video that I did called stop trading time for money and how to make $1,000 a week. Or was it $10,000 a month? It was something like that
that I put in the title. I put in the title and
I put it into context because it was the concept
of trading time for money versus charging for a task. You know, like if you're a
freelancer or you work a job, then hourly rate means that you make less $100 a day sometimes
which is really sucky for all your hard work, but if you found like
three things to do in a day that someone valued at 50 to
$100, you'd make more money and keep more of your
time for your family. So it was a really important video and I made a title that I
was like, you know what? I might take some heat in the comments but this title will get
people to click this and it'll be a wake up call, maybe it changes someone's life, maybe somebody ends up
making much more money and can provide for their
family, so I was like, screw it, I'll make a title that will get clicked. And it did and it got like 100,000 views but it also triggered
the YouTube algorithm because of where those views came from. Just because you subscribe
to a YouTube channel, doesn't mean that you get the videos that you subscribed for. Unless you hit notifications and say that you want all the videos, you're probably not getting them. If you look at the YouTubers that you're subscribed to right now, you can figure out that wow,
I haven't gotten a video from so-and-so in a long
time on my YouTube homepage, why is that? And that's because of how
the YouTube algorithm works. And sometimes you'll find yourself even unsubscribed to a channel. So why do we judge people on
their view-to-subscriber ratio? I think part of it is just that most people don't know any better. They don't realize that
YouTube is just not delivering all of the videos to everyone
who signed up for them. Either because they skipped a few videos or because YouTube determined
somehow that that video, it doesn't fit that
person's viewer behavior or because again, you didn't
hit the notification bell. So there's a lot of reasons why you don't get the content
that you signed up for and your viewers may not be getting your content because of that. And here are some ways
you can deal with this. You guys have often heard me say that variety channels are dead in YouTube and yet I still keep
making variety content because it works for my business. And because it works for my ADHD and because I can't help myself. But if I really wanted to look
like a successful YouTuber to the rest of you and
to, I'm gonna say it, the morons in the comment section who are gonna razz me about
my view-to-subscriber ratio in this video and every
other video I upload that doesn't get 50 to
100,000 views, thanks guys. For those people, view-to-subscriber ratio is about whether you're doing
a good job as a YouTuber and whether you're making
content for your audience. And yet, that's not how
the algorithm works. And if you've uploaded content, and you have even 1,000 subscribers, you know this to be true. Here's something that I
told my friend Jon Prosser and that I told my friend Jason Lewis. Jon Prosser is the host
of Front Page Tech, it's a popular tech show here on YouTube. He's been doing YouTube for a long time and just a few short years ago, he almost gave up on doing YouTube because the channel
wasn't performing well, it wasn't getting views, and even when it did
start getting traction, he noticed patterns in his content that were hurting his channel and he couldn't figure
out what to do about it. And so, I gave him some advice and then I gave this advice
to several other people. You see, Jon was interrupting
the tech news show with bad jokes that everybody
in his community signed up for with doing an Ask FTP
show which is you know, like how YouTubers go,
oh well, ask me anything, he was doing that ever so often and he was also doing a weekly podcast on the YouTube channel as a live stream. And those things were
things that the core, most die-hard followers
loved but at the same time, even though it was a great
community thing to do, it was hurting the momentum
of the YouTube channel and it's not the content
people signed up for and it meant that they were
skipping some of these uploads. So what I told him or rather
what I suggested to him was to just make Front
Page Tech, just make FPT. Just make the show that
people signed up for and do nothing else on the channel. And within a very short period of time because people were getting
five to seven uploads a week of exactly the show
that they signed up for, the views skyrocketed, the momentum of the channel skyrocketed, it got the best view-to-subscribe
ratios its ever gotten, it went from struggling
to break 10,000 views to getting 30,000 and
more on a regular basis every single upload, this works. And when I've told any content creator to just stick to the content that is performing best on the channel and make no other type of
content except what's working, this has been successful
to grow their channel. But it's also had a very
particular downside. For a creator, this is a death
sentence to their creativity. They don't feel they have permission to make the content they
want to make the most, that they're passionate about, or do something different
and they get into a rut. They get bored very
easily and very quickly because again, we're creators, we don't wanna do the
same thing over and over. If we wanted to do that, we'd be working in a
factory somewhere, right? But the algorithm wants consistency, it loves pattern recognition, and human beings are
comforted by what is familiar and also getting exactly
what they said they wanted the way that they wanted it. And so, that's kind of the trade-off and the sacrifice someone
would have to make to get consistent views
on their YouTube channel. They would have to be
ruthlessly consistent about only making the type of content that has been proven to perform
on their YouTube channel. And so, if you want more views and you want more subscribers, you will have to narrow down
the niche of your content, you will have to, after
running experiments to see what works best for your audience, only make the thing that
is in the most demand by your audience or in your niche, and your channel will be
successful and it will grow. But you will also likely burn
out faster by doing this. This is exactly why creator
burnout has been so rampant among creators that are either on the rise or have been successful in
the platform for a long time. It is exactly this
desire to get more views, to make more ad revenue,
to get more subscribers, to always go for bigger and bigger numbers that ultimately makes creators
suffer on this platform because of the way that
they have to accommodate the audience, the algorithm,
and the advertisers. And what we learned also at VidSummit which I've always known to be true because I'm an advertiser and I sell products on the
internet and I manage clients who sell products on the internet,
so I'm in Google AdWords, I've always known that profanity is something that hurts
your YouTube channel. I've always known that to be true, a lot of people have contradicted
me for years about it but now you see even channels
like PewDiePie and DramaAlert, and all these other big
YouTubers acknowledging that cursing and profanity
hurts your ad revenue and that you could make as much as four times more ad revenue by not cursing at all
in your YouTube videos. Anyway, so that is real, that is a thing. Also with regard to
videos making more money than some other videos, ultimately, the niche and demographics
of your audience determine how much ad
revenue you can make. Even with less views, I
do very well on ad revenue compared to some of my friends
who do different niches because we have different
audience demographics and that's something that
again, it's rarely talked about because there's not a
lot you can do about it beyond not cursing on your videos, and I don't think you should make content that just makes you the most money. I mean, I certainly kind of do that but I don't think that's for everybody and it could also affect your creativity. So it's something to
think about, it really is. Now let's talk about titles
and thumbnails real quick. I know this is a long video, I know you're suffering through it, I hope that you took a little break, you got a snack, you got a juice, whatever you need to
power through this video but it's important. And I think that one of
the most important tips I can give you is that the
title and the thumbnail is what is going to matter
probably the most initially for something called view
velocity and watch time velocity. If you look at your real-time analytics and this is great about
the YouTube mobile app if you guys haven't used the analytics in the YouTube Creator
Studio that's on your phone, you can see real-time analytics and you can like pull
it up and you can say, oh, in real time I've uploaded my video and this is how it's performing right now and this is how many people are watching my channel right now. And those real-time analytics are powerful and they're important. The first hour that you
make a YouTube video public, is probably the most important hour in that YouTube video's lifetime and the first 24 hours after that. And this is what is called
view and watch time velocity. Watch time and average viewer duration matters the most on YouTube
but you can use views as kind of a rough estimate of that by looking at real time views and how something is gonna perform. In the first hour of an
upload to this channel, if a video breaks 2,000 or
3,000 views on the first hour, I know that that video
will perform better. If the video gets less than 1,000 views in the first hour of upload, I know that the video is going to have a harder time and struggle, and so, then I need to promote
it more in my social media and drive traffic to it and
hit the engagement in comments to keep people coming back so that I can accumulate more
views and more watch time in the second hour than
I did in the first hour to signal to YouTube that this video does grab people's attention and that it does matter to them. And so they're spending time on it. And that is gonna signal to YouTube to keep distributing and
promoting the video to more people like the people who already watched it. So it kind of works like Amazon's like, if you bought this, buyers
like you also bought that. So you know, if I buy a camera, it recommends me lenses and accessories that other people who bought
the camera also bought. YouTube's the same way
if you think about it from that perspective. The action item from that is that the title and the thumbnail, as well as a topic that has
attention ultimately matters. It's why if I make a video
about making money online or getting views on YouTube, that's a topic that has
massive attention around it. But can my title and thumbnail pull you in to the video on that topic compared to the other options
you have at that moment and can it do it in the first
hour and in the first day? And if you can get that
right, then ultimately, your video will perform better. I can't always nail that
right in terms of timing and that is why sometimes despite the hundreds of thousands of
subscribers on the channel, that's why sometimes the
views don't work out. If I release a video at the wrong time, it could die just as easily. You have to know your audience, you have to know their habits, you have to know how they consume content, and you have to know when
is the best time to upload and there are tools that
can help you with that. You can get the topic,
title, and thumbnail right but you have to get timing right as well to be able to get that view velocity. And then the video has
to actually be good. The video has to actually be good because if you're not hitting that 60% average view duration,
then guess what happens. That's saying that people
aren't really interested in the video and they're not watching it a good portion of the way through, so you're not accumulating
enough watch time, you're not accumulating
enough average view duration for YouTube to keep promoting that video. If we look at my videos that have gotten over 100,000 views before in analytics, and I'm popping some of
that up for you guys, the reality is that if I can nail high average view durations, YouTube promoted it more
in its browse features and also in recommended. And tags do matter, I
know there's controversy about do tags matter? But here's where they do matter. They matter based on the
lifetime value of the video. If you're not making a video that's gonna be irrelevant in a week because it's a news story
or something like that, you want to make sure
you get the tags right because it helps YouTube
with recommending your video against other channels and other videos that match your topic. So I wouldn't ignore tags but I would say to spend three or five times as much time on your title and your thumbnail. A thumbnail is packaging. Apple is one of the
most profitable brands, if not the most profitable
brand in the world, because it figured out design,
it figured out aesthetics, it figured out that we
like stuff that looks good and it builds its marketing and its design thesis around that, and it's a trillion dollar company. So if you're gonna spend eight
hours making a YouTube video, maybe you should spend
a healthy amount of time on a good thumbnail and on
researching a good title. And here are some tools that
are gonna help you with that. This video on helping you
get more views on YouTube is sponsored by my friends at vidIQ. And vidIQ is one of the most
powerful tools you can use for your YouTube channel. You can use their research
tools to find keywords and titles that have attention
around them in your topic and that can help you optimize your titles and also your tags so that
you're getting that traffic that you need and popping
that view velocity. They also have a Channel Audit tool that can show you the videos that you have that have good view velocity around them so you can make related videos to that, you can also look at your competitors and what has view velocity
around their channel, and then you can make
similar videos and topics that you know are competing
in your niche for attention. Maybe you can do it better or maybe you can make a response video. So if you go to vidIQ.com/Roberto and use the code Roberto, you
can get a 30-day free trial of vidIQ and see if this
can help your channel. You can also just use
the free browser tool, that's actually helpful too. Like I said, this isn't
something I can always nail and get right because
I want to make content that I think matters to
even just one person. Ultimately what made
my business successful was instead of trying
to get a million people, focusing on exactly who I can help and sometimes that's 1,000 people but 1,000 people who each spend
$100 with you is $100,000. So if you guys are thinking practically, I would just remind you of that. I also think that just being
able to help one person every single day is a gift and I also think being able to make the content that you care about and that matters to you is worthwhile even if it doesn't attract the biggest audience in the world. Your creativity still matters and I want you to stand up
for that and respect that. So if that means you have
to make variety content and get less views, then do that. I mean, it's what I'm doing. But if you absolutely
ruthlessly more than anything wanna be a successful YouTuber, then you'll have to make
creative compromises. You'll have to make sacrifices. It's going to require you
to focus in on your content and give people what they
signed up for and nothing else. It's going to mean doing brand deals and taking a little bit of hate from your audience on it sometimes because that's what's
gonna put food on the table for you and your family
when YouTube demonetizes you because of the content that you have to do that people signed up for. So I think at the end of the day, while it might feel like it's
impossible to win sometimes, you can do it with the right strategy. That's what I help people
with in my coaching business and again, if you want to razz me about my view-to-subscriber ratio, I guess that's what you're gonna do. But like I said, it doesn't really matter because at the end of the day, the people who do see my videos, enjoy them, they benefit from them, and they get to grow successful channels, they get to be successful on Instagram or they get to build a successful six or seven figure business. And so, I'm grateful for every single one of those viewers that sticks with me and it shares my content out in the world. And to the haters and the people leaving those nasty comments,
thank you for the watch time and thank you for the
bump in the algorithm. I really do appreciate it because every little bit helps. Question of the day, what small tweaks are you going to make to
improve your YouTube channel? Let me know in the comments section. Like this video if you liked it, don't forget to subscribe, check out the other awesome
stuff here on the channel. And as always you guys, thanks
so very much for watching and don't forget, go out there and create something awesome today. Take care.
