My Video with best watch time gets very low impressions

[happyornot]

Hello everyone. I am new here, also new on youtube. Please excuse me if I did any mistake in this post.

My channel is only 3 months old. I have about 15 videos yet. Recently I published my most successful video. Watch time, retention rate and click through rate are over the roof compared to my other videos. Its watch time is nearly equal to all my other videos combined. The problem is, after uploading the video and getting my best ever statistics ( >30 minutes watch time per person), a couple of hours later the impressions of the video suddenly dropped to zero. I am so confused and disappointed about this..

This is the third day of the video. Today it got a couple of views, each with long durations. When I look at its statistics, it shows a raising impression graphic with "215" impressions today. But, comparing the high click rate and very low number of views, this does not seem realistic to me. Also; total impressions of my channel for today seems only 53! An all time low.

My understanding was that youtube would give a video more chance if its watch time was good. But in my case, that did not happen. In fact, some hours later the impressions of my whole channel almost flat lined. Have you ever experienced something like this? What do you think could be the problem? I put so much effort into this video and this is so discouraging

 

[mirrorlessNY(youtuber)]

discouraging feels like a frequent occurrence for me, but if you have passion for the content/topic = all should be well .,.,.whats your channel? you can put link under icon/name like under mine

 

[Min/Max Munchking]

Is the CTR 15%+, ~10% or sub-10%? From my personal, anecdotal experience, anything above 15% is stellar, around 10% is passable, below 10% you can kiss that video goodbye because it ain't getting promoted anywhere.

Realistically, it's almost impossible to maintain 15%, but you want to aim to operate within the 15-20% zone for the first 200-500 views on a new video. After that, YT algo seems to "allow" you to drop lower, but if you drop from 15% to 6%, you're still not gonna get promoted. My 9 day old semi-viral video was maintaining around 10% CTR for the first 5,000 views, then it finally dipped below, but as your video gets promoted to larger and larger audience, your CTR will go down. YT knows this, so they apparently made the algorithm operate within these parameters.

Average view duration is relative. If your video is 10 hours long and all you get is 30 minutes, that's only 5% audience retention. Since we don't know the length of your video, it's impossible to say if that's good or bad. I've made some changes to my new videos and I'm now getting 25-40% retention, which is still really meh, but you have to do everything you can think of to make people watch the entirety of your video, from start to finish.

Realistically, videos "should" be 5-25 minutes long. Maybe 30. Anything above that and you're not operating in the "sweet spot" zone. My longer-than-30-minutes videos regularly underperform in the YT algorithm, which is why I recently started uploading in series of 3 videos instead of releasing a single very long video that lasts more than an hour. And, surprise surprise, one of my newest, 15-minutes long videos suddenly shoots up to 25k views in its first 10 days.

All of this is anecdotal, nobody can tell you definitively, other than YT engineers, because they have access to data from all the channels and they know the intricacies of YT algo which we as creators can only guesstimate.
But patterns do seem to exist and they repeat themselves. Exceptions exist as well ofc, there are obnoxiously long videos out there with millions of views, but in 2020, it definitely looks like shorter is better for the majority of new channels.

Also, is that video optimized in a way that YT knows what type of audience would be interested in it (tags, description containing keywords etc...)? If yes, you might be experiencing "new channel barrier". There does seem to be a certain block/cap for new channels in place, before YT algo determines you're "safe" and "ready" to be promoted to the larger crowd. But also, new channels do have the opposite sort of "grace period" for being new, meaning if you upload a bunch of appealing/popular videos, you might go viral within your first 50 videos much easier than channels that are a little bit older. Exact ages and timespans I do not know, I just kind of keep track of mine and "a few" other channels and that at least seems to be a pattern.

Back in 2018 when I started this channel, I also had very good CTR (I hit 20%+ with my second video) and passable average view duration on my first few videos, but I was only getting 5-10 views a day channel-wide for the first few months, compared to nowadays when one of those oldest videos alone is getting almost 200 views/day.

If you're getting organic views (they just spontaneously come from search/suggested/homepage instead of you promoting the video manually on FB, Reddit or forums), all you need to do is keep making content relevant to the same/similar audience and you will get picked up eventually.

To be honest with you, 15 videos is nothing, I have 93 and I legit feel like I should have 186 and even then it would probably not be enough.

People like watching new videos, which makes YT algo always hungry, so keep feeding it, and don't stop.