YouTube Formula?

YouTuber1978 said:
YouTube is a computer program. It's just a robot - a mathematical algorithm that looks at how engaging content is and promotes the more engaging content over the less engaging content. The only way to consistently be successful on YouTube is to produce great content. Someone might get "lucky" in the sense that they happen to film some great content but the algorithm can not be fooled or tricked and it does not play favorites. It has nothing to do with luck. It's just math. Attempting to fool or trick the algorithm will lower your score and make it less likely to promote you. Make good content and write accurate descriptions and tags. That's all you have to do. The algorithm re-calibrates every 24 hours and does a major recalibration every 30 days so even if you get "lucky" by getting a shoutout or something you will be getting almost zero residual traffic from that shout out after 30 days if your video is less engaging than other videos with similar content. That's why it's a total waste of time to promote your videos. Make great content so the algorithm promotes it for you. If you look at a video that's got great content in a popular category like gaming it can get 30-50 thousand views a day. None of it from subs, none of it from "social media". All of it from the YouTube robot suggesting it to people and displaying it in search. "Social Media" accounts for less than 10% of the YouTube weighted scorecard (the type of algorithm they use). Unless you get over 100 facebook shares, tweets, ect - the algorithm doesn't even take it into account.

The only thing the algorithm really cares about is audience retention. Over simplifying the explanation to illustrate a point - if I make a sixty second video on "How to cook a rabbit" and the average person watches it for 49 seconds and you make a sixty second video on "How to cook a rabbit" and the average person watches it for 50 seconds YouTube will promote your video over mine every time. You'll end up with millions of views and I'll end up with none. You've got to focus on audience retention. I look at my "relative audience retention" in analytics every day. You have to see that chart above the average line they show. If you do that wether a video is 10 seconds long or 10 hours long, wether it's on a popular video game or a local news story, YouTube will always be promoting it over other videos that are below average audience retention.
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That's true but if You are a small channel that is just starting then how can You even get people to view Your content if You are not promoting it?
 
ZombieBrain said:
That's true but if You are a small channel that is just starting then how can You even get people to view Your content if You are not promoting it?
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All you need is a few views for the YouTube algorithm to pick it up. Every video get's a couple of views the first day. YouTube starts promoting it if it's above average. The reason you can't game the system is because the algorithm is constantly re-calibrating. Let's say you post a video. You watch it yourself 10 times and you watch the entire thing. Great, YouTube will promote your video. But if the next 10 people only watch it for a few seconds and click off YouTube will not keep promoting your video. It's an almost perfect system that entirely rewards good content over bad content (with YouTube defining "good" as videos having a high % viewed before someone clicks off compared to other videos of the same length).
 
Are You saying that I shouldn't give my videos views from myself? Because it adds views when I set up annotations and cards after I publish it.

Also... my most successfull video has the average percentage view of 45%. I always thought it's not that great? I thought that the number of views I received resulted from posting a video relatively quickly after the patch 1.04 came out and by adding good title, description and tags. Here are the audience retention stats:
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Watching your own videos doesn't hurt or help from analytics. YouTube engineers are smart enough not to count those. Those retention stats look good. I've attached a screenshot. If you see your audience retention above the average line all the way to your endcard chances are you have a video that is going to be highly promoted by YouTube.View Time Screenshot.png
 
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