YouTube Formula?

[ZombieBrain]

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.

I don't think audience retention is all that matters... look at this example:

Relative audience retention is above average throughout the whole video and yet it received a lot less views than my video from the Witcher 3 that I have mentioned before in this thread.
In my opinion if a channel is not big and isn't getting hundreds or thousands of view then there is a little proabability that Your videos are gonna get promoted by Youtube.

 

[YouTuber1978]

@ZombieBrain I'm really surprised that video hasn't taken off for you. Couple of comments. Keep producing content with an audience retention chart that looks like that and you'll be huge. I think it's hard to take one video in isolation and make a final call. I think with the YouTube formula you can still get everything right and have a video not take off. But get it right on 10 videos and 8 of them will take off. The other thing is that there's certain things you can do that YouTube will penalize you for. For example - did you change your tags, title or description after the video had been live more than a week? If you did I've seen YouTube never promote a video where tags where changed. I have also seen it happen the other way round where changing tags helps. It's just make the algorithm quirky. 2. YouTube can ghost your video if they think you've tried to game the system. For example. Searching for your video multiple times and then scrolling past the second page and then clicking on it to try and boost your search position.

I'm not saying you did any of those things - I've just learned through experience and the experience of others that trying to game that YouTube tends to punish videos where they think someone's tried to game the system to make it appear higher. Same thing for keyword spamming. If you repeated the same keyword multiple times in the description, title, tags etc, YouTube doesn't like it. E.g. I hope your description wasn't "Check out the fallout game play walkthrough to see some amazing fallout action. This is fallout 4 at it's best".

 

[StraightUpIrish]

@ZombieBrain I'm really surprised that video hasn't taken off for you. Couple of comments. Keep producing content with an audience retention chart that looks like that and you'll be huge. I think it's hard to take one video in isolation and make a final call. I think with the YouTube formula you can still get everything right and have a video not take off. But get it right on 10 videos and 8 of them will take off. The other thing is that there's certain things you can do that YouTube will penalize you for. For example - did you change your tags, title or description after the video had been live more than a week? If you did I've seen YouTube never promote a video where tags where changed. I have also seen it happen the other way round where changing tags helps. It's just make the algorithm quirky. 2. YouTube can ghost your video if they think you've tried to game the system. For example. Searching for your video multiple times and then scrolling past the second page and then clicking on it to try and boost your search position.

I'm not saying you did any of those things - I've just learned through experience and the experience of others that trying to game that YouTube tends to punish videos where they think someone's tried to game the system to make it appear higher. Same thing for keyword spamming. If you repeated the same keyword multiple times in the description, title, tags etc, YouTube doesn't like it. E.g. I hope your description wasn't "Check out the fallout game play walkthrough to see some amazing fallout action. This is fallout 4 at it's best".

I had know idea about this tbh thanks for the heads up

 

[Paulie Popcorn]

I thought it was using a super-cute dog? Apparently, Carmella is not cute enough!!

 

[ZombieBrain]

@ZombieBrain I'm really surprised that video hasn't taken off for you. Couple of comments. Keep producing content with an audience retention chart that looks like that and you'll be huge. I think it's hard to take one video in isolation and make a final call. I think with the YouTube formula you can still get everything right and have a video not take off. But get it right on 10 videos and 8 of them will take off. The other thing is that there's certain things you can do that YouTube will penalize you for. For example - did you change your tags, title or description after the video had been live more than a week? If you did I've seen YouTube never promote a video where tags where changed. I have also seen it happen the other way round where changing tags helps. It's just make the algorithm quirky. 2. YouTube can ghost your video if they think you've tried to game the system. For example. Searching for your video multiple times and then scrolling past the second page and then clicking on it to try and boost your search position.

I'm not saying you did any of those things - I've just learned through experience and the experience of others that trying to game that YouTube tends to punish videos where they think someone's tried to game the system to make it appear higher. Same thing for keyword spamming. If you repeated the same keyword multiple times in the description, title, tags etc, YouTube doesn't like it. E.g. I hope your description wasn't "Check out the fallout game play walkthrough to see some amazing fallout action. This is fallout 4 at it's best".

This video was uploaded 3 days ago. I don't remember if I changed tags after uploading it, maybe I have added a few tags. Here they are:

As You can see only relevant tags are used. Maybe I shouldn't have repeated the "fallout 4" so many times but I've heard that it's good to put multiple search phrases in tags to target more searches. Am I wrong? Tags are the most puzzling thing for me.

I usually do search for my videos to see how high up they rank in search but I never click them to boost them up.
I also never spam keywords. I usually use the targeted keywords at the beginning of title and repeat 2 or 3 most important of them once at the beginning of description (sometimes even not once). I remember reading some guide which stated that it is a good practice to repeat keywords used in the title but no more than twice, so I stick to that. Here is the title and description for this video:

Title: Fallout 4 E3 Only Gameplay Footage - High Quality
Beginning of description: "Character creation, dog companion, VATS, building shelter, crafting / modding and epic combat compilation for dessert. Use annotations or links provided below to immediately skip to parts that interest You (Watch in 1080p 60fps for best quality)..." after that there are social media contact details and music credits.

Maybe the video would be more popular if I had uploaded it just after the event, I don't know. For now it has 172 so nothing crazy

The things I MAY be doing wrong (I don't know if it matters). Is that sometimes I refresh my video a couple of times to see if it's fully processed to be watched at 1080p 60fps, but I do that before I actually press "Publish" so it shouldn't matter? It does give the video a couple of views tho. The other thing is that I usually watch the video once on my mobile after publishing to see how it looks on mobile devices.

 

[StraightUpIrish]

This video was uploaded 3 days ago. I don't remember if I changed tags after uploading it, maybe I have added a few tags. Here they are:

As You can see only relevant tags are used. Maybe I shouldn't have repeated the "fallout 4" so many times but I've heard that it's good to put multiple search phrases in tags to target more searches. Am I wrong? Tags are the most puzzling thing for me.

I usually do search for my videos to see how high up they rank in search but I never click them to boost them up.
I also never spam keywords. I usually use the targeted keywords at the beginning of title and repeat 2 or 3 most important of them once at the beginning of description (sometimes even not once). I remember reading some guide which stated that it is a good practice to repeat keywords used in the title but no more than twice, so I stick to that. Here is the title and description for this video:

Title: Fallout 4 E3 Only Gameplay Footage - High Quality
Beginning of description: "Character creation, dog companion, VATS, building shelter, crafting / modding and epic combat compilation for dessert. Use annotations or links provided below to immediately skip to parts that interest You (Watch in 1080p 60fps for best quality)..." after that there are social media contact details and music credits.

Maybe the video would be more popular if I had uploaded it just after the event, I don't know. For now it has 172 so nothing crazy

The things I MAY be doing wrong (I don't know if it matters). Is that sometimes I refresh my video a couple of times to see if it's fully processed to be watched at 1080p 60fps, but I do that before I actually press "Publish" so it shouldn't matter? It does give the video a couple of views tho. The other thing is that I usually watch the video once on my mobile after publishing to see how it looks on mobile devices.

Im on board with you dude, I really no matter how much I look at guides and listen to youtube gurus, I just don't fully understand tags

 

[YouTuber1978]

@ZombieBrain you want your tags to give youtube enough information to correctly identify what the video is about. Pretty sure YouTube would have figured out that's it about fallout 4 with less mentions Either way, probably not a big deal. It's a much bigger deal if you keyword spam in the title or descriptions.

 

[ZombieBrain]

@ZombieBrain you want your tags to give youtube enough information to correctly identify what the video is about. Pretty sure YouTube would have figured out that's it about fallout 4 with less mentions Either way, probably not a big deal. It's a much bigger deal if you keyword spam in the title or descriptions.

So is it better to put single words or phrases in tags? Because if phrases are better then it will be really difficult not to repeat words.

 

[YouTuber1978]

So is it better to put single words or phrases in tags? Because if phrases are better then it will be really difficult not to repeat words.

I personally do a combination of both. I prefer single words but I try to match what I think someone might type into search. So when you go into YouTube and search if you hit the space bar after "fallout 4" it suggests things like "fallout 4 gameplay" "fallout 4 news" etc. I'll normally include those if they are relevant. YouTube is basically telling you how to extend tags if you want to because it showing you the most common search terms.

 

[ZombieBrain]

I personally do a combination of both. I prefer single words but I try to match what I think someone might type into search. So when you go into YouTube and search if you hit the space bar after "fallout 4" it suggests things like "fallout 4 gameplay" "fallout 4 news" etc. I'll normally include those if they are relevant. YouTube is basically telling you how to extend tags if you want to because it showing you the most common search terms.

Yes. I'm using TubeBuddy (browser plugin) to find those suggestions. I'm getting almost 50% of total views on my channel from search so I guess it's decent? Do You happen to know a comprehensive guide about Youtube tags? I'd really like to learn more about that matter.