The YouTube Algorithm Explained (2025 Update)

Summary

Navigating YouTube's 2025 algorithm can be challenging for creators striving to understand video success dynamics. The Think Media Podcast dives into these complexities, featuring insights from YouTube's liaison, Rene Richie. They debunk myths about the algorithm's role, emphasizing audience focus over algorithmic worries. The discussion also unravels what influences video impressions, views, and the strategic use of YouTube features such as hashtags, premieres, and metadata. Whether dealing with dead channels or juggling content creation with a 9-to-5 job, the podcast offers actionable advice and practical insights to help creators grow their channels efficiently.

Highlights

• Creators should not overly stress about the YouTube algorithm; focusing on the audience usually provides better results! 🎯
• Video performance is less about being pushed by the algorithm and more about drawing in audiences! 📊
• Understand the concept of impressions—key to understanding where your views may be coming from! 🔍
• Different traffic sources like search and browse have unique behaviors and strategies for engagement! 🔧
• Channels don’t die; smart adjustments can lead to revivals and sustained growth! 🌱

Key Takeaways

• Don't stress over the algorithm; focus on your audience! 🎯
• A video's success depends more on audience interest than the algorithm! 🙌
• Use metadata and hashtags smartly but prioritize great content! 🔍
• Experiment with content posting strategies and stay informed on trends! 🚀
• Maintain creator sanity by prioritizing mental health over algorithm worries! 🧘‍♂️

Overview

The YouTube algorithm is a hot topic, generating both intrigue and anxiety among creators. In the Think Media Podcast, major insights are shared on how the algorithm actually operates—pivoting the focus from the algorithm itself to the preferences and behaviors of the audience. Renee Richie provides clarity on this by explaining that the algorithm’s role is less about pushing content and more about joining the dots between creators and potential viewers.

Understanding the different elements of YouTube, such as how impressions work and when and why to use tools like hashtags or premieres, is crucial. Impressions, for instance, are visually represented opportunities for videos—each time a thumbnail appears as potential content to watch. Utilizing proper metadata, research, and market awareness can significantly enhance a video’s chances of being recommended across the platform.

Beyond the nuts and bolts of YouTube tools, long-term success hinges on creator strategies and maintaining healthy mental perspectives. Subscribing to viable strategies like scheduled video releases or understanding traffic sources can help creators adapt and thrive, even if uploads are less frequent due to life’s demands. The overarching message: prioritize genuine engagement and sustainable practices over fretting about temporary algorithmic changes.

The YouTube Algorithm Explained (2025 Update) Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 so how does the YouTube algorithm work does uploading a new video kill the momentum of the recent or last video how does YouTube determine Impressions one of the biggest hurdles for creators is getting over the idea that we make a video we upload that video and the algorithm pushes that video out try not to think about the algorithm too much because the algorithm's job is to follow the audience we're going to be unpacking really how to get views how to Impressions work and even how do you to
• 00:30 - 01:00 create viral content I'm joined by Renee Richie who's the head of editorial and at YouTube liaison helping YouTube empathize with creators and helping creators succeed on YouTube and he really is an incredible expert because not only has he been creating content since 2008 one of his channels has grown to over 300,000 subscribers and he is a practitioner himself as well as working at YouTube and being at all the events really can
• 01:00 - 01:30 give us some Insider insights to help you create an unfair advantage in 2025 for your YouTube channel and your content Renee welcome back to the podcast thank you so much for having me it's always great to be here so we did a community tab post and so many questions came in and I want to hit those in relation to the algorithm Impressions videoos momentum why a video has momentum and loses momentum but from a high level can you explain how the algorithm Works sure sure so I think
• 01:30 - 02:00 like one of the biggest hurdles for creators is getting over the idea that we make a video we upload that video and the algorithm pushes that video out to viewers when it's actually the other way around what the algorithm does is pull videos for viewers so a viewer will open up the YouTube homepage on their phone or on their laptop or some other device and within a few milliseconds the YouTube algorithm will try to figure out what are the most the best videos for that person at that time you know on that device and populate those on the
• 02:00 - 02:30 screen the videos that they're most likely to want to click on watch enjoy interact with uh so that they have something that's going to be satisfying for them to watch so the advice that we try to give people is try not to think about the algorithm too much because the algorithm's job is to follow the audience so if you have questions about the algorithm replace it with the word audience and almost all of the time you'll get a way better answer and one of the things that everybody wants is views like how do I get more views
• 02:30 - 03:00 but before you can get a view you have to get an impression what is an impression so an impression is like there's multiple traffic sources on YouTube and one of the best piece of advice I can give people is go into those traffic sources because a lot of times you'll open up YouTube Studio you'll see like the click-through rate you'll see like the The View duration and you'll just stop there and think the video is good or bad but what you really want to do is see what those numbers are for search for uh browse which includes the subscription feed the homepage all
• 03:00 - 03:30 of those things because it can vary wildly within those and impressions are specific mostly to the browse tab like anytime we show a thumbnail I guess search as well anytime we throw we show a thumbnail on the page and a viewer has the opportunity to look at that thumbnail and choose whether to click or not that's an impression the thumbnail being there in front of a viewer is an impression and so by Nature if a video gets a thousand Impressions that just means like a chance to be viewed and if the video had a 4% click through rate
• 03:30 - 04:00 then it means you out of a thousand Impressions you would have gotten 40 views yes yeah so yeah it's that that thumbnail was shown to a viewer as an impression and if we break down these traffic sources for those that are maybe thinking about how they could strategically use them shorts feed is a traffic source and that's also a little bit different than Impressions an impression is kind of the same but if it's actually being in the shorts feed it means it went through someone's feed they may have swiped away from it but it went through their feed distributed by
• 04:00 - 04:30 YouTube Correct yeah yeah so with long form videos when you look at those browse areas those browse surfaces you have Impressions and clickthrough rate because the shorts are in a feed there's no and there's no thumbnails there's no browsing there's no Impressions so there you have viewed versus swiped away so if you if you put up a short and you have like a few hundred or a few thousand views treat those as Impressions because it means it's the shorts algorithm sort of testing that video with audiences the way that the long form algorithm would test those thumbnails with audiences
• 04:30 - 05:00 okay so then if we break down the long form traffic sources YouTube you explain these just kind of in a high level simple to understand what is YouTube search so YouTube search is someone goes to YouTube there's a search box at the top they type in what they're looking for and then it generates a ranked list of videos that YouTube believes best matches that query personalized to the user there's always two metrics uh there's performance which is how well those videos perform which is more of an objective absolute and then there's the subjective part the personalization you
• 05:00 - 05:30 and I could both see a video that has the same performance and you might you know thumbs down and I might thumbs up just because of our own personal taste so it's going to rank based on performance and then rerank based upon personalization and you'll get that rank that order in the search and then if someone chooses your thumbnail that impression would convert like you'd get the click-through rate for that impression to a view so what are you telling me that the search feed is slightly personalized and perhaps meaning if I was to open an incognito window I could get different results if I did a YouTube search than I would
• 05:30 - 06:00 based on like my viewing history if I did a YouTube search yeah that's one way that we like someone might say I didn't see this video in my search like open up an incognito window and search and see what you get there got it so if there and there would be that idea that if someone is just going to YouTube or hasn't pop or hasn't conditioned their account with their watch History you might have kind of a universal ranking versus more of a personalized ranking but the bottom line is there is the ability to search on YouTube and in doing so that becomes a source of Impressions someone's doesn't mean
• 06:00 - 06:30 they're going to watch your video but if your video ranks um anywhere on that first page or any page that a viewer clicks through they could see your thumbnail and that would be the equivalent of one impression so then another traffic source is browse features what does that mean so browse features is where there's sort of like a bunch of thumbnails on the page and you can browse through them and click on the one that you want so for example the subscription feed is one of those probably the for most people home the home page is the biggest source of browse traffic um and then I think
• 06:30 - 07:00 there's up next is also included in there got you so that's traffic from the homepage or home screen the subscri subscription feed and other browsing features and then there's suggested videos and and these two are known as like the power traffic sources like if something's going really viral it's typically not going to go viral from YouTube search because there's only a certain amount of search traffic in any given month but it it just continues to satisfy viewers and it's showing up on people's homepages and it continues to spread but suggested is a little bit different than browse what is suggested so suggested is for example the sidebar
• 07:00 - 07:30 if you choose a video and you're watching a video there'll be other videos in the sidebar or on mobile there'll be other videos underneath it it does cause some confusion because people will see videos that don't relate to the to the videos that they make and they'll think that YouTube doesn't understand their audience but what YouTube again is it's not centered like the discovery system is not centered on creators it's centered on viewers and viewers typically have a wide range of tastes so if I click on one of your videos I might see like a couple more of your videos in the suggested sidebar
• 07:30 - 08:00 then I might see videos from other creators who make things that are similar to yours but then I might see other videos based on what I watched like 20 minutes ago like maybe it was a sports I was watching a bunch of sports videos or coffee videos and I'll see some there so then if I click on a coffee video they'll go into suggestion and say hey they came from Sean canel does YouTube not understand my audience but it's the opposite is it we understand that people like very topics and that people choose their own Journey sometimes they want to keep going sometimes they want to change the channel literally so we we make so suggested is the videos that YouTube is recommend in next to what you're
• 08:00 - 08:30 currently watching yeah it makes total sense too sometimes especially if it's video podcasting or education or something at some point like you said you're done and you but you want to go then watch a music video or you want to go catch up on a political town hall or something and so uh it might seem completely unrelated but YouTube is a massive in a way Marketplace it is not unlike hundreds of channels on Direct TV so you you're like I'm done with Comedy Central I'm ready to go catch into the news or I'm ready to go learn something
• 08:30 - 09:00 on the Cooking Channel um and so then there's other YouTube features so what what is that and then there's even others and so I'm I'm looking at actually my backend right now and maybe list off a few things because there's other places Impressions and Views could come from yeah there's notifications which is the one place where YouTube actually does push things out especially if people select all not like to get all notifications um and I'm blanking on so I don't have them in front of me and there's a rather long list but there's
• 09:00 - 09:30 the shorts feed and there's just a variety of other things that are in there got you related video links are in there now someone clicked through from a short to go to your video so just yeah and even I mean there's I mean it goes even deeper I guess you could have um if I look in here just to list external as big external director unknown notifications playlists related shorts end screens hashtag Pages ad if you VI if you run your video as an ad you'll see like an ads uh traffic Source there as well I would encourage uh creators too to probably not get too distracted with those ler level ones um who knows
• 09:30 - 10:00 you may have some miracle amount of traffic that comes from there but if you take for example hashtag Pages um I got 58 views and it's equivalent of 0.0% of my traffic compared to like actually shorts feed was two million views and this was on our thick media podcast channel so just different in in percentages okay so we kind of establish just for a second like what one thing that's really good though is like it's a way to judge your anxiety level sometimes because we'll get a lot of times where people will say uh like someone said they're not getting
• 10:00 - 10:30 notifications they're not clicking through my video and then I always encourage creators to go and look at the notification traffic because like I know on my channel 14% of people have the Bell set to all eight% of those have turned off all notifications for the app and you can only do that after you set the Bell to all which means at some point they just had enough of notifications and then 1% click through because they're busy their operating system stacked them or delivered them quietly or did an AI summary for them and they just come like they watch your video but they do it from the home page when they get home and it's or when they
• 10:30 - 11:00 take out their phone and it's convenient to them so rather than and some people will spend days you know being super stressed about their notifications and then they go and look and it's such a tiny amount of views I would just say like get a sense of where your traffic comes from and spend your efforts on nurturing that the sources that you're really successful with that's a great point out of 2.5 million views on the thi media podcast in the last 28 days 5,000 views came from notifications uh for us and then the the big one shorts feed YouTube Arch browse feature
• 11:00 - 11:30 suggested is where a lot of our views are coming from and it depends on the nature of the content well let's dive into um some nuances here uh one of the questions that came in asked does uploading a new video kill the momentum of the recent or last video especially if it's uploaded almost a day after the previous one so it's a nuanced answer so like one of the things that it can depend upon is like uh it depends a lot of these answers I'm going to give you depends a lot on the Creator and Their audience so for example if you're a news
• 11:30 - 12:00 channel and you're doing breaking news whether it's like Finance or weather or something and you're putting up 10 videos a day because your audience expects the latest news immediately they're going to pick and choose which ones they watch so like those videos are all going to be stepping over each other because very few people come to YouTube so often that they're they're going to come every 10 minutes to find every one of your new uploads uh other people maybe like they do an engineering video and the project takes them three months so they post three times a year or once a month or something and that that next video is is going to have very minimal
• 12:00 - 12:30 impact because most people are going to come to YouTube way off way more than once a month so a lot of it depends on your content uh if you can figure out sort of like the rhythm of your channel if you know people tend to come like every three days it's unlikely that the top of recommendations they would have two recommendations for the same Creator so like you open up the YouTube app and you see like your first three videos or you open up on the desktop you see your first eight or 12 videos it's unlikely that if you put up two videos close together both of them will be there they be the one that the YouTube system
• 12:30 - 13:00 thinks is the most likely for the person to click on and if they scroll down they'll probably get to the other ones but it it does mean that at some point people might start choosing in between your videos depending again on the frequency and the urgency of those videos same thing like if you post a video and then go live a lot of people are gonna say oh they're live I can't miss this and they're not going to look at your video so maybe like go live and then tell everyone you're about to launch a video and think of it strategically so let me know if my thinking is correct here you're saying it's unlikely that two of your videos
• 13:00 - 13:30 would be recommended on like the gold golden opportunity of YouTube traffic would be someone logs in your video is right there on the homepage if it's on desktop there's what eight choices and if you're there with a great title and a great thumbnail and people click on it love it then you are theoretically going to get disproportionate dis uh you know distribution and maybe the video even goes viral it's unlikely there' be two recommendations there however that could lead you to the idea that well I only
• 13:30 - 14:00 want to upload one video so that a week let's say so that it has a greatest chance of like making it to the homepage but that would not necessarily be the logic even if you were to upload two or three high quality videos high effort videos even though there might not be two there you're also giving your chance more at bats because if your video doesn't perform it's distribution you know if even subscribers are skipping over it well then it's also maybe likely you would have zero recommendations on
• 14:00 - 14:30 the homepage let's say and so it's a nuanced answer to your point that if you're putting out great content consistent uploads um are giving you more at bats is my thinking correct yeah it maybe like a video is overperforming so you decide you make a strategic decision to give it a little more space or maybe it's underperforming so you make a strategic decision to upload another video closer or you know that these are just entry point videos and they'll start watching the first one but then they'll go to the second and third one that you know that someone just love that video would love to watch next so
• 14:30 - 15:00 it has to be part of an overall strategy the only thing I call out there is that each traffic Source primarily affects the same traffic source so if you upload a video and your subscribers aren't into it there's no like algorithm in the subscription feed so it doesn't really matter what matters is on the homepage is how people who watch on the homepage are reacting to it I know some people like are they worry that their subscribers won't be into it check to see how many subscribers actually watch the subscription feed versus the home feed and then you know figure out does it really matter if they if they aren't into it as long as like if it's really
• 15:00 - 15:30 compelling great packaging the home feed is where that sort of uh performance is going to be measured so let let me just then a totally personalized answer um we upload the thick media podcast on Tuesday and Thursday as a Target and we if if Tuesday popped off like you said wow that one's getting 2x 4X are typical performance it's a one out of 10 would you give it more space I'm asking you
• 15:30 - 16:00 personally and maybe say hey let's put push back the Thursday upload let's let this thing continue to run and and for us we found that flexibility we can study our upload times when should we upload we could upload on Friday or Saturday and actually as far as how many of our viewers are online it stays pretty consistent and and we would be paying attention to that as well but if if what would Renee do if you really had a breakout video on that Tuesday would you give it some space yeah so like the the way I'm going to answer this is like there's there's two different like large categories a personality type there's
• 16:00 - 16:30 one personality type who really cares about the immediate performance of a video if you are that type it's easy to say don't but if you are that type who like I've launched a video I'm sitting there I'm waiting for it I would give yourself a little space like let that video perform as best as possible but if you're somebody who uploads a video and then doesn't look at it for a week you're like whatever system's going to do what it's going to do we found that over the course of a month when you publish doesn't matter that much overall because those views will ACR like maybe like there won't be you won't get two videos in the top spot of recommendation ations but maybe like two days later
• 16:30 - 17:00 that person comes back to YouTube and the other video is there like because YouTube doesn't give up on videos it keeps testing them so if you're willing to like wait and you're not sort of like bound to the initial day's performance I would just stick to your schedule and not worry about it too much Renee tended to be old Rene tend to be very like stuck on the immediate performance like current Rene is like just set it and like leave it I think that's smart and and not to I think either personality type I think is okay but I almost feel like that's a more like maturing type of perspective as you've just been on
• 17:00 - 17:30 YouTube over the Long Haul not unlike me I think we go into that stick to the schedule stick to the system stick to putting out the best content you can and just understanding the shelf life of YouTube videos like I'm like anybody emotionally tied to the day of upload oh 10 out of 10 I'm a failure of course it's emotional re roller coaster but I have just learned especially with our Obsession at think media for ranking videos that it's like man the first week or the first month if you're especially
• 17:30 - 18:00 creating Evergreen types of content videos can be getting views for weeks months and years to come and five years later if the video is still getting significant views per hour you're not thinking back like wait was that a Tuesday or a Thursday what was the upload time it's irrelevant like ultimately because the long game of YouTube on Evergreen content sort of Trumps all of this stuff absolutely I I came to this realization personally when I noticed that my videos that were eight or nine out of 10 were suddenly my biggest videos because they were Evergreen they were buyer guides and then like so the answer like the actual
• 18:00 - 18:30 answer is yes if you upload videos close together they can have an immediate impact on other videos but over the course of like a month especially if they're not like if they're not time-sensitive videos they like they'll probably end up at the same place okay so another question is how does YouTube determine impressions for example why does a video Get Low or no Impressions after uploading and what should a Creator do to try to get that video Impressions and
• 18:30 - 19:00 I'm sure a lot of creators are thinking if I have a newer Channel and this question is kind of like it's like what comes first the chicken or the egg like we all should imagine and YouTube is certainly giving creators opportunities but I think people are wondering how does it work like in the sea of all of these competitive content how could I even get my initial impression why would I get an initial impression and what are some opportunities to trigger that or to you know ultimately position our content for the best opportunity yeah so I think like going back to like the one out of 10 10 out of 10 Things I think like in
• 19:00 - 19:30 some cases like that is like we made an amazing video or you made like a not so good video but I think in other cases you can look at that as sort of Market potential like I think I like to think every video is sort of bound by its Market potential and then within that range your execution on that video so like if you make the best video in the world but it really only appeals to five people like it doesn't matter that it's the like those people are super love it and maybe that's what you really care about but it's it's not going to be like a billion view video just because like there's not that big an audience for it
• 19:30 - 20:00 and so sometimes the 10 out of 10 videos aren't that they're not great videos they might be amazing videos it's that the potential audience for that video isn't very large and so I think sometimes katos will make a video like especially in their beginning it might not be a great video and then the answer to that is like keep making videos keep learning keep improving make better and better videos so that when people do give them a chance you know they might like them and then the system will kick in there but the other thing is like what is the potential audience of your video so a video might not be getting a lot of Impressions it might not be
• 20:00 - 20:30 performing well you can do things like updating the thumbnail updating the title look put your title on the homepage look away look back is yours the thumbnail that your eyes click on because there's going to be a Sean canell video here and there might be like huge challenge Creator YouTuber video there uh you know like other really popular video tech reviewer here and like did did people even see your thumbnail like it was on the page but did they notice that were they too busy clicking on like the Sean canel video and so be honest with yourself like did your thumbnail really lock someone's attention while they're
• 20:30 - 21:00 looking around the page or scrolling on their phone and then was it enough to actually get them to click like did it did it make them curious enough or interested enough because it doesn't matter if it's a great thumbnail someone looks at and goes ah I don't care and then they just go on to the next video so you you have to really do those two things capture attention and get clicks and you can try other like a new thumbnail a new title for that but also if that's not working maybe the addressable Market isn't very large and if you care about views because some people don't like you have to be honest with what your goals are we both know creators who make enormous amounts of
• 21:00 - 21:30 money off very few views like they just have a very specific really high value audience they get like a few thousand or whatever views and it makes Incredible amounts of money for them so they have a very different goal than views but if your goal is views like what is the addressable Market of that video and if the first one didn't take off figure out like how can I make a version of this that would appeal to to many more people that's very interesting like Niche appeal versus broad appeal would be a consideration and then also it makes me think especially when starting there's
• 21:30 - 22:00 an argument for Casey net uploads a a video somebody uses a software tool and says there's no tags and he left the description empty metadata doesn't matter then there's maybe this argument to where yeah but you're starting a channel from scratch and you're trying to let YouTube know what this video is about and tap into something that also is Broad appeal how do I start a new tech Channel and compete with big other channels would
• 22:00 - 22:30 you say that well metadata matters because early on especially that is going to be some of those signals you're in the early days of Impressions and could Impressions be connected to metadata because YouTube goes okay well at least we're going to give this video a shock because it's explicitly clear that it's about this particular phone model or this particular camera or this particular sewing machine what do you think about metadata yeah I think like it's interesting so like Casey niad is his own topic there's not a lot of
• 22:30 - 23:00 people who can say that like people don't watch Casey for a certain thing they watch Casey because Casey so like that's one of those unicorn channels that's not a great example for anybody to like to like Casey got to the top of that mountain but like he ran around eight times climb three trees like you don't like you can't just run up there so like like so those examples are like be inspired by them but like you can't just say he doesn't use any title like put any title on he wants doesn't matter uh but like to your point about metadata YouTube want to understand what a video is about so if there's it has very
• 23:00 - 23:30 little signal if a lot of people haven't watched it uh again thumbnail and title the most important metadata because that will get people to click and watch in a previous episode we talked about Trends and one of the ways to get people to have data on that is to use like hashtags because then like if the topic is bigger than you like if you're making a video on a popular concert or a movie or like a big news event and you hashtag it you'll show up on the hashtag page for that and maybe people looking specifically for that will across you if you have a good description in the
• 23:30 - 24:00 beginning like YouTube's try to understand that video that's what's going to help it understand eventually Behavior like audience behavior is what's going to determine the ultimate success and failure uh so you can't like metadata your way into a good video it has to be a good video but it can help YouTube understand who to put it in front of especially in the beginning when it's trying to test with those audiences how they respond will be how it performs but just sort of giving YouTube some help until it accumulates enough data is helpful uh there's this word thrown around um called Channel Authority
• 24:00 - 24:30 and how would you describe that and is it a real thing what my understanding is even using the new what we talked about in part one if people have not watched it of our recent conversations we'll link to that in the show notes talking about new YouTube features under the Inspire tab you can also do a search of different topics to brainstorm video ideas for your channel and there's now this kind of circle that gives you a prediction of How likely that video is to get views uh on your channel which
• 24:30 - 25:00 would would be essentially what your Channel's been conditioned to or the types of subscribers that are subscribed to your channel which I think is what people mean when they say Channel Authority like you are an authority and I almost wonder I guess it's maybe a theory and perhaps you can confirm or deny like on think media we've developed it seems to be a massive amount of authority around this title of like best camera for YouTube or top cameras for YouTube and it would seem that I could be wrong but just tit on thumb nail and the quality of the video and the watch
• 25:00 - 25:30 time of course those are going to be the heaviest weighted metrics sometimes I wonder and and maybe velocity because subscribers click on it but I almost wonder is channel Authority a real thing because YouTube's also like well historically think media has really satisfied people with camera related videos what's your take on this concept this mysterious concept of Channel Authority so I think it's one of those yes and no things because the algorithm tries to follow the audience audience and audiences can ascribe Authority and
• 25:30 - 26:00 that can manifest in different ways so like uh for example you see like your favorite challenge YouTuber puts up a video you know exactly what you're going to get if you click on that thumbnail it becomes a no-brainer it's sort of like a restaurant makes your favorite meal anytime you want that meal you go to that restaurant you get it you're happy that restaurant served random food it might be risky you're like uh I don't know I'm not sure what I'm going to get I'm going to go to this other place that I know for sure what I'm going to get so audiences can ascribe Authority and sometimes when you see like on my channel for example I talked about tech companies and I made some videos on
• 26:00 - 26:30 Twitter and they did really badly and I had to look at it and go well people aren't used to clicking on me for for Twitter so probably the people who watched me most weren't that interested and by the time uh the system discovered people who were interested they watched videos on Twitter from people that covered it all the time and that they trust it a lot and nobody needs to watch 10 videos on Twitter in a given week so it just like it was exhausted before I ever got there but on the same token like you can make a random video and it'll go viral and and there's no like you don't have any Authority on that
• 26:30 - 27:00 video but it was something people really wanted at that time or didn't even know they wanted or didn't have competition that was underserved so I think that audiences can ascribe Authority but on the other hand like you always have these endless opportunities to do things that maybe you don't have Authority for but there's like a unique moment where that video just really resonates with people and takes off under its own power so under the Inspire tab I mean what YouTube is saying if we brainstorm a topic and it says yeah this is probably going to be a peak topic for you that's the Inspire tab giving us feedback of
• 27:00 - 27:30 who our audience is correct yeah it's sort of like the audience tab you'll go there and you'll see which videos are bringing people back to your channel most often but also which channels and videos people who watch you are also watching and that can give you an idea of like make more videos like those videos or make videos of people who watch those videos would love to watch next or these are videos i' never thought of but I could do my own unique spin on because my audience is obviously interested in those things and this is just like the next level of that like what are people watching here what else
• 27:30 - 28:00 are they watching what do we think would be a really good fit for those people who are watching those videos that's very interesting so it's kind of an amalgamation of of uh in a way a blackbox of data from YouTube of a combination of factors so leaning into that especially when we only have so much energy many of our listeners might be trying to make one video a week and finding trying to put out an excellent video a week is its own challenge even if you do it full-time or you're working a 9-to-5 job you know the challenge of that kind of consistency well when you
• 28:00 - 28:30 use that Inspire tab you ultimately if you publish a topic where YouTube predicts and of course it's always take it with a grain of salt and the AI could be right or wrong but if YouTube predicts that it's going to be very low interest from your Channel versus the other one that's going to be Peak Interest from your channel and these other factors you're talking about well I'd prefer to do four Peak Interest as opposed to four low interest if I'm also trying to go full-time faster if I'm trying to put out the videos with Highest Potential reach views how would you address my thinking there
• 28:30 - 29:00 do you ever wish that YouTube came with a cheat code well it kind of does it's called vid IQ and it's packed with AI tools to help you grow your channel faster think of it like having a YouTube expert in your corner giving you personalized tips and tricks to improve your videos so that ultimately you can get more views and subscribers and the best part is you can try it out for 30 days for just $1 if you want to grab this offer just go to vid iq.com
• 29:00 - 29:30 slink or click the link in the show notes all right let's get back into the episode yeah again I think it depends on your goal like again if your goal is like Peak up upper right views then yeah you want to lean into what what is successful and give people more of what they love about you I would again just stress that it's like it's not meant to replace your creative strategy it's meant like if you were hitting a brick wall or you like you have a Creator block to give you ideas that you can riff off of but you might also know that hey it doesn't think this is really good interest but I've seen these XY things on other platform forms or other ideas or in the news and I just know there's a
• 29:30 - 30:00 market for this I would never like I would never like not experiment just because you don't see something in a in a graph that gives you like you know a higher confidence level I would always let let the human win I gotcha and so if just to close the loop uh if you're listening to this we're talking about if you go to your channel and you go to um analytics there's overview content audience revenue and inspiration that inspiration tab has recently been updated and will help you get new ideas for your next video using generative Ai
• 30:00 - 30:30 and it's more powerful than ever because um it is of course connected to not just your channel the information is being served up to you by YouTube but as we said there's an amalgamation of factors there that is gonna can give you a unfair advantage or just a fair uh playing field for coming up with your next best video idea and so we're talking about the algorithm and as we talk about that there's a big question where people wonder can channels die and
• 30:30 - 31:00 is there such a thing as a dead channel one of the questions that came in says well if YouTube has just stopped giving Impressions is the channel Dead Forever so like one of the things I like most about YouTube is like it really doesn't give up like I've seen videos where they get almost no views for a couple of years and then six million views over a weekend and obviously that's like a huge outlier uh but I don't think there's ever anything that's dead like there might be things that it would be less effort to start a new channel and build
• 31:00 - 31:30 a fresh audience uh but I don't think there's ever sort of an idea of dead so like if you're going to be continuing on the same topic I think you can invest in Reviving that channel like again like seeing what's fresh in the market because YouTube is competitive it's like um anything else like the the biggest one of the analogies I love is the biggest media company in the world right now with the two biggest franchises in the world is having a real hard time pulling views and there's no algorithm involved like they're having like a couple successful movies TV shows but a lot of the stuff isn't working no
• 31:30 - 32:00 algorithm so like that audience affinity and audience match and like product Market fit all of these things applies whether there's an algorithm involved or not and I think like if you're continuing with the same topic see who else is doing that what's fresh what's working because there's always new like people coming into a space uh the audience changes over time it's like you can't just keep doing the same thing over and over again and expecting not even like different results but the same results because everything does move forward so I would just look at it and if you're doing the same type try those fresh ideas experiment see what
• 32:00 - 32:30 resonates lean into what works if you're doing something different like you might have some Advantage if you think there's a big overlap with the existing audience or you have a lot of personal Affinity on your channel but otherwise like you can experiment with new channels as well like just sign one up start working with it and sometimes it's just like there's less stress involved in that as well so we've um circled around this topic of Impressions many times now but I think this next part could be incredibly insightful as we just I think you know creators want to wrap their head around um you know why did I get views
• 32:30 - 33:00 why did this video do well why did this video not do well and so one of the questions that came in said okay I'm making a video about a topic that is is being talked about so it's it's a trend it's it's popular and it has good click-through rate and it has good average view duration and it has good watch time but the views slow down so can you help us understand that um sometimes our metrics might be
• 33:00 - 33:30 incredible for us like and this is a football channel so our metric you know let's say it's getting a 10% click-through rate and it's holding there and then it's like man the average view duration is is also phenomenal eight minutes or something and and um you know that's pretty good platform wide yet at some level you know we're we're capping out sort of like what videos cap out and why do they cap out is it our subscribers they they maybe hit of an algorithmic wall is there any other angle of explanation to kind of
• 33:30 - 34:00 help us understand why this might happen and how to think about that in terms of do we try to do something to revive it or keep it going or do we focus on the next upload yeah so there's a paradox of Statistics uh which you just have to learn about so um one of the things is if you see a viral video they typically have much lower click-through rate and much lower retention just because the audience becomes so big that 3% of a million is so many more views than 10%
• 34:00 - 34:30 of a thousand like you're just as the videos grow and grow and grow the chances of any one person clicking on is lower but so many people are getting Impressions that even with a low clickthrough rate that just translates into a ton of views so typically when you see a viral video it's not that the metrics are super high it's that the metrics were high through the core audience but then it went into like a much more casual audience and they loved it as well and then it just kept going more and more and the metrics are going down because the Casual audience is less invest it but the size of it is so massive and like an analogy I try to I
• 34:30 - 35:00 totally stole it from Todd bopr is that it's like automated word of mouth so let's say like I watch a a video and I love it and I know that you and two other people that you know friends of mine are really going to love it too so I recommend it to you and you're like not my cup of tea but the other two people are like you'd love this video they tell three more friends and they tell a bunch more friends and they tell a bunch more friends but it gets to a certain point where we've exhausted our friend C like our friend Circle everyone who is interested in it watched it or passed on it and there's just nobody
• 35:00 - 35:30 else that we can recommend it to or we don't know anybody else to recommend it to and that's when you'll typically see a video like launch and YouTube is like this person would like it this person would like it oh we've shown it to everybody we think would like the video and they've ever watched it or not and then it tends to go back down and you can make new friends so like sometimes people will search and find a video like oh maybe this a new audience here uh or there'll be something in the news or another big Creator will make a video and you'll be in suggested and there's ways that videos can find new audiences but it's typically that like it goes
• 35:30 - 36:00 through that pocket of audience and when that's depleted it goes back into like we'll try and see if we can find a new audience and if we find it you might see bigger or smaller spikes as it goes along and with some of these videos it's like oh man the friend Circle loved it but as soon as you tell people who aren't as close friends they're like no not for me and then because the initial like love of that video was so high the metrics are all great but it just it didn't Escape like gravity and as soon as it hit casual it just tanked and the way statistics work is you won't really see that it's like the the amount of
• 36:00 - 36:30 Impressions you got compared to the amount of people the cordence that loved it versus The Casual you just see those really good metrics and you would expect to see those go down if if it kept succeeding it makes sense and so yeah your subscribers loved it the initial velocity was there and I think for those who dive into their analytics though they have maybe visibly seen that all of a sudden it was like getting this many views per hour and then the drop seems dramatic one of the possibilities of what has happened there are probably one the most common possibilities is yeah it was really being consumed to a core
• 36:30 - 37:00 audience I've also heard it explained his circles you may have just said that so it's you know it reaches that first Circle and then it tests It On The Wider Circle and viral could be the circle has gotten so broad yeah but every time you stepped into that next Circle it hits a wall and it's like oh the interest there The View duration there The Click through rate there is not the same and thus algorithmically it's like well why did YouTube just stop giving me impressions well it's not that it's not about your video it's not trying to push
• 37:00 - 37:30 your video it's trying to satisfy viewers and as it it actually hit that that that's essentially the wall more casual viewers even if they're your super fans you've got or supposed super fans you've got your core audience who loves your stuff but just because they're subscribed they subscribe for all kinds of different reasons in fact I heard you say once subscribe means different things to different people explain that because just because you have a subscriber like wait a minute I have 100,000 subscribers why don't why are they not all watching it why are not my videos getting 100,000 views well not everyone hit subscribe because like they
• 37:30 - 38:00 they wanted to see everything for every minute what does subscribe mean or what could it mean yeah so I have a friend Dave whis who has a great analogy he's like subscriptions number of subscribers is all the money you've ever had in the bank it doesn't mean it's your current balance like those are active viewers and for most people that's a that's a great number like to just know every dollar you've ever had in your bank account but what you care about is your current balance and so care about like returning users or unique viewers like what your current viewers are that's much more important because some people
• 38:00 - 38:30 do subscribe as sort of like a mega like like they like I super thanks they're like I love this I'm going to hit subscribe because you deserve it you earned it uh other people are like I want to bookmark this channel like it's not something I want to watch all the time but I want to be able to come back to it other people are just like hey I like also like it varies by region it varies by generation how many people will like will subscribe some people just subscribed and then like three years later like if they were 13 now they're 16 completely different person if they were like 15 now they're 20 completely different person and people's
• 38:30 - 39:00 interests change and I think a lot of the times we don't think about our own behavior but if we think of ourselves as viewers go into the sub feed see how often you clean that out see how often you actually watch all the channels think about how often you click through every video in there because I know I go to my sub feed every day but I don't I can't watch every video in my sub feed every day so like subscribers is like it's an interesting metric if someone subscribed to you right now they're probably really interested in you if they subscribe to you 10 years ago and just never cleaned up their sub feed
• 39:00 - 39:30 probably not as interested anymore so one of the questions we actually get all the time is there's a lot of creators who started a channel sometime in their past and they started you started back in 2018 the first channel I ever started was for my church in 20 no 2008 you started your first uh Channel I think it was in 2007 that we started a channel for my local church in our small town and I've started many channels since there's others who have started Maybe a personal Channel they uploaded a back boy Backstreet Boys clip
• 39:30 - 40:00 a thing of their dog you know some random recital or something and then they abandoned it for a couple years so people always wonder should I post on my old Channel or on my new channel and the specific question actually said my old account from 2007 with some awful random videos is it better to start a new account or is it helpful for the algorithm to use the old one what would be your decision-making framework to decide should I start a new Channel or post on an old Channel yeah I think like one of the nice things about YouTube is
• 40:00 - 40:30 the algorithm tries not to have opinions uh it just looks at Behavior like audience response so I would like if you think that you have an audience there that is into you and this kind of stuff that you like it could give you like an initial Advantage like if people subscribed for whatever topic but uh they just love the feeling you get them like some people are just really funny and people initially come there and they watch like the video for the topic and they're like this this Creator is super funny I love them and that Creator does something else and it's just as funny they're there for it or like the Casey nistad example they don't really care
• 40:30 - 41:00 what Casey does they just want to watch Casey so if you if you think that like there's some affinity for you or some crossover in what you've done then and what you've done now that would just give you an initial push like it can be good to do and I would experiment and try it like there's nothing to lose by trying it um but but if you think it's completely different audiences our usual advice is same audience same channel different audience different Channel and then it'd be worth like if you think there's just no affinity for it or or nothing to gain from it start a new channel think of like think of channels like shows you know like Brian Cranston
• 41:00 - 41:30 can be in Malcolm in the Middle and he can be in Breaking Bad but if that was the same show it' be really confusing so you can have like the same person but like fig base your your your strategy on the audience not on on the the host if that makes any sense yeah and there's certainly a point to be made if you're very much a personality or personal brand that has done different things like a Casey neistat that um you're asking yourself yeah why did they subscribe in the first place we like to say um never upload videos your subscribers didn't subscribe for and
• 41:30 - 42:00 take that statement with a grain of salt because you can experiment you can research but if people originally subscribed for Minecraft playthroughs and your new thing is you're really into vertical gardening that that might be a hard pivot saying that though you just might be a you might be Tim Ferris and Tim Ferris is known for just kind of being his own experiment of trying things whether that's fencing whether that's biohacking whether that's psychedelics whether that and so you're like man that seems really random but
• 42:00 - 42:30 you're like no it's Tim Ferris but like you know whether it's venture capital and investing but you're like you're following actually a personality which is maybe why some people get confused too and I do think there's something about topic though so is it a topic based channel did you subscribe for a particular topic I think media has had different personalities on the channel over the years but the through line is we still talk about cameras best lighting cameras tools and so um and while actually the changing of personalities absolutely change viewer satisfaction we have still found macro
• 42:30 - 43:00 success by staying as much on brand as we could so that's some great advice they go deeper in this question and ask though should I delete in private old videos if they don't have anything to do with the new content that I'm making yeah so one way to think about that is like a so one of the ways YouTube works is watch History so let's say you and I have almost identical watch histories but you've watched some videos that I haven't those would be good candidates to recommend to me that's goes back to that Word of Mouth thing like it it understands that like you like similar
• 43:00 - 43:30 things to me so things I haven't seen those are recommended and watch history is like the connection that we have to those videos and those channels so when you delete a video or private a video it removes that connection now that might be something you want to do if you if you're like you know for whatever reason but if you think there's that connection is worth maintaining because there is again that overlap with people who might enjoy the new thing it's it's worth uh keeping it at that point because like a lot of times people won't remember the topic of the video they don't remember the subject of the video they'll
• 43:30 - 44:00 remember the way you feel remember the way they feel after that video and they might want more of that feeling so I would just try to get a sense of like is it worth maintaining that connection if you want to sever it you can go ahead and delete and private that video but if you want to maintain that connection as a way of like potentially getting more videos recommended to that person I would keep it even if there's a variation in tone or content or topic now you might have stated on this earlier and it could have been in part one of our conversation but the question ultimately is does engagement on different types of posts and to Define
• 44:00 - 44:30 posts if somebody watches a long form video and engages a short and engages or a community tab post do they cross promote algorithmically if somebody engages in a community tab post theoretically is it only going to make them see more Community tab posts from that Creator and side note there's actually Community tab post showing up in my feed for me person personally it's usually like hip-hop albums or classic
• 44:30 - 45:00 hip-hop albums and people and and these massive channels they got a little square of the album covers which album from 2008 was the best and it hits my feed and I don't subscribe to the channel or follow the channel or watch videos on the channel I might be consuming some of their shorts meaning that you know they're going through my feed so so there's the big question is is if I'm utilizing all these different formats is their algorithmic crossover between the formats yeah so there are you know what referred to as Bridges
• 45:00 - 45:30 between the different formats um one thing I was going to mention earlier that sort of applies here too is one of the biggest problems creators have is expectational debt so it goes to everything like if I make a video with very small appeal and it gets 10 out of 10 I might be devastated even though there was no way that there was a big enough market for that video to get any more than that and I didn't adjust my expect like when I made videos about iPhone reviews they were enormous when I made videos about accessibility they got very small use but I knew that it was important I thought it was important to make them so I adjusted my expectations
• 45:30 - 46:00 this is similar to that some people for example if you're making long form and shorts some people only watch shorts that's only they only want to watch short form video some people only watch certain topics on shorts like personally I can watch a dancing short but I wouldn't watch 10 minutes of dancing not that dancing isn't amazing it's just like my I prefer to watch other long form content so I'll watch that in shorts I wouldn't watch it in long form so those those parts of the audience even though if they watch a lot of your shorts we might recommend or YouTube might recommend the long form video
• 46:00 - 46:30 they're just not inclined to watch it because they don't watch long form and or they don't watch those topics on long form there are people who do watch both though so if they engage a lot with shorts we can test recommending the long form videos as well whether they go across or not it's a different story you can also put that like related video link on your short we found like creators who just put the link there will say like it doesn't work but we found a lot of creators who like uh who know like Their audience is there for a feeling and they do it very intentionally and purposefully and
• 46:30 - 47:00 they'll say like hey for the rest of this click the click the link right here maybe pop up a thumbnail of what the video looks like they have a lot more success in moving people over the most important thing is like think like the viewer no viewer is going to watch something because you want them to they're only going to watch it or engage because they want to so it's our job as a Creator to make them want to or to to get them excited about wanting to do it whether that's moving from a post to a short to a long to a live we've got to make like a call to action and then reward them for taking that action and
• 47:00 - 47:30 that's what build sort of cross format Affinity that's genius and actually I want to uh mention a video we'll link to in the show notes or an episode um with the content strategist for Dave Ramsey who has multiple channels multiple personalities multi multiple kind of a whole media Empire and he taught the three pillar strategy and how they do shorts and how it I think it texed their long form views but they did it in a very particular way to your point it wasn't just accidental it wasn't just throwing out a link but they were very thoughtful and structured and that is uh
• 47:30 - 48:00 one of people's favorite episodes so make sure to check that out later and we'll link that out in the show notes the last part of this question though was also is there how are engagement metrics weighted on these different content types let me just isolate that to community tab I'm assuming and you can confirm for me that like other social media platforms even just dwell time is being registered by YouTube if I stop on a community tab post and read it even if I don't click like I'm imagining
• 48:00 - 48:30 YouTube is like well that's time on platform looking at the post is that true well you can click with attention it's like people will ask us if someone is on their phone and they pause on a thumbnail and starts to play does that count as a view and if they watch for long enough you they basically clicked with attention instead of clicking with their finger so that will count as a view so yeah like if you started like if you if we feel or YouTube feels that you're giving attention to that thing it does count as giving attention to that thing it's just hard to put a number on things because there's so many different signals and all of them are very
• 48:30 - 49:00 dependent on other signals so but in like in the large scheme of things everything else being equal whatever is not equal will win so if you're doing a lot of something that's going to count more than if you're doing like a very little of something interesting so yeah I mean again I will see Community tab post maybe it's a poll I'll vote maybe it's a poll or text or a carousel I'll swipe I don't necessarily click like or dislike you know just as a personal antidote I don't even know if I ever I don't know if I've ever clicked dislike in my life I think I've either just I haven't either yeah I think I've either just clicked like or done nothing um but
• 49:00 - 49:30 it is a way to tune though like so like um because there is personalization and ranking if there are videos where you like the topic in general but you don't like that specific kind of video you can use the dislike button to sort of tune the recommendation engine to show you less of the videos you don't like and the like button to show like more of the videos you do so you can use that for personal tuning yeah and would that be uh it would it be accurate to say you're kind of up prioritizing or down down prioritizing you're still subscribed to the Creator you don't unsubscribe from
• 49:30 - 50:00 the Creator you've proven in your watch time you like the Creator but you might down prioritize perhaps a topic and then algorithmically YouTube is like okay we maybe we're taking that information into account for what we'll show you in the future yeah it's not really like subscribing is like another signal so like it's not the entire picture but it's more like um you're just wait like you you saw like this topic like you generally like this topic of videos you may not particularly like this this version of that topic this subtopic the way this Creator present like it's just a signal to less less of this and more
• 50:00 - 50:30 of more of the other thing okay so as we were talking about the algorithm a lot of people listening to this are juggling a nin to-5 they maybe have aspirations to be a part-time or full-time Creator maybe they love the side Hustle but regardless whether it's family whether it's kids juggling it all in fact an individual in full-time Ministry is working on a family Travel Channel and ask the question how do I maintain growth when I'm not able to produce as much content as others would love your advice related to that because
• 50:30 - 51:00 if we're talking about the algorithm I think we could feel like man competing with somebody that is able to produce more content to me than me is so difficult but if you were in a situation where you had limited time and you can't post as much as the full-timers what would your strategy be so I think like everyone as an individual is going to have pluses and like maybe not even plus as Min but they'll have circumstances and there might be people who have a lot of time but you know they've never learned to edit or to film and they don't know how to frame themselves so like they that that's just a skill
• 51:00 - 51:30 they've got to work on other people might not have as much time to post but we've seen across YouTube in general that there is no one way to succeed one of my favorite examples is like Nile red I think he posts like two or three videos a year their 45 minute long chemistry videos where he transforms cotton balls into cotton candy or something and like 20 million people watch them uh over the course of the year like they're just like ridiculous and like some people might think well posting two or three times a year there's no way that they're going to get traction and like like he's not like
• 51:30 - 52:00 over the top he's just standing there in his lab in his lab coat you know talking very lowf uh and people just really love the content so I think like it uh and again depends on what your goals are because like people can have different goals for for their Channel but if their channel is like maximum growth possible I would just lean into what you can do like if you if it does take longer uh try to like spend that spend whatever time you can like watching your videos or researching how uh things work so when you do make the videos that you can make you give yourself the best opportunity with each of those videos
• 52:00 - 52:30 yeah and I love that example you Ed of if you make like fewer high quality videos which could be subjective and at the start you're maybe still learning your skills but essentially A ranked video on YouTube whether it continues to be suggested or whether it continues to be discovered in search can be your pathway when time is limited to Growing your channel then essentially it could be growing your channel passively while you're working while you're doing your job while you're working in Ministry whatever ever it is you're doing and that was my story as well like I really focused on how do I make Evergreen
• 52:30 - 53:00 content that ranks in Search and suggested so that when it was a side hustle it just took me one step closer every upload hopefully and it wasn't every upload because not every video continued to get views but you know as I focused on that it was my step-by-step process to going full-time on YouTube um one interesting you can also sorry like one other thing to think about is like if you're only making a few videos whether you can still provide a journey in videos so like if you're doing pure help content if you do like how to
• 53:00 - 53:30 repair your sink and then your next video is how to repair your shower like there's very little likelihood like unless a person's had a whole like disaster that they're gonna want to watch one video and then the next video but if you make how to repair your sink and then the next video you make is how to avoid having to repair your sink and then the next video is like the best parts to replace your sink then at least if like one of those videos does rank uh the way you're talking about you've given a journey so that people might watch two or three or four of your subsequent videos and you're not waiting for these one shots every time yeah
• 53:30 - 54:00 that's a genius tip and compounding the growth of your channel creating more leverage now one of the things that kind of is uh one of the oldest YouTube features and very rarely is talked about but when people upload their videos they sometimes get stumped is YouTube categories like do categories matter what are the best practices for categorizing content and if we take this to the top of the conversation algorithm Impressions can getting my category right at least Le give me even if it's minimal a little bit more metadata or
• 54:00 - 54:30 information for my video to perform well yeah so like it's one of those things where like aside from title and thumbnail there's very little metadata that's going to mean a lot long term but you want to choose what's most accurate for you uh I wouldn't spend a lot of time worrying about it especially if it's not like some people worry it's not 100% accurate pick the best one you can and that again like if especially if you're brand new and there's very little information about you it does help YouTube initially understand it but I wouldn't like devote a lot of I would devote to making better videos and not worrying too much about that I got you the specific question too said actually
• 54:30 - 55:00 how do I best categorize Faith content if I'm doing like a Bible study is it under education or is it a per people in blogs or is it how to ins style if off the cuff if somebody was if they were doing some kind of religious content um is that education what would you say yeah I would I don't think it's going to make a huge difference but like Education Works like I would you probably know like the Creator probably knows their content the best and might be different ways of doing religious content that would fit into different like different buckets
• 55:00 - 55:30 like maybe you are teaching maybe you are storytelling maybe you're doing other things so I would just pick the one that you think best reflects your content yeah maybe you're a personality maybe you're doing news from a certain perspective how to and style big idea here though is don't overthink it but also um you know one tip that I have found lately is I've been talking to Gemini and you know Gemini and um quite literally talking because of the Audio Mic feature and being able to do verbal dictations and to be clear Gemini would be Google's AI large language model and
• 55:30 - 56:00 because of the connection of YouTube Google Gemini Alpha bit um Gemini can pull some really great answers for you in regards to um if you were to ask about YouTube categories it could explain what each one means and things like that so definitely a tool to consider looking into um you know at part one of our conversation you mentioned YouTube Premier that's another one people wonder about like it sometimes people fall into patterns and habits in fact I had a question recently where someone's like we've been premiering our videos for the last five
• 56:00 - 56:30 years it was like a travel channel couple and they were like and we always do premieres and we are exhausted this was the comment they were like we're always showing up because they treated the premiere at someplace they would be in the comments and they were like is it okay for us to either stop doing premieres and is it going to kill our Channel and should we do premieres if it's really like you said it's a red carpet um in the last episode it's like a red car carpet Premiere the big idea
• 56:30 - 57:00 is that you're there to hang out with viewers for the first viewing and be in chat I see some channels that just schedule and Premiere it they're not there they're just that's the way they upload so is there a Best practice is there an algorithmic advantage to using this feature or is it not that big a deal yeah I think those this is one of those things where like the the algorithm shouldn't have opinions because it shouldn't punish Creator like there should never be an idea of like algorithmic punishment I know everybody thinks the algorithm is out to punish them and we all take these things very personally
• 57:00 - 57:30 but that would just not be good like let's say the the like your next video is going to be the most popular video in the history of YouTube and there was some weird algorithmic punishment or like uh like oh they didn't premere it therefore We're not gonna like that's in nobody's best interest it's in everybody's best interest that every video have like have every chance for every bit of potential that it could ever have so like everyone is aligned on like video should succeed sort of regard like on their Merit sort of regardless of the um specific tools or methods or or however people want to put them up so
• 57:30 - 58:00 I would say like and also prioritize Mental Health and Longevity above everything else so like it even if there was like some like audience expectation for like premieres and it just didn't fit your lifestyle anymore prioritize being here for the Long Haul like being able to make those videos and maybe that's not premiering at all anymore maybe it's saying I'm only going to premere the first video when I'm in a new country and that's going to be like an extra special event and people be even more excited for it because it's it's like less common now it's more of a rare occurrence so I would like think
• 58:00 - 58:30 about it more in terms of like the Creator's longevity and then give your audience a reason to support you in doing it I love that okay and then uh I think this might be our final question um hashtags you brought up hashtags earlier that if if you're a newer Channel and you wanted to reinforce your video to get some Impressions related to good metadata that stepping on jumping on a trend related to hashtags um could be powerful I think
• 58:30 - 59:00 there's I've seen confusion where people go wait a minute is tags hashtags I'm like no two different things um and some people maybe don't use hashtags at all or maybe they're putting extra weight on them what are hashtags how do they work and then how is it best to think about them strategically as how they could actually help creators maybe trigger Impressions trigger the algorithm get views and what weight does that carry yeah so the way I think about these things in general is like try to spend all of your time making great videos because like there's no there's nothing
• 59:00 - 59:30 else that is as impactful as making great videos and that just means videos that your audience are going to want to like click on watch the completion and hopefully watch another video everything else is sort of taking your time away from that so think about it that way and then spend that other time um like invest that other time accordingly and hashtags like there they're it depends on the size of the Creator like if you're an enormous Creator uh you still might want to and you go to a you still might want to use a hashtag what hashtags do to actually answer your question is it puts like an active link
• 59:30 - 60:00 for that hashtag on a video so if people click on that link they'll go to like a hashtag page and they'll see other videos that use that same hashtag or if someone is already interested in that event and they go to that page they might have watched somebody else's video and come onto that page and seen your video so what you're banking on is that the interest in the trend or the topic is much greater than your like organic potential audience it's like this concert or this movie premiere or this uh natural event was so so much
• 60:00 - 60:30 attention that when people go there I want my I want my video to be in front of them if you think you're way bigger than the than the hashtag then instead of somebody maybe watching your video next they might go to the hashtag page and watch somebody else's video next which like just selfishly isn't as good for you so I would like again be like super strategic about it and think like is this a potential for me to get my video in front of a bigger larger different audience and is that something I care about and then if it is like especially if it's like a mega concert or Trend or something might be worth putting that hashtag there especially like if it's just H like Mega like
• 60:30 - 61:00 Blockbuster movie premiere huge concert event one of those things could be worth it for you to be there otherwise I would also be like strategic about that as well I would love if you thought about my thinking on this it makes total sense that if appropriate and you were typing into something like people are just looking as an event is happening and maybe it is a a release of a new product or even you from home covering the news I go to um have gone to CES Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas for probably
• 61:00 - 61:30 over a decade and so around when something like that's happening there's people who just kind of like want the feed they want everything related to it and they and they might go to the hashtag page great um the way I like to think about it though is I also realized the problem with those clickable links and I think you kind of just said this is they someone might accidentally click that or click that intentionally leave your video and then on that page you're nowhere to be found so It ultimately leads away from your Channel the way I like to use hashtags is actually more for personal organization and I use the
• 61:30 - 62:00 hashtag think media podcast the hashtag Sean canel the hashtag think media three show up and those three then are pages that the truth about hashtags you can't own them other people could certainly use those hashtags and show up on that page but those as being kind of personal brand company brand media brand are ways that those those are the main three that I use um you know other creators on think media we might use their name so then a way to categorize and go deeper in them plus think Media or whatever it is um what is your thoughts on using
• 62:00 - 62:30 them for organization and brown branding like I do yeah I think that's great I would always want to click through and just see what other videos are there to your point because you can't really own them and you might think this is great like there's no one here it's just me or I don't mind that the other people here or no I don't want anything to do with like the other videos that are on here so I would just do that like as like a periodic check uh to see what's on there but yeah then I think it's great it's a way for people to find more of your videos on a topic they already expressed interest in yeah that's a great point and and that's why yeah you might think
• 62:30 - 63:00 your channel name or your brand name is your channel name or brand name and then you click through and see oh whoa there's there's somebody else or this is some weird Trend different industry or something you're like wow there's a bunch happening here so the the big piece of advice make sure to click through and just check see what's there um and then make a educated decision I think the one other interesting thing about this is that it's as many as three hashtags is maximum that'll show up there but I also noticed that it's
• 63:00 - 63:30 overrided like on our th media podcast because we always add these episodes to the playlist which means they get distributed on YouTube music and are a proper podcast on YouTube that playlist link overrides the hashtag and there's other things that override that section I suppose the user interface on YouTube could change over time but um am I thinking about that correctly in my description as well I think I'd have to will check that because they shows up in different places on different surfaces and different exper and YouTube also runs experiments for different places uh
• 63:30 - 64:00 so I might not be doing the seeing the same thing that everybody's seeing uh but I would again like just do go to find an old video U put the put the hashtags in see where they are experiment see how it changes see what works best for you uh and then you put those on your if they Works put that on your more recent videos yeah that's a great point and at this exact moment I see I see my views I see the data of upload and then I see the think media podcast unfiltered YouTube tips with Sean canel the playlist would override that that's a good point though the metadata you're adding or the
• 64:00 - 64:30 optimization of your video the tapping into YouTube features YouTube experiments tries different tests different surfaces show up different things maybe a good piece of advice uh for listeners as we land the plane is uh I've heard it said for like an entrepreneur mindset eat at your own restaurant take some time to experience your own content to click around in your own description destion to see how once you started posting YouTube links in your description is now like a really cool YouTube logo in the title sometimes
• 64:30 - 65:00 if you copy paste over description stuff it's it's truncated in the public facing thing and now the Link's dead eat at your own restaurant go look at where your hashtags are leading if you're even using them and get really familiar with also the new YouTube features which if you haven't listened to our first episode where we actually talked about so many new YouTube feat futes and updates that creators can leverage in the actual experience of YouTube the future is bright on YouTube it's
• 65:00 - 65:30 exciting to see what's coming down the road and uh Renee I really appreciate you spending now like equivalent of two hours together just going super deep in algorithm super deep in new features you've added so much value and so much respect and appreciation for you taking the time to add value to our community it means the world if people want to connect with you follow you oh man I appreciate it and if they want to connect with you follow you and some of the other ways they can stay plugged into YouTube news where can they find you I'm at YouTube liaison pretty much
• 65:30 - 66:00 everywhere so whatever your favorite platforms are go to YouTube at YouTube leison I'll be there also uh Creator Insider we have podcasts with YouTube Executives that try to go even deeper on a lot of these topics their areas of specialty fig media podcast subscribe like share rate review wherever you watch or listen my name is Sean canell you're guide to building a profitable Channel thanks so much for joining us today and I can't wait to connect with you in a future episode of the think Med media podcast