What's going on with you YouTube?

[Jon]

This has the potential to be a very useful discussion. Some points to start it off:

• Not all traffic is equal. Certainly not all view counts are equal to individual people viewing something, and view counts can be gamed in a variety of ways.
• Web content can sit undiscovered for months or years before it goes viral. In fact this is much more common than something instantly becoming popular.
• Videos that prominently feature women, animals, explosions, or weird stuff like zit popping have a tendency to outperform technically useful videos in raw views.
• When you post on this forum, your videos get automatically posted to various social media (credited to your username, of course). If they're really good, we will ALSO manually post them on social media, as we did for your most popular video (more below). This always leads to a traffic spike, and sometimes a significant one.

The most popular video, by far, on your YT channel (sorting by Most Popular), is for a metal bender. This aligns with an understanding that we have gained by analyzing years of click/open rates for our newsletters, in that the following tool content gains the most traffic: crane, metal cutter or bender, bandsaw, brake, axe/tomahawk, tractor. Not necessarily the highest quality traffic, but the most views. Also, recently, those large bearing type of metal benders were very popular, for good reason, and yours was one of the first ones to tap that popularity. Note how your second most popular video is a brake.

Consider taking your most popular video, and creating additional videos that work off of that theme. Sometimes people will do a Part II video, or a more in-depth video detailing the construction of the subject of the first video. Or, a series of related videos. So, here you might do additional metal bender builds. Or more builds that incorporate large bearings. Or feature that metal bender in additional tool builds.

Have you noticed a recent increase in large bearing metal bender videos? I have. People likely saw your success, or the success of similar videos, and created similar builds. There's nothing inherently wrong with this, but it's important to note.

If a video goes viral, research why. For example, when you post a high-quality build on this forum, it gets moved into the "Best" section of our website, and into our Best Homemade Tools subforum. Once that happens, your video gets more traffic, and we will also promote it repeatedly, in our ebooks, again on social media, and in the "From the Vault" section of our newsletter, which goes out to around 46,000 subscribers now. Those two "Best" sections of our site are also very strongly correlated with long-term retention. When someone views something in those sections, they're 17 times more likely to return over 3 months than an average visitor who found us in Google. For example, this person found your metal bender video in our Best section: https://www.smokstak.com/forum/showthread.php?t=184546

If you can track down why a specific video was successful, then you can promote your future related videos in that same spot. The same forums, the same comment threads, the same social media, etc. This is often dangerous, however, if you're jumping into a discussion where people are ALREADY discussing your work positively, then my experience has been that your success rate will be very high, over 90% in the small amount of times that I've crunched the numbers.