What's going on with you YouTube?

I'm trying to figure out how YouTube works!
While putting my whole soul into making DIY videos, I only get 3000 Views.
And people who have just prepared something from balloon get a few million!
What's going on with you YouTube?

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.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by 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.

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Thank you for all the information you recorded! It helped me a lot

So what do I need to do to appear in the places you specify?

To get your tool thread into the Best Homemade Tools subforum (tools from which are automatically added to our Best page), your tools have to receive many legitimate Thanks votes. Once monthly, we move all the most-thanked tools into the Best Homemade Tools subforum. If you win a Homemade Tool of the Week award, your tool gets moved in there immediately.

Also take note of the common web advice that, especially if your site or social media account is new, you should spend ten times as much time promoting your content than you spend creating it.

Also, you can post that video on hundreds of different forums. Here's a list of 400+ forums that link to us; that's a good place to start: https://www.homemadetools.net/links

Diy fixman: Hello!
One things you might try is to first address the person viewing your video.
I have probably watched a few thousand you tube videos.
I haven't "liked" any of them!
It is not that i actually did not like/appreciate their video.
I just don't have a Youtube account and cant log in to actually press the buttons.
So. maybe you could Address that point and help people like me to learn to log into You Tube.
A Lot of the folks on this site are older folks and not really geared up to all the features etc of youtube.
We tend to only learn enough to get us to the subjects we want to see and the rest of YOUTUBE is invisible to us.

Good Luck

Richard

diyfixman,
When you get the answer, please tell me about it.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by diyfixman

I'm trying to figure out how YouTube works!
While putting my whole soul into making DIY videos, I only get 3000 Views.
And people who have just prepared something from balloon get a few million!
What's going on with you YouTube?

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I just had a look at your channel and I do not know what you are complaining about. It looks to be very successful. Many posts with 100,000+ views, I noticed one with 13,000,000, 76,000 followers. I think that you will have to go way down the intellectual scale if you want to increase that, as Jon said make explosions.

Although I have had some videos on my channel for several years it has only been recently that I have put any effort into trying to increase traffic and subscribers but that seems to have been spectacularly unsuccessful. Less than a 1000 followers during the past 12 months. Perhaps I should change to a handheld phone camera which I wave about so much that nobody can tell what is happening because their eyes are confused.
During the last couple of weeks I have put a few posts on "Instructables" in an effort to drive some traffic to my YT channel. The hand tapping machine is by far the most popular that I posted there yet it hasn't caused a noticeable blip in the YT numbers.
Anyway I have no intention of posting videos that are outside of my range of interests just to get the numbers up. I'll leave others to make explosions and/or plain stupid and/or fake movies.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by tonyfoale

I just had a look at your channel and I do not know what you are complaining about. It looks to be very successful. Many posts with 100,000+ views, I noticed one with 13,000,000, 76,000 followers. I think that you will have to go way down the intellectual scale if you want to increase that, as Jon said make explosions.

Although I have had some videos on my channel for several years it has only been recently that I have put any effort into trying to increase traffic and subscribers but that seems to have been spectacularly unsuccessful. Less than a 1000 followers during the past 12 months. Perhaps I should change to a handheld phone camera which I wave about so much that nobody can tell what is happening because their eyes are confused.
During the last couple of weeks I have put a few posts on "Instructables" in an effort to drive some traffic to my YT channel. The hand tapping machine is by far the most popular that I posted there yet it hasn't caused a noticeable blip in the YT numbers.
Anyway I have no intention of posting videos that are outside of my range of interests just to get the numbers up. I'll leave others to make explosions and/or plain stupid and/or fake movies.

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I do not complain I respect and appreciate all my subscribers!
The problem is that I upload new videos and I only get 3000 hits and that's despite having 76,000 subscribers. It's watching! I spend a lot of money and time and I do not get exposure I expect. I'm just wrong where are all my subscribers?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by diyfixman

I do not complain I respect and appreciate all my subscribers!
The problem is that I upload new videos and I only get 3000 hits and that's despite having 76,000 subscribers. It's watching! I spend a lot of money and time and I do not get exposure I expect. I'm just wrong where are all my subscribers?

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When making maker videos, that is very usual.
I have noticed that only couple percents of my views comes from the subscribers. Possibly there is about 1000 persons who watches every video. Others watches only if subject interests them.

My opinion is that most of the people who watches maker videos, doesn't actually make things by themself. They just want to see something cool, possibly learn something too... but mostly they watch just for fun.

I think that reason is that most of the youtube viewers are young, they don't have own workshop or tools. That's why all kind of simple stuff interests, even that those "awesome, unique, new idea from a nut and bearing " - videos are really stupid / useless. ( just my opinion ) Those videos go viral, because of simpliness and because viewer isn't so experienced to realize that its actually very useless stuff what they are watching..

My most watched video is one of those, made it just for fun, as a kind of joke... then suddenly it was a "awesome" Lol.. and when i have tried to make something actually usefull, simple to make.. etc. It gets couple views. :)

I agree with Thomas,
this is the reality at YouTube.
Also the most of subscribers use the default settings.
So by default the notification
"Notify me when channels that follow upload a new vid" Is inactive.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by kess

Also the most of subscribers use the default settings.
So by default the notification
"Notify me when channels that follow upload a new vid" Is inactive.

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I did not know that. It explains a lot.
It seems strange because I thought that the main reason to subscribe was to get the notification of new stuff. What other benefit is there for a viewer to subscribe?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by tonyfoale

I did not know that. It explains a lot.
It seems strange because I thought that the main reason to subscribe was to get the notification of new stuff. What other benefit is there for a viewer to subscribe?

---

Hi tonyfoale

This policy it wasn't from the beginning, but suddenly after an update few years ago
(if I remember correctly must been about 2016).

Quote:

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Originally Posted by tonyfoale

I did not know that. It explains a lot.
It seems strange because I thought that the main reason to subscribe was to get the notification of new stuff. What other benefit is there for a viewer to subscribe?

---

You see this particularly on Twitter. People will mass-follow people in a quid pro quo expectation of a follow in return. Or, they'll just follow thousands of people (manually, or can be done with software), simply to promote their account to the people who are being followed. Sometimes there is also some sort of marketing or notification benefit that advantages a user who is following you, over one who is not.

There is no single widely applicable strategy. If you're making a channel strictly for intellectually valuable content, then of course you want to look at channels like Dan Gelbart's, and you may want to promote your video in places where there is academic discussion relevant to your content. Maybe look at the universities where there are students or teachers who would like your content, and then figure out how to reach them from there.

More generally, Made in Poland's channel is a good one to look at for homemade tool builders.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Jon

You see this particularly on Twitter. People will mass-follow people in a quid pro quo expectation of a follow in return. Or, they'll just follow thousands of people (manually, or can be done with software), simply to promote their account to the people who are being followed. Sometimes there is also some sort of marketing or notification benefit that advantages a user who is following you, over one who is not.

There is no single widely applicable strategy. If you're making a channel strictly for intellectually valuable content, then of course you want to look at channels like Dan Gelbart's, and you may want to promote your video in places where there is academic discussion relevant to your content. Maybe look at the universities where there are students or teachers who would like your content, and then figure out how to reach them from there.

More generally, Made in Poland's channel is a good one to look at for homemade tool builders.

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Sek Austria is another one that's good to check out.
Made in Poland has "Fans" that watches every video that he makes.

I think that should be coal where to target, instead of trying to get loads of views for one video.

I have decided to make my own stuff, if people likes it, then they watch, mostly they don't. But i believe that i found my audience someday..

I checked some stats from my latest video.

65 % of the views in past two days comes from the youtube search / succestions.

600 views from the subscriber notifications.


Most views outside the youtube

236 from facebook.
55 from some german website.
14 views from homemadetools.net
7 from gmail
2 from watssapp
2 from Metalwork forum

Etc..

This months top 1 in traffic outside youtube features.
2300 watched mins from homemadetools.net

Overall watched minutes about 4 million.

( Got suddenly loads of views to one of my videos )

So. My conclusion is that if you can't get Youtubes attention then getting views is somewhat difficult, if you don't get fans that likes to see whatever you make.