If YouTube videos are underperforming,I think there are only really a few main causes for why this may happen that cover the majority of cases. These can be systemically broken down to give you perspective as to what may be going wrong. By understanding what’s happening, it will help you grow your YouTube channel. So feel free to bookmark this or share it with whoever needs it. 📚 1. SUPPLY-DEMAND ISSUES - If the audience that exists for your specific topic is too small, then you’ll have a invisible ceiling as to how high your views can get. - DEMAND ISSUE: For example, if the absolute biggest creator in your niche is only getting 100K views a video, then it’s going to be difficult for you to go beyond that even if you execute the video perfectly from an editing and storytelling perspective. - SUPPLY PROBLEM: If you have lots and lots of competitors in the same niche, this will make it more difficult for you to compete in the niche you’re in. You can probably overcome competition by being more skilled. Another way is to sidestep competition by choosing a topic that’s more niche, though it may run into the demand issue. - Topic choice and title/thumbnail go hand in hand. 2. PACKAGING ISSUES - If your title is unclear or confusing or unappealing, it probably wont perform well. - If your thumbnail is is unclear or confusing or unappealing, it probably wont perform well. - When people are designing thumbnails, the most common mistake is for people to get too stuck into specifics like colours, brightness, saturation, whatever. - Those things are definitely important, but the single most important thing that’s necessary is to skilfully execute on thumbnail psychology. - I talk about this in my course in more depth too, but in essence the same psychology tends to perform similarly for the same audience. This is an extraordinarily useful principle that, when applied correctly, greatly increases the chances that your video will perform well. - When testing and getting feedback on thumbnails, don’t just ask for feedback on thumbnails that have tiny differences. Ask for feedback on thumbnails that have major differences. Usually, with major differences, there will be a clearer winner. 3. STORYTELLING ISSUES - Storytelling is by far the most difficult thing to execute on a video, because it is complex and iteration is slower. - I’ve helped with a bunch of videos with whatever million views, and it doesn’t matter how big you are. If your video executes topic and packaging and performance/YouTube-specific editing right, it will do well. I believe the YouTube algorithm is very fair in that regard. - When I see underperformers on someone’s channel and the topic/packaging is good but the views are bad, *and* there’s no specific issue with supply-demand (e.g. topic is dying or there’s heaps of competition) or too little data (e.g. channel isn’t big enough for YouTube’s ML to push it to the right audience yet)…then the last diagnosis is there are usually glaring issues with storytelling. - There’s multiple ways to diagnose the storytelling issue at hand. The single best way is to get someone with more experience to take a look. Next best way is to get someone with equal experience for a second opinion on which parts were boring, or even better, to watch their reactions in real time and get their input. Third way is to look at the retention graph (check out my video on that if you like). Fourth is to create a system for determining good vs bad criteria, based on what trustworthy people in the space have said are useful criteria (but only trust those with a track record). — If this has been helpful, then my only ask is to like this tweet so that it comes up for other people too. ❤️
Adding a few notes to emphasise some points: CONQUERING DEMAND ISSUES: - Another way to overcome “demand issue” is to broaden the content idea so that it appeals to a wider audience. - So for example, instead of “The Perfect Lie of Oshi No Ko” (narrow, presumes knowledge of the anime before the user has clicked on the video) it might be simply rephrased to “This anime lies to your face.” - There’s always a balance; whilst specificity sacrifices breadth, that specificity can add value/improve signalling too. Takes some time to figure out this trade off. - “The riches are in the niches” has some truth in that you’ll get a more dedicated and specific audience, but you won’t necessarily get a huge audience. It really depends on your desired outcome. For example, promoting a business using <100K sub channel on something specific can be very lucrative despite views not being the most. - That said, if you’re aiming for 1M+ videos, then there has to be 1M+ people that wanna watch it, and more likely much more since not 100% of people will click. SAME PSYCHOLOGY PRINCIPLE: - This actually was something I discovered when I was researching my own niche: the same titles, even across different creators, would be outliers for all creators of that niche. - Interestingly, a bigger creator than I basically took a title I made from my research…and it became an outperformer for their channel too by at least 4-5x their usual view count! Won’t name names of course since everyone takes inspiration from everybody. - It’s because whilst specifics may change, outperformers on someone else’s channel reflect something objectively more stable in the psychology of the population of the world. - Knowing that, you could make a whole bunch of banger concepts that would have a high chance of getting a few million views. - Creators who are lame may do this just by copying others. Not what I recommend. - Instead, creators who are cool and grow more actually borrow elements from what’s been successful, and combine and expand on it to make it even better. - Innovation and originality takes strong observational note of what came before.
