Struggling to GROW Your YouTube Channel? WATCH THIS! | Matt Gielen

Welcome everybody to another YouTube Hangout. Super excited to be here with a new friend, someone where we rescheduled to get back on because he's got some amazing content ideas to share with us. Mr. Matt Gielen, he is an expert on YouTube and figuring out the algorithm, and we're going to talk for the next half hour about how to dissect it and help your YouTube channels grow. So Matt, welcome aboard, man.

Thanks for having me, man. Appreciate it.

You want to give a little context, a little background for the audience, just so they know what you're all about?

Sure. So my name is Matt Gehlen, and I'm formerly the VP of programming and audience development at a place called Frederator. You may have seen some of our stuff before. We made Adventure Time and Fairly OddParents and a whole host of other cartoons that were extremely popular on TV. I got to work on the digital side, focusing on building the audience for Cartoon Hangover, which had the cartoons Bravest Warriors and Being Puppycat and a whole host of really awesome shorts on there. And then I oversaw the programming and audience development for Channel Frederator on YouTube. We did really well there. In about a year and a half, we built that channel up to about 1.1, 1.2 million subscribers, doing anywhere between, you know, around 8 and 17 million monthly views. And then I also helped build the Channel Frederator Network.

Love it. So you put out this detailed report. I forget where it was published. It was on one of the blogs talking about the YouTube algorithm. And I think I reached out to you on Twitter afterwards and we had a little bit of discussion back and forth about it. What are, what are some of the things that you discovered? The people haven't read the article, and we should, we should link that up so people can dive deeper if they want. But what are some of the things that you discovered that people aren't doing that, that could really help their YouTube channels grow?

Um, things that people aren't doing that would help their YouTube channels grow, I would say, is kind of taking a look at your content and recognizing if there is content that's actually hurting the viewership on your channel. You know, we found evidence to suggest— I don't think it necessarily proved it outright— I don't think it necessarily proved it outright, but it suggested that uploading a video that got less than 3% of your subscribers to watch in the first 48 hours could actually cause viewership on your entire channel to drop, including your library videos. And we see this most commonly like in channels that kind of go into like a bit of a death spiral where either You know, people aren't watching the newest videos, or maybe their content's gotten a little stale. And what ends up happening is that their library of videos begins losing traffic from like suggested videos and search, and they start dropping out. And so this suggested to us that there's, there's kind of like a meta score or meta algorithm that's basically like, if you're hitting these combination of factors, we're going to rank all of your videos in our discovery algorithms higher. And so that's like things like, you know, browse and suggested and recommended and related, you know, and all the various places those show up, most importantly on the homepage and on watch pages. And, you know, if you keep uploading those, you know, quote-unquote negative uploads, it can, it can tank your channel, is what we saw. And conversely, if you're regularly doing, you know, 10, 12, 15% of your subscribers in the first 48 hours you'll see your channel really, really begin to grow to a certain extent. So those are some of the higher-level findings of the, of the article. We also found really cool stuff about like duration. You know, literally videos that were just longer, right? So whether that video was 15 or 20 minutes or 25 minutes made a huge difference in terms of viewership. And then kind of as a subcategory to that, the audience retention on those videos also had an impact on algorithm. I don't think that's news to anyone. I think this was the first time anyone kind of put out any sort of like data behind that that showed, you know, when we had a video that would get a 12 or 13% average view duration, we would get like 2x our subscribers in terms of overall viewership. So, you know, we had about a million subscribers and we did this research, you know, videos that would get 2 million views were doing about 150,000 views from our subscribers in the first 48 hours. And the reason I use subscribers as a number, I don't actually think the algorithm really cares whether subscribers or not. I think it has to do with a concept called view velocity, which is that they see this video accruing so many views in the first 48 hours, YouTube says, oh, this video is really important for for the topics and keywords with which it falls under and the interests with which it falls under. So let's serve this video to people with that same interest and you'll get a lot of click-through. And if that retention, the audience retention and the click-through stays the same as it expands it, it'll continue to expand it over time. Now I think there's probably stages. We're going beyond the article now, mainly because this stuff fascinates me and I can't help but continue to think about it. I love it. If you think about a video's lifespan and kind of like certain stages, right? Like you have that first 48-hour window where YouTube is really kind of analyzing your video and seeing what it's all about, right? It's first and foremost, it's taking in kind of the metadata that you put in, right? And this is everything from average video length, title, description, tags, closed captions. And then it starts taking into account things like comments and who's clicking on it and what they've watched before and so on and so forth. Starts building that into it. And there's kind of like this 48, 72-hour window where YouTube is basically saying, you know, what is this video all about and how good is it? And by good, it means really like how good is it at creating a lot of watch time on our site, right? It has nothing to do with quality or anything else. It's how good is it at keeping people on our site. Now, you can pull from that that, you know, the better quote-unquote quality video is going to generate that, but that's a whole nother conversation for a whole nother time. And then outside of that, right, there's kind of like the first week, 2 weeks that, you know, the initial 2 or 3 days kind of leads to. And then after that, it's kind of the long tail of the video. And I think there's different kind of weightings at different times. I have to do a lot more research on it, but kind of what I've been seeing from like a top level and going, oh, that's something really interesting. I wanna dig into the data on that. That's what's popping out at me.

Cool. And so what's interesting there too is you're saying that if a new video comes out and doesn't do well, then that can impact all your old videos too.

Oh yeah, absolutely, big time. And we should also take note that there's always going to be an element of like, if you have one video that's doing really well, there's going to be a certain percentage, whether that's a fraction of a percent or 50 or 60% of the people that land on that video to watch that are gonna go and watch your other videos. Right. And that obviously is going to have an impact on viewership. But what we saw kind of more in the details is it's more of like a circular effect where, or like a wave effect where the waves kind of start building onto each other and start overlapping. Right. So if you start having all these real successful videos, right, your, your graph starts to go— I think this is the right way on the screen, it's a little confusing.

Yeah, yeah.

So like your, your graph starts going like this with the ups and downs versus just kind of like this right along with like the uploads, um, and they kind of build on each other. But that being said, if we think about kind of the meta, uh, algorithm or the, the high-level algorithm as like kind of a channel score, um, and say Well, if your videos are regularly gaining more audience than your subscribers, that means that your channel should have more subscribers, right? Because you're reaching beyond your audience from a viewership perspective. And I think YouTube takes that into account. And similarly with watch time. Now it could boil down to something as simple as like, well, your channel is generating a ton of stickiness for our site, so we want to send more people to your channel. So that they stay on the site longer. And so, I think it's a combination of factors, but certainly keeping people on the YouTube platform and continuing to outperform yourself is going to generate more audience.

Interesting. Let me ask you this. I don't know if you have data on it or not. For subscribers who are watching your video, if you had to have one call to action at the end of the video, would it be to leave a thumbs up, leave a comment, share it? What would— what the— what's the priority of, uh, engagement afterwards? Or, or do you know, do you have that figured out yet?

So you were saying if you had already get like 15, 20, 25% of your subscribers to watch, what would you ask them to do at the end of the video?

Yeah, or even if not, like even, even you only gain 3% or whatever it is, like what's the highest impact thing that a subscriber can do for you where if you're a creator, you have a lot of creators who have like 20 calls to action at the end of a video, and as a result, they're not going to do anything, right? So you have to pick one, like, hey, a question of the day, leave it down below the comment, or please guys, add this to a playlist or give it a thumbs up. Does it make a difference on the engagement for the algorithm?

I heard a saying recently that I really loved, which was tyranny of choice. Where if you give a viewer too many choices, they're gonna choose to do nothing and go away, right? So I think a pretty good rule of thumb is like no more than 3 calls to action so that they have an option, right? And it's a pretty solid rule of 3, right? Like you see that throughout so many things in life. And so giving people 3 options, I think is probably the best place to be. I have not done any testing on it. I don't have data to back it up, I can say from a non-scientific standpoint that essentially when we reduced our calls to action from, I think, 7 or 8 to 3, we saw better performance. We're also making better content, but essentially in order of importance, what I would say is watch more first and foremost, mainly because watch time and keeping on people on the platform longer is so incredibly important. And this kind of speaks to programming strategy, right? Like if you're making a video about LeBron James, you don't want to then tell people to go watch a video about, um, you know, horseback riding, right? The people that are watching LeBron James video probably don't care about horseback riding. Sure, there's a small percentage, but, um, you know, I don't think it's a huge percentage, right? You want to tell them to go watch another video about LeBron James, or if you don't have that, tell them to go watch a video about Kobe or, um, you know, Steph Curry or whoever it is, right? And you go from most relevant to least relevant in your video inventory from what video you ask them to watch next. The next thing I would say is subscribe, mainly because from that windowing perspective we talked about earlier in a video's life cycle, those first 48 hours are so important, and that makes subscribers unbelievably important, right? And so when you upload a new video, the first people that are likely to see that video and click on that video, giving that video like a watch time score, giving that thumbnail like a click-through rate, are going to be your subscribers, right? And they're gonna be the best performers. And so from that perspective, the more subscribers you have, right, the greater reach you have, the more watch time, the more session duration time you're able to create, the better it's going to be for your video and for your channel. So number 2 would be subscribe. And then number 3 would probably be some sort of engagement. I've seen no indication that engagement has any impact on the algorithm whatsoever. You know, there, there was a— in this day and age, historically, yeah, it's incredibly important, which makes me believe— makes me think that there might be still some weighting going on in the algorithm. And then if you also think about it from a more theoretical standpoint, videos that are engaging are likely to accrue more watch time simply by the fact that while someone is going to do that action, They're still watching the video, right? Say, hey, comment down below, right? Well, someone then has to think about your question. They have to think about what to write, right? They have to actually type it out, right? Chances are, well, maybe not on YouTube, but in other places, people will go back and like check it for grammar and spelling. You know, they're gonna want to add their emojis. Not your audience. I'm sure your audience is good on that.

I know there's lots of, in the live chat, there's gonna be lots of emojis happening, so it's fine.

That takes time, right? And so like, yeah, maybe videos with like a disproportionate number of comments, right, are racking up this incredible watch time because people are literally having to sit there while the video plays and write out the comment. And in that scenario, it's like, well, you know, which is it? Is it the watch time or the comment? It's like, well, the watch time doesn't happen without the comment. So, you know, some sort of engagement action would be good at the very least to show that you actually care about what your subscribers and fans think and keep them engaged with the show.

Right. So comments too. What happens? Somebody leaves a comment, somebody else responds, they end up coming back to the video. If they come back to the video and just respond to the comment, but without watching it again, because they've already seen the video, they just want to be part of that thread. Could that actually be a negative signal?

No, I don't think so. I think it's just engagement generally. Like, I don't think I'm sorry, are you asking more about like if a repeat view happens?

Yeah, so on this video we're gonna get comments afterwards, right? Maybe I respond to one and say, hey, you know, Tamara, thank you so much for watching the video. She comes back to see my comment and just to leave another comment to say, hey, it was awesome, but she's not gonna watch this whole half-hour thing again because she's seen it. If she ends her session there, Does that negatively impact the video now?

Um, I mean, theoretically it could. Again, I don't have any, any data to suggest one way or the other. What I would say is that I know historically YouTube has given algorithm weighting to videos that generate repeat viewing. I think there's probably a lot of evidence in the kids space to suggest that like Oh yeah, that can be really powerful if they do repeat viewing. So from that perspective, I would say it's probably a toss of the coin either way. Generally speaking, though, I think if someone's coming back to stay engaged in the conversation, that's got to be a good thing.

Right. I'm thinking now at the end of a lot of my videos, I'll ask a question. So the question of the day is whatever, leave it below, but I'm never really doing Hey, here are some related videos that you guys might enjoy. If you're saying that's like the primary call to action should be watch more, then, you know, should I, who's some selfish consultant here, you know, should I change my strategy to like put 3 links in the description and say, hey guys, here are 3 videos I think you need to watch next, go check them out in the description below and not do a question of the day?

Well, I think you can still do a question of the day, but I think, yeah, you should absolutely tell people, you know, what they might enjoy next. You have to think about it from two perspectives, right? You have to think about it from your audience who has watched, you know, a lot of your videos or many of your videos. And you have to think about it from a new audience, right? 'Cause a lot of people who watch that video are not gonna be people who are subscribed or who may have ever seen your video before, right? So it's a way of introducing them to your content and letting them know that you have a ton of other videos up that they might really like. And then if you think about like, well, the reason why people are on YouTube is to be entertained and to discover things. And if you can help them do that, I think that's really valuable to the audience. And yeah, it's really helpful to you as well. So from that perspective, absolutely. Yeah, I think so.

Cool. Well, the people in the live chat are saying don't stop the question of the day, please. So I'll keep that for you guys. Okay, don't worry. Otherwise, you're going to get tons of hate tweets at you. Matt, come on, man. So for now, for creators who are looking to launch a new series on their channel— maybe they're doing 1 video a week, they want to go to 2 videos a week— the metric you would look at to judge the success of a new series would be subscribers watching the video?

That's a tough one, and, and that's a tough one because almost no matter how much promotion and marketing you do for the new series, right, it's not going to get as many views as like your current popular series, mainly because in my view it shows up in a subscriber's feed and they're like, I don't recognize this, I don't understand this, I am not going to click on this, right? This is not something I usually watch. Here are 10 thumbnails of something I usually watch. I would like to click on one of those. Now there's a whole bunch of strategies to, to get around that, but to answer your question about the success of a new series, I would focus on more about what the average view duration is. And if you're getting really good average view duration, like let's say you're 60 to 80% range, which I think is pretty damn good for longer videos, If you're in that range, great. If you're a little bit below that range, you might want to look at like the structure of the video. Are there ways to keep more people engaged longer? Is there a way to get into the video quicker? That sort of thing. But generally speaking, I think average view duration is going to be the most like apples to apples that you can do to your current series in a way to kind of measure the long-term viability of it. And in addition, I wouldn't cut a series until you're at least like 5, 6, 7 episodes into it. If it's something you care about and are passionate about, mainly because one, that's how long it's gonna take to build any sort of audience for it out of your current subscriber base. But also it gives a good amount of content for people to go back to and check out in one go, right? Like the average YouTube video, you're talking about 5, 7 minutes. That's not a huge duration of entertainment time. Whereas if you have 5 or 6 episodes of that, well, now you're talking about like, yeah, you know, I could sit down and eat a hoagie and watch 3 or 4 of these videos and determine if I like it or not. Right. Like, did you see the Netflix study that came out that was like, you know, Netflix knows exactly how many episodes of a show you need to watch to fall in love with that show.

Interesting.

Yeah. And like for certain series, it was like, you need to watch 3 and you're going to watch every season. For other shows, it was like, you need to watch 7 or 8. And so, you know, giving yourself a good enough kind of data set of— that's data set— data set of 8 videos to get a better feel for it, I think, is kind of a good benchmark, somewhere in the 5 to 8 range.

So one of the things that we've been looking at as we add a new series in would be subscribers gained per video. Maybe that's not a great metric, but, you know, our goal is for every video series we put out, we want every video to be in the double digits of of new subscribers joining. You know, if it's negative, then that's a really bad series, obviously. But if it's like single digits, 5, yeah.

For your current audience, right? It doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad series, right? Which is a problem, right? Like, in my view, YouTube doesn't give a hoot about any individual video all that much. There are a lot of exceptions to that rule, but for the most part, any individual video is not all that important to YouTube in the sense of you might have the greatest— I'll give you an example from a movie and TV channel we had at Frederator called Cinematica. Cinematica, we built about 100,000 subscribers after like 3 or 4 months or something. We're doing about 3 or 4 million monthly views. And we built that audience mainly by doing listicles and theory shows and this kind of crap about The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, Star Wars, and Marvel. Right? And we wanted to be a more well-rounded audience. We wanted to bring more females in. So we did a listicle on Orange is the New Black. It was a perfectly fine video, perfectly good video, nothing revolutionary, nothing crazy. It shouldn't have done 10 million views. But it should have done way more than like the 4,000 views that it did because the average video on that time did a couple hundred thousand views for us. And so, you know, that was the first indication that I had that was like, okay, they don't really give a crap about how good of an Orange Is the New Black video that is. What they give a crap about is whether the people that they served it to, which happened to be your subscribers, right, because that's who gets to see it first, clicked on it. Right? If those people didn't click on it, right, they're not gonna go and say, well, this is a great Orange is the New Black video, right? And they're not gonna give it a chance to be a great Orange is the New Black video. Maybe over time, yeah, you know, 5, 6, 7, 8 months, it gets picked up or something happens to it. But out of the gate, no, right? So that, that's part of what led to this idea of like, you have to focus on this very specific niche. And so with that in mind, that's why I think like a negative subscriber number is a really hard way to judge a new series because it's only about that series and your audience, right? Or I'm sorry, it's only about how the very specific audience that you currently have access to interprets that video, right? And whether or not they like it or it makes them unsubscribe or whatever it is. So from that perspective, I would really encourage you to, to not look at that as a primary metric when, when a new series first goes up. Like, give it some chance. Let me fight for your children.

I love it. Um, I know, I know, you know, you are obsessed with data and trends and figuring stuff out and hacking your way. What, what's the next thing you're looking at? What are some of the things that are on your radar that you're exploring the next blog post is going to come out and drop some new knowledge bombs on?

Well, I've gotten really excited about a couple of things. So like one of the biggest questions I see, like when I'm trolling on like, you know, our partner YouTube and our YouTube is like, you know, how do I launch a channel? Or how do I get audience? And, you know, it feels like there's no way to build a YouTube channel in this day and age and all that kind of stuff. And like, you know, that definitely irks me because I think there is. Now, I also understand that I've had the benefit of working with existing audiences, right? So like, yeah, we built Cartoon Hangover more or less from scratch, but we were kind of riding on the coattails of the creator of Adventure Time, right? And there was a baked-in audience there for Bravest Warriors, which led us to our first, you know, couple hundred thousand subs. And then, you know, when we started launching Channel Frederator, we leaned on Cartoon Hangover and were able to send audience over. But that said, you know, I've helped channels launch over the last like year or two, and I've seen them become extremely successful. And I think I'm gonna start— my next big one would probably be that, you know, how to launch a channel in 2017, right, and drive audience. The second one that I'm been thinking about since VidCon, which I'm really excited about, is actually the audience side of the algorithm, right? Because I took a picture of a whiteboard drawing I'm going to look up while trying to do this. But I gave my whole reverse engineering algorithm presentation at VidCon. And then afterwards, I was talking to a YouTube engineer. And he came up to me and he was like— he was limited in what he could say. And he was basically like, you weren't wrong. You weren't necessarily right, but one of the things you should think about is the audience, right? And I was like, oh man, that's a really good point because my focus is always on creators and content creation and that sort of thing. But what that got me thinking about was like, you know, I've never seen anyone do a really, really interesting analysis on what YouTube serves audiences based on what they think about them. And part of what spurred this was I went into my Google account and I saw that they had me labeled as like, you know, having 10 different interests. And like, of course, like the first one was like YouTube, YouTubers. I was like, well, shocking. But essentially, you know, Google labels you and what you're interested in and serves you content and search results based on that. And so my thinking was there has to be a like very moderately, and I get that it's like, okay, apparently I didn't take a picture of it. There's, um, there has to be a moderately scientific way to try and see what YouTube would serve to someone that they believe is interested in XYZ, right? Whether that's like cars, beauty and makeup, whatever it is. So like, I want to create like 10 demographic profiles within Google, check that against what they say that I'm interested in, and then go to YouTube on like a fresh cookie-free browser and and see what they serve, right? And watch some videos and see what happens and just record the whole thing, right? To be like, oh, well, you know, YouTube served us 50 thumbnails when we landed on the homepage. And of those thumbnails, 80% of them were 10 minutes or longer. Or just try and see what it is. Now I got a feeling I'm gonna get a ton of Jimmy Kimmel and Jimmy Fallon, right? No matter what demographic, because they need help. No matter what kind of demographic information I put in. But I'm curious, I want to see what happens. So that's, that's gonna be the next one.

Cool. And so for people to follow along on your experiments, you know, I discovered you through the blog post that you put on, I think it was Tubular Labs. Was it Tubular Labs? TubeFilter. TubeFilter. TubeFilter, that was it. Are you gonna, are you, maybe I'm ignorant, are you Are you posting this stuff? Do you have your own platform? Is it— are you putting it up on Twitter, your own blog, your own YouTube channel where you're sharing this, or is it just— I want to follow Matt around and not just hope I find his articles. I want to make sure my audience gets the next gold that comes out.

You can certainly follow me on Twitter @MattGielin. That's M-A-T-T-G-I-E-L-I-N. I post a lot of work to Filter and I post it in other places. Potentially looking to do some other, other pretty cool things here soon that I can't talk about just yet. But I'll be certain to let you know as soon as that's up and live.

All right. Okay. Okay. A little mystery there, a little ninja stuff happening on in the background. Yeah, I mean, I followed along most of the guys who are doing the, like, YouTube advice and, you know, how to, how to explode your channel, all that stuff. And you definitely have a different perspective on which I think people would really, you know, if you wanted to start a YouTube channel talking about this stuff or blog or whatever, I think, I think you'd bring a lot of, a lot of value and build an audience pretty quickly. And I'm happy to help out with that too, man. I want to know the next thing that launches. You got to hit me up. We'll do another one of these and drop some knowledge bombs on the audience.

Cool.

Well, it's amazing how quickly half an hour flies and now you got to get back to the client you're working with there. In New York. Is there any final message that you want to leave the audience? I know we talked about following you on Twitter. Is there anything else that you're trying to promote or spread awareness of?

No, nothing that I'm trying to promote or spread awareness of just yet. You know, I was on Tim's podcast, and I have a tendency to look very coldly at the numbers and stop thinking about it in terms of audience or creators. I must be gaining that through osmosis from YouTube. But, you know, one of the things that he brought it back to, and I was like, that is a really good point, and I should probably try to keep that in the forefront of my mind, which is, you know, at the end of the day, you know, make content that you're passionate about and you care about, right? I think that's actually one thing that anyone could learn from looking at what you do, Evan, because you're very clearly passionate about this. You really care about helping people, and I think that's really, really awesome.

I love it. Well, thank you for the time. Thank you all you guys for watching live. Go check him out on Twitter. Continue to believe, or whatever your one word is, and we'll see you soon.