Lauren Bateman (Full Time Tubers) explains five reasons YouTube may not be promoting a creator's videos and gives practical steps to improve algorithmic performance. Key points: YouTube prioritizes watch time and session time; creators should optimize thumbnails and headlines to raise click-through rate; use playlists, cards, and end screens to increase watch time and session length; new channels often lack sufficient data (she recommends ~50–100 videos and notes growth can take 1–2 years); and learn SEO/best practices (tags, descriptions). The video includes a walkthrough of the YouTube Analytics funnel (impressions → CTR → views → avg. view duration → watch time) and ends with CTAs to subscribe and a paid “YouTube jumpstart” course.
Hey youtubers, welcome back. If you were anything like me, you always felt like the YouTube algorithm was working against you. I remember waking up excited in the morning, running over to my analytics to find that literally like nothing had changed.
So I want to welcome you to Full time Tubers where I help video creators just like you earn a full time living sharing their expertise on YouTube. Now I know what it's like to grind day in and day out, putting out more and more content, more wondering when YouTube is going to show these videos and get your content in front of the right people. Right? If you can just get your videos in front of the right people, your channel will take off. Right? So in this video I'm going to give you five reasons why YouTube isn't paying attention to your content just yet. So the first thing I want to talk about is how the YouTube algorithm actually works. Remember, YouTube sells advertising, so the goal of YouTube is to keep people on the platform as long as possible possible. So the most important things for YouTube are watch time of videos and session time. Now session time is you bring someone over to the YouTube platform. How long do they stay on the platform? YouTube gives you credit for that. So you should always be trying to keep people on the YouTube platform by always promoting your other videos. Now many people new to YouTube don't understand that YouTube actually gives you credit for, for these start sessions even if people do not continue to watch your content. So do everything in your power to get people over to the YouTube platform. Whether you have a newsletter, your Instagram, your Facebook, Twitter, whatever you can promote and bring people over to the platform. So now that you understand how the YouTube platform works, I want to talk to you about the very important YouTube funnel. Alright, so I'm going to jump in over here on my laptop which is off screen and what we're going to do is we're going to check out. Let's just go to my latest video here. Let's go to the video analytics. But you could literally do this with any video by just clicking on content and then clicking on the little analytics button right here to check out a video. So let's go check this one out right now. So this is a video that literally just came out yesterday. So it's a newer video for me and you can see YouTube's let me know, hey, this video's gotten, you know about what it should be getting for when you release new videos. So what you do is I want you to go over to Reach.
And then we're going to scroll down and you'll see there's this really cool little funnel. So YouTube is great at giving you lots of information about your channel. What's working, what's not working. Pay attention to these analytics because YouTube's just going to tell you what it wants. Alright, so if we come back over here, you'll see the top of this funnel is impressions. Now impressions is how many times your thumbnail was shown on either a homepage, a search or anywhere else on YouTube. And that's just people saw the thumbnail and either they clicked on it or they didn't. Which brings us to our next factor which is click through rate. So you see this video has a 5.2% click through rate. Now obviously the higher the click through rate, the more views you're going to get on your videos. This is why thumbnails and headlines are so important on YouTube. You can actually control click through rate. I also want to point out real quickly, 83.2% of the views and impressions I'm getting on this video is because YouTube is actively recommending and promoting my content. Now, once we go through click through rate, you get the actual number of views that you've gotten from these impressions. You have your average view duration. And at the very bottom of the funnel, the most important, important piece of information that YouTube wants to know is how much watch time did you get from these impressions. So the more things you can do to keep people watching your content, whether you set up a playlist that's a series and gets people watching multiple videos, whether you use cards that pop up up on the top of your video, whether you're using end screens to help send people to other videos, that that's what you should be doing. You should always be trying to get someone to watch another piece of your content and keep pushing that watch time. Hope you guys are enjoying this video so far. Don't forget to subscribe to the channel and turn on your notifications. This way YouTube will let you know when I release more videos just like this one. So number three, I just want to let you guys know, don't focus so much on views and subscribership. Always you decide, just ask you to subscribe, always ask for people, describe be pushing for views. But the biggest, biggest thing that funnel has shown you is that watch time is the most important factor to YouTube. So work on those thumbnails, make them better. You know, a lot of times people on the home screen, your thumbnail just doesn't stick out. So viewers are just passing it by. So what can you do to make Your thumbnails a little bit more exciting, a little bit more provocative, show a little bit more information and stick out from the masses. Not only that, make sure you have great magazine like headlines. Both of these things will help improve your click through rate. And then once you get someone on your video, do everything you can to deliver amazing content to keep them watching the video from the beginning to the end. Now why aren't you getting promoted yet by YouTube? You saw that my video was getting 83% of it was from suggested video from YouTube. So how can you get there? The biggest thing I want newer YouTubers to know is that YouTube, it is an algorithm and that means it's mathematical, it requires to have Data and most YouTubers just don't have enough data in the pool yet. When a lot of YouTubers ask for help with their channel, a lot of times I'll go over there and I'll find that they've uploaded like 10 videos. And 10 videos is not enough information for YouTube to understand who your audience is, who likes your videos, who doesn't like your videos, who's going to watch, who's not going to watch. So really you got to just start grinding it out. YouTube is not easy. If it were easy, everyone would be successful at YouTube. You guys see my silver plaque back there for my guitar lesson channel? And that took a time for me to get that going. I really think it takes 50 to 100 videos and most of the time it takes one to two years for the average YouTube channel to really start gaining traction. Now the faster you can pump out that content and make it good content, the faster you can start getting that snowball effect to start taking shape. I would say the hardest part of YouTube is that first year really grinding through that content. But again, like I said, YouTube is not meant to be easy, but it is so worth it. Last week I went on vacation to Iceland and by the time I got home from vacation, I had already completely paid, paid for the entire vacation without ever logging on to my computer. If you're not getting a lot of views, a lot of subscribers yet, just keep putting more and more data into the system so that YouTube can learn and understand what your channel's about and who your audience is so that they can start serving that content to the correct audience. And the last thing on why you might not be getting promoted yet in YouTube is that you're just doing, doing a lot of things wrong. Now I know a lot of us YouTubers, we talk about secrets and hacks and there really aren't any hacks to YouTube. They're really best practices. But when we make videos and you put, put it on a thumbnail, it actually, you know, gets us a lot of views and a lot of clicks. Now I do YouTube full time. I make a full time living on YouTube. But the first two or three years I was doing a lot of stuff wrong, particularly in regards to to SEO, you know, serving the right content to my audience. I didn't know how to properly use tags, I didn't know how to write descriptions in a way that would help YouTube promote my channel. So I think if you can learn that knowledge as soon as possible, that it will help you get a jumpstart on your YouTube channel. If you're newer to YouTube and you're looking for kind of like a 30 day jumpstart for your channel to kind of learn some of these hacks and tricks that I didn't know when I was first getting started, go check out my YouTube jumpstart course. I'll put a link in the description below. Really you can get through the content in probably 14 to 30 days and really give you some good direction on what to focus on for your YouTube channel, particularly if you're a smaller channel. And if you're interested in learning about the biggest mistakes I made when I started on YouTube, go check out the video right over there.
