Lauren Bateman shares her YouTube analytics from 16 months of uploading roughly 50 videos. She found that consistency matters, but only if your content matches what your audience wants. Posting multiple videos at once wastes their first 48 hours of algorithmic boost. One video per week is a baseline; twice weekly can hit browse features. Quality and fit beat volume.
Questions this video answers
April 1, 2017 to September 15, 2018.
About 50 videos.
Approximately 16 months (till the 1,000-subscriber mark).
At least one video per week (she personally posts twice a week).
The first 48 hours after a video's release.
Chapters
Hey, content creators, have you been wondering how many videos you need to post to really get your YouTube channel going? I know there's lots of different. I'm going to try and give you as specific of an answer as possible, understanding that every channel is different. But first I'm going to do is I'm going to show you the process I went through on my channel, how many videos it took me to get to that 1,000 subscriber mark. And also talking a bit about consistency and how consistency actually helped my channel growing.
Now a quick little note on consistency before I jump into my analytics over on my laptop here. A lot of YouTubers out there, they'll say, hey, you know, you got to post consistently, you got to be consistent. But, but what does that mean? And does consistency really help? And the answer is yes, consistency can help. But if you are posting the wrong content or you're posting a bunch of content that's random or not really for your audience, you could post every single day to YouTube and not get r really far with your channel. And at that point you're going to get burnt out, you're going to get overwhelmed and I'm going to show you about a little bit of overwhelm you'll see in my channel. And I'll also show you an example of someone else who's in my niche that's posting every single day, but not quite getting the same results as I'm getting posting only twice a week. Alright, so here we are in my YouTube analytics and I just want to show you the time period here is April 1, 2017 to September 15, 2018. And you can see here, my channel is just getting started. You'll see this spike here. This is when Lauren was a bad YouTuber in the beginning and I like bought views. So if you guys are wondering if you buy views, does it help? You can see it literally didn't help my channel at all. So don't go buying views, don't go buying subs. It really doesn't help your channel at all. But you can see this is the course of about 18 months or so, 16 months that it took me to get to the 1,000 subscriber mark. So how many videos was this? Well, let's go dig into the data. Okay, so here we are. This, these are some of the first videos I uploaded. And you're going to see I made a cardinal mistake in the beginning when uploading content, which was that I recorded a bunch of content. And then you can see here, I uploaded them all on the Same day. And you don't want to do that with YouTube. Someone like me, I like to post twice a week. And the reason I post twice a week is because if you're going after browse features, YouTube's only going to be able to promote a video for the first 48 hours. That's usually the most important time for. For browse features and things showing up on the home screens is that first 48 hours. So if you're posting two videos within that 48 hours, YouTube can only promote one of those videos or they'll promote both of them, but they're kind of competing with each other. So when I did this here, you can see I released four videos on the same day. That meant YouTube had to promote all four of them at the same time. So you can see where there's. You don't want to be competing with yourself. Now, if you're someone who runs like a news media outlet, you might need to post more frequently because you're following news and trends. But if you're someone like me in the educational industry, you know, posting once every 48 hours is a good strategy if you can maintain that. Now, I went through and I counted all of my videos, and it looked like I uploaded 50 videos in the course of this time period. So you can see here, in the beginning, I uploaded a ton of videos, a lot of videos. Seven videos, six videos, four videos. And then you can see me kind of like Peter out here. I got, like, wicked overwhelmed with all the content I was doing. You know, I had life. I have another business I run. I run a music school. So I had a lot of things going on, and life kind of hit me hard. And I was really, really burnt out after, like, pumping out all of these videos. And you can see it reflected here in the data. I kind of slacked off a bit. And you can see my channel. I mean, it's growing a little bit, but it kind of really flatlined until something really, really cool happened. So fast forward a little bit. You'll see here. All of a sudden, in November, my views skyrocketed. One of my videos got picked up by the YouTube algorithm and. And it started showing it to more and more people, and those people started liking it. And you can see from this point on, when I noticed that that was happening, I was like, I need to be more consistent with my YouTube channel. You can see here a couple of videos here, three videos too. But you don't. You don't see any sevens. I see a four, I see a three. Now, what does consistent mean? How many videos should you be uploading to your YouTube channel? I said earlier, if you're running something like a news channel, an entertainment channel or something that that goes around tre topics, you might have to post more frequently. But if anything, this data shows you you don't have to post to YouTube every day. I know there's a lot of people who are like, I'm going to do a 30 day challenge and get as many of those videos out there as possible. That's great if you want to do that because you learn a lot from posting a lot of videos on to YouTube. I got way more comfortable. You know, probably after 30, 40 videos my personality started coming out. So I highly recommend to any content creator, especially in the beginning, if you can try to stick to a schedule of at least releasing one video a week, that's going to get you to that 50 video mark by the end of the year. Don't just post videos to post videos. You want to make sure that the content you're posting is in line with your audience. So I just want to take you over to a good friend of mine, John, who's another guitar teacher out there. And John's been working really hard on his channel. Him and I are good friends and we chitchat, but I just want to show you. So in the last 30 days I've posted eight videos. I post two videos a week. John has done 29 videos over the last month. Now, in the long term, is John going to benefit from this once his channel starts taking on. Absolutely. But you can see the difference in subscribers. John right now has about 27,000 subscribers. Now I have about 125,000 subscribers as the making of this video. And you can see that even though John is posting almost every single day to his channel, I'm getting a lot more subscribers and a lot more views by being a little bit more intentional with my content. So I might not be busting out as many pieces of content, but I'm really focusing in on the pieces of content that I do release. I'm making sure that, that they're for my audience and that they really resonate with what they want. It's much better to post less frequently and have a high quality video. Now I'm not talking studio quality like this where you have a really nice camera, really nice lighting. You don't need that to be successful on YouTube. You can do just fine with just your phone. So don't worry about, I'm not talking about that as quality. I'm talking about making sure that the content is quality, that it resonates with your audience. Because that's when I started seeing real growth with my YouTube channel. When I realized when that video took off, I said, wow, this is what my audience wants. And it for the first time, I actually looked at my YouTube analytics and I started wondering why people were liking and watching the content they wanted to watch. And I went through my videos and I said, these are the most popular videos on my channel right now. Out of these 50, 60 videos that I've released, I'm going to make more videos just like these and see how my audience responds to it. And when I started catering my content very specifically to a very specific audience, that's when I saw my YouTube channel really taking off. And not only did my views increase, but my watch time increased and my watch time retention, how long people were staying on my videos increased. So you can see knowing what your audience wants is super important. And delivering on that is way more important than posting to YouTube every day. As your channel grows, I could probably go down to posting once every other week or once a month and not have a big effect on my channel. There's some YouTubers out there who do super high quality content. They post one video a month and a half and they get millions of views every single time they post a video because their subscribers know that that content is going to be absolutely amazing. Now that you know how frequently to post on YouTube, an important factor you'll want to know is exactly what time, what day should you be posting your videos for your specific audience. YouTube has a really cool feature in their analytics. If you guys want to click on that video over there, I'll show you exactly the best time to post to YouTube for your audience.
