YouTube has become one of stable income sources. A lot of people have opted it as a business and a career. In this post, I am sharing some of my thoughts based on more than a decade-long experience of mine with the video sharing platform.
Starting with zero views and zero subscribers, the popularity depends on how YouTube treats your channel. YouTube says that, it follows the viewer’s trend. If people are watching often and longer, YouTube tends to recommend the videos. YouTube treats the channel according to their popularity. One of the metrics of popularity is the subscriber count. YouTube has set public and not-so-public milestones based on subscriber counts.
There are algorithmic tweaks at every milestones. The tweaks are however top secret and we can only guess according to the experience and those experiences might be different for different users because, YouTube constantly tweaks it according to their research and conclusions.
The number one video-sharing platform in the world has over two billion logged-in monthly visitors globally and generates billions of hours of video views every day. So, it is a huge platform to understand.
YouTube milestones:
First milestone is the first 100 YouTube Subscribers. This milestone unlocks new channel feature unlocks — is the custom URL. The URL feature is available for all channels with 100 subscribers that are 30 days or older with a profile picture and a banner image.
Custom URL helps in shortening long URL to a short one. In addition, you can brand the url according to you name or service.
Right after reaching the first milestone, videos get a little more impression – called “an algorithmic bump up” increases total impressions means better option for impressing the potential viewers with clickable thumbnails and quality videos.
Hence, milestones help in the likelihood of the video going viral.
Reaching the 100K milestone experience however was not that positive in my case. In both Anand Nepal Channel and Nepali Folk Tales, YouTube stopped promoting the video as before right after reaching the milestone. The views decreased by 4 time and so did the subscriber addition. Now, after 3 to 3.5 months, things seem to be going in the right direction.
100K effect: Sudden drop in impression despite the viewership. Continues for 3 months and it slowly recovered after that.
