Based on my experience with creating YouTube contents, here is how I determine what type of content to produce next. I use YouTube analytics to understand what the viewers are watching and how the channel is working. Based on the data feedback I design the contents.

How to do a quick channel check-in by using the built-in analytics to figure out how the channel is growing and then how to correctly use the data for making right decisions in right time. This will help in growing the audience in the channel.

For this simple task, you don’t need to be an expert in data analysis. Also, you don’t need to know the inside of YouTube’s complicated algorithms to be successful on YouTube. The data YouTube provides is very detailed and there is a huge amount information. It doesn’t make sense to a lot of people and that is okay. Don’t worry if you find the data overwhelming and confusing because, you don’t need everything that is shown.

Here are 4 easy steps to make the maximum use of analytics and interpret the data and the trends so that you can confidently make decisions.

STEP 1: Zoom Out: See the forest (Long term data)

This is the first step in looking at your data – look the data for the past 365 days or the lifetime. For example in the following data of the Views data of the last 365 days.

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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.

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