A few days ago, we wrote a post about YouTube and Their Crazy Algorithms. In this post we were talking about how YouTube must have been messing with our channel ranking because we had such drastic day-to-day variance in viewership. We were thinking that they might be running some kind of test to determine just how good our content is - is it worth ranking higher? Or does it need to be ranked lower?
At that time, this is what our latest analytics looked like.
Fast forward a few days and it seems like they finished their tests and determined that we should be ranked higher. Much higher. Here are our latest statistics.
Before starting this adventure and dipping our toes into the world of YouTube, we thought our growth would come slowly for quite some time until we got lucky one day and had a post go viral. Things didn't exactly work like that.
We've been promoting our channel significantly in quite a few different ways. At first, we were celebrating each additional subscriber since they were coming in pretty slowly. Then, we were really excited to get to the point where we were gaining about 20 subscribers each day. Over the past couple days (after YouTube started ranking us much higher) we've been gaining 50-100 each day.
We haven't yet had any videos go viral, but we do have one that's on its way to getting a lot of views. This video about our movie theater experience was posted just 5 days ago and it's already our most-popular video. The only one we have with more than 3,000 views.
We find it kind of funny, and slightly annoying, that this is our most popular video. We didn't think it was a very good video, it's definitely not our favorite, and we felt like we just threw it together. At least it felt that way compared to the amount of work that goes into most of the videos.
That's probably just how things go in the world of YouTube. You put your blood, sweat, and tears into a video that goes nowhere, and one that didn't take nearly as much effort is the one that goes viral.