We've been working hard to grow our YouTube following for the last couple of months and over the course of the last week, we've come to find out that YouTube can make or break your channel based on how you rank in their algorithms.
One day, we'll have our best day ever. Then the very next day will be our worst in two weeks! YouTube is really screwing with our emotions as they've been messing with their algorithms.
This graph shows the performance of our YouTube channel over the past 40 days or so. You can see that one day recently, we had only 2,000 minutes watched and every day we've had wild swings in viewership reaching nearly 8,000 minutes.
We're convinced that these wild swings are due to YouTube's algorithms.
What motivation would YouTube have to do this?
We were trying to brainstorm why YouTube might be doing this to our channel. Ultimately, the goal of their website is to get as much traffic to their website as possible and to keep those people on YouTube as long as possible. Or, at least it would make sense to us if that's what they're trying to do.
Are they testing out how many people we're sending to YouTube?
Are they seeing how many clicks we get when we rank higher and lower in the search results?
Are they seeing how many minutes people watch when YouTube recommends our videos versus when they're not recommending them as much?
Are they running tests to somehow determine just how good our content is?
I think they're doing the latter and running some kind of test. I think that their algorithms have told them that our channel puts out good content and now they're running tests to see just how high they should rank us.
Do you have a YouTube channel? Have you experienced wild swings in your viewership?
We've seen swings in our viewership before but it has never been anything close to this extreme!
If you have a YouTube channel with active followers, you know that your minutes watched spike every time you upload a video. However, since we're uploading new videos every day, those spikes shouldn't matter too much when it comes to the variations in minutes watched each day.
If we're right about them running tests to see just how good our channel is, I sure hope we pass those tests. We're checking our stats every day and are anxious to see where things go from here.
Until then, we'll continue promoting our channel in any way that we can, and we'll see what happens. I hope you found this post at least somewhat interesting. It's one of those things that's very intriguing for us but might seem completely uninteresting to an outsider.