YouTube Creator Day: Some Lessons Learned

I attended my first Creator Day on Thursday this week, and I wanted to share some of the lessons that I so far haven’t picked from other YouTube sources (YouTube Help, the Creator Academy, etc.)

1. Audience retention is key. If someone watches a longer amount of time, they’re more inclined to keep watching. So while it doesn’t benefit YouTube in the short term (in minutes), it benefits them in the long term. So a ten-minute watch time is better than a three-minute watch time, but a longer video isn’t at all necessary. If you have shorter videos, find ways of keeping that viewer on your channel, and find the points where they tend to leave your videos (if it’s a few minutes in, which you can find in analytics reports) and add a call-to-action or a card to get them to something else that might interest them on your channel.

2. Livestreaming is huge, and it can bring a tremendous amount of watch time in a small amount of time. WHAT DOES THAT MEAN??!!? Okay, so Livestreams, being events that end (as opposed to videos that stay up forever….though the stream recording goes up afterward if you want) tend to bring more of your subscribers right away. The more people who watch your videos (the more watch time, I should say, not views, but how long they watch) right after you go live adds value to your channel. Plus, viewers, on average, stay 50% longer in a livestream than the same viewers in a video with similar content. So you can hook more people right away (which is good for the algorithm), they get engaged more (with chat), and they stay longer. Good for your channel, which is why they’re pushing it. The length of the stream is good for watch time, but a short stream that a lot of people go to right then is better for you than a mediocre-performing video that doesn’t gather views and engagement quickly.

3. Title and description are 100% most important for search. Titles should give searchable information in the first few words. Not because search doesn’t find things after that, but because people scrolling through search results only read the first 2-3 words in your title before moving away. Similarly, if you have searchable information in your descriptions (and you should!) put that in the first 1-3 lines of your description, as the rest won’t be seen by people who are searching, and they skip by it. So most important stuff on the left side of your titles, and on the top part of your descriptions.

4. While likes and dislikes are engagement, they are low on the scale of engagement in terms of the algorithm. YouTube uses likes and dislikes as a way for viewers to decide if a video is interesting to them. Often, videos with tons of dislikes are wildly popular, because people like to see controversial/dramatic stuff. But don’t stress about likes and dislikes, because they won’t affect your search results, except in a small way in terms of engagement. (I specifically asked this because people here have said they get bothered by dislikes, and I wanted the YouTube rep to give me some info I could bring back to you about it.)

5. You may hit it big quickly, but most channels over 50K start out small and grind away at it for years before hitting big milestones. We had a woman who has a 200K exercise channel as one of our guests, and she said that constant, regularly-scheduled uploads are THE most important thing that got her channel going…3 years after she started it. So DON’T GIVE UP.

I hope these lessons have been helpful to you. Remember, these days it takes more than just creating and uploading content. A smart, regular strategy and the ability to adapt as necessary are critical to success.

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