How DELETING YouTube videos could grow your channel

[00:02] along with 100 others because i believe they were stopping me from getting more here all about it this is the story of my quest to get youtube to suggest my videos more and what the result of this experiment was six months later and how

[00:17] one thing i spoke about in that video turned out to be the most influential factor in increasing my home page views by 7 67 what i did work so by the end of this video you can go and make changes to

[00:31] your own channel and start forcing youtube to suggest you more you can do and watch the previous video here's morgan freeman to explain why i removed all of those old videos in the first place ed unlisted all those videos

[00:45] because he felt his most popular videos didn't have much to do with his niche and were bringing in new viewers who would never click on his other content thus damaging his click-through rates but was that the right thing to do and

[00:58] thing you'll notice there's this big old drop-off in views and then nothing really happened for a while until my home page views went bonkers but did unlisting the videos cause this well yes well no okay it's a little bit more

[01:12] videos i actually made some pretty big changes to my strategy and my content and those were the real catalysts so i'll explain how they all work together and then you'll understand so the first big change i made was to stop targeting

[01:25] click-through rate of my existing videos i could see that video titles designed for search nearly always had diabolical click-through rates when displayed on the home page and that would kill every chance i had of getting suggested more

[01:38] out the window for how i wrote titles said goodbye to keywords and just click the thing is when you're after views on the home page you actually need to be the most interesting thing on the page to your viewer because you compete

[01:52] so there's quite a few different ways to do this but one really effective way is to create a title that plants a question in your potential viewers mind so that when they see your video they think how or why or what or just wonder what

[02:06] happens actually what that means is sometimes you can't even let people know what a video is going to be about in the title so let me give you an example this video here is about sound design now i know based on data any video i make with

[02:18] it's not a word that works for my avatars so by using this method on a most youtubers ignore this but they really shouldn't and it was the best performing video i'd ever made in the first 24 hours and what's crazy was the

[02:32] comments on that video were like wow why don't more people talk about this and in truth they do all the time it's just not everyone finds that topic interesting from a clickability point of view but actually when they do watch that kind of

[02:45] new way of thinking about titles my click-through rate shot up and it didn't views come in thing is thinking like that was only a part of what caused the uplift the next thing i did and without this the previous steps probably

[02:59] wouldn't have been as effective was this let's just pull up a clip where i talk actually a better metric to track how interest your subscribers are is the individual viewer figure that i mentioned earlier combined with this

[03:12] little number average views per viewer now average views per viewer is probably the metric i'm going to focus on more than anything else ever now so let me just explain what it is why it matters and how mastering this number will force

[03:24] youtube to suggest you more so average views per viewer is the amount of videos people watch on average on your channel in the time period that you select in information by going to a youtube studio and then clicking on advanced mode and

[03:37] then hitting the blue cross here and then selecting this for this example that number there is your average views per viewer in the time frame now you're right well it's gonna be different for everyone but think of it like this if

[03:51] you release four videos a month then in an ideal world this would be four at the very least if you release 12 videos a month like i did back in the day and it's only 1.4 like mine was then you really need to work on that because

[04:05] people just aren't coming back why is focusing on this number so powerful and number is high it pretty much means that you're doing a really good job coming up titles that your viewers are interested and care about it also means that your

[04:17] content quality is probably rocking too because people won't watch multiple importantly it means you're likely to be creating long session times on your does because this is a flipping weapon so this is the video that blew up on my

[04:32] channel and compared to videos i've been making around it it had a really low retention and click-through rate in the first 24 hours of its life yeah it still well i'm gonna take you through the clues and show you so this figure here

[04:46] is the first clue end screen elements clicked it was just so much higher than my channel average and actually when i looked nearly every video i made with the new strategy was the same they all had really high end screen click

[05:00] percentages compared to older content and then the comments gave the next clue thing that when people discovered the channel they were binging on the content which was great thanks guys and then the final clue was this when people clicked

[05:14] on my end screens i found that the retention from end screens as a traffic source was always really high 80 sometimes and the result was this the video that blew up started long session times on my channel and then it got

[05:27] pushed more and more by youtube on the home page because it could see it was doing a great job of starting these long session times and keeping people on the to do but not only that the next video in the series that the end screen was

[05:40] pointing to that got clicked on quite a lot gave youtube a sign to then push that video more on the home page too and then this just went down the chain and multiple videos started to get traction at the same time these 14 videos work

[05:52] all because it looks for viewing patterns so you need to not just get a good click-through rate and retention on one video but you need to make sure your viewers are all clicking on the next because it will promote the first video

[06:05] more and the second one that everyone's clicking on too and if you can do that in a giant chain of videos well yeah you saw what happened at one point the channel was picking up 2 000 subscribers a day which is just insane in this niche

[06:18] so the average views per viewer as a result went from 1.4 to 2.3 which actually i went from 12 videos a month to 3 to 4 so it's kind of relative and i'm always going to work on trying to

[06:30] your own channel well start thinking of your end screens and your viewer journeys as important as your titles and thumbnails your end screen is the only personally as to why they should watch another one of your videos to think

[06:44] would find most interesting after watching the current video and then such a great idea to click on the next one i got rid of having multiple options on my end screens and even remove the subscribe button too so that there was

[06:58] only one option there look i know this is complex but if i simplify it down it looks like this removing videos was the right thing to do for me because it helped me focus on who my viewers were and what they really cared about more

[07:11] suggesting stuff that isn't relevant to you guys but when it comes down to getting more views on the youtube homepage you also have to focus so much more on writing titles that appeal to people on a psychological level and then

[07:25] you need to produce content that doesn't just get good retention but actually once you've gotten there you've got to do everything that you can to convince them that the next video to watch is almost better more useful and more

[07:39] watched to start building your session times up but the thing is there were actually some pretty big mistakes i was also making before i changed my strategy them now none of this would have worked as well

[07:53] working for you then you need to watch this video next because these two videos combined are just going to make such a massive difference really bad about like teaching you stuff and then using it on you but how else am

[08:07] and then using it on you but how else am i going to do it