You might not care about the YouTube Algorithm because you might think that it doesn’t affect you. This couldn’t be farther from the truth if you watch anything on YouTube!
YouTube chooses which videos get shown to a creators subscribers and on Home Page based on a variety of metrics. You are either a creator who is trying to figure out how to get your videos seen by potential viewers or a viewer who is being force fed the same regurgitated crap that YouTube’s Algorithm is feeding you.
This video performed incredibly well, beating out the last 10 videos in views instantly! Why? Because we talked about “Girls walking around naked”.
Naked is the important part because apparently a lot of people search for videos with the term “Naked” in them on YouTube (hate to break it to you but if you are looking for that on YouTube, you are on the wrong platform. There are a few other websites that will yield what you are looking for).
Suddenly all our viewers were finding our channel by searching the term “Naked” and we received a ton of views! This was great because it was a crossover episode with our friends from Bums on a Boat, the more views we received, the greater the number of viewers that would find their channel! Seems like a Win-Win situation.
YouTube even congratulated us for making a video with an interesting thumbnail and title, along with really good watch time. Yay! Watch time is always really high on our episodes because they are captivating, and no matter how many views they get, the watch time remains high. The problem is that the video simply isn’t shown if it doesn’t have certain “catchy” aspects to it.
Our next episode was performing pitifully! It started off ranking 7th of our last 10 videos published and YouTube sent us a kind little reminder saying something along the lines of “fewer viewers are choosing to watch this so it will show up less in recommendations”. In other words, it didn’t contain the word “Naked” in the title so the video was not being shown to viewers and therefore underperforming.
We changed the title and in under an hour it had climbed the ranks to the position of 2 of 10!
The YouTube Algorithm will either showcase or bury your videos and you have no direct control on what it does. All you can do as a creator is try to cater towards what the Algorithm likes so that you can grow as a channel.
How does this affect you as a viewer? All your favorite creators are forced to make clickbait crap to try and keep their channel and their livelihood working for them. We don’t have another job that buys food, we live directly off the earnings from our videos. If the video does poorly, we make less money and if we don’t make enough we would have to stop sailing to work a normal job! As you can see, YouTube’s Algorithm has us by the throat and we are stuck between a rock and a hard place!
As you know, we are not the type to just accept hardship and not find a way to improve the situation! We are sailors and we are very good at finding solutions to our problems.
Our solution to the problem is to stop hoping that YouTube will notify our subscribers and to make a way to notify you guys directly! I have created a list serve (or e-mail list) that you can sign up on and when we publish a video, you will be notified directly by us. There is no spam, there is no junk, just a direct communication from me to you letting you know when we have a new episode or video out.
The goal is to build the list serve up to the point where it rivals the YouTube subscriber number so that we no longer need to rely on YouTube to notify our viewers of a new video and we can put an end to the constant clickbait titles just to get YouTube to notify our viewers of our episodes.
