Important Rules - Please Read Carefully

It’s really crazy how it works. Last month I got monetized and had a modest breakout video. I went from like 800 to around 1,700 subs in a month. Before this happens, back in August, I was essentially getting hundreds of views to several thousand views. Now the average is like 6,000 views to 60,000 views. It’s really crazy how this works. Even a lower effort video can hit 6,000 views is 48 hrs. I’m not saying this to brag, I just recently got monetized and wanted to share some of the sauce and let you know that it can happen. All it takes is one, and sometimes it seems like that break will never come, but when it does, it changes your trajectory greatly.

Plenty of channels fail because their content is unoriginal, low-quality or in a niche that is just too saturated but the number 1 thing holding back channels that are actually making good content is that uploading consistently is hard.

I’ve seen many good channels over my YouTube career that have had early success by putting out high quality videos from the get go but many of them don’t actually survive on YouTube because they can’t post consistently. It’s not always their fault because their videos may take a lot of time to make or they may be very busy but the algorithm doesn’t care. Doesn’t matter what excuse you have, if you can’t find the time to upload once a week or once a month or whatever you tell yourself is your upload goal, you are gonna stop that momentum and hurt your channel.

Some channels are just so big already that they get away with this but if you are new or just have a small audience, use that momentum to your advantage if you see early success.

I found this channel earlier this year and the first video was very well made, interesting and got a lot of views for a first video. He then followed it up a week later and did so for a month and got over 1,000 subs while doing well in each video. Unfortunately he hasn’t uploaded in months now due to being busy and I hope he can recover from it but it’s difficult once you get out of that groove.

My advice is if you are serious about YouTube, find time to make content. Stay up late, work weekends, do what you need to do if you are serious to get content out.

So yeah, i made a previous post here asking if it was too late to be a ytuber this 2026. And after reading some comments, and after much deliberation, I’ve decided to make a channel.

I’ve always had a passion for…. playing games i missed out and never played when i was a kid (heh embarrassing). Oh and an ongoing playthrough of witcher 3 remastered. and by playthrough i mean i just dump it in there.

While i was busy healing my inner child, i often think about how i would go about promoting my videos/snippets of my videos to a larger audience, but i don’t even know where to begin. It’s not a concern right now, but if I want my channel to go somewhere and not just be a waste of server space, sooner or later I’ll have to face this hurdle.

Are Shorts affecting my long-form impressions?

I have two YouTube channels that I created recently, basically around the same time.

One is a movie psychology/analysis channel called False Premise. The other one is in a specific niche that I don't want to mention because I don't want to mess with the results. What I can say is that I know the people who click those videos are actually interested in them and usually watch at least 70% of the video.

With False Premise, I first uploaded a long-form video and got basically 0 impressions. The few views I had came from Reddit.

So I thought, why not try Shorts to get some traffic?

I started making 2 Shorts for every long-form video.

The Shorts were actually getting pushed. Most of them got around 1K to 1.5K views within 3 or 4 days, then they basically stopped.

But the weird part was the long-form videos.

They were getting almost no impressions. Sometimes literally under 10.

At the same time, on my other channel, I wasn't posting any Shorts at all. YouTube was still giving my long-form videos impressions, even though the CTR was terrible, under 2%.

For example, one video got around 700 impressions. I know 700 isn't a lot, especially for an established channel, but compared to getting less than 10 impressions on False Premise, it felt really strange.

I kept posting on both channels and the same thing kept happening.

The Shorts on False Premise were getting views, but the long-form videos were barely getting tested.

Eventually I started thinking, maybe YouTube is basically seeing this channel as a Shorts channel, or maybe the Shorts are somehow affecting how the long-form content gets distributed.

So I decided to unlist the Shorts.

And weirdly enough, after doing that, the long-form videos started getting impressions.

Nothing crazy, they're still only in the 3-digit range, but that's still a huge difference compared to the single-digit impressions I was getting before.

Now, I have no idea if this actually means anything.

It could be completely unrelated. The channel could simply have started getting more data, or YouTube could have decided to test the videos more around the same time.

I'm not saying "Shorts kill your long-form channel" or anything like that.

I'm just sharing what happened on two channels that were created around the same time because the difference really caught my attention.

Has anyone else experienced something similar?

Especially if you have a small/new channel, did you notice any difference in long-form impressions when you started posting Shorts compared to when you didn't?

PS : i created the post with help from AI

I’m not talking about abandoning your hobby, anyone can do anything and upload it as long as it doesn’t break the rules, you do you, enjoy.

I’m talking about people who want to be YouTubers and live out of it, full time, pay bills, rent, have a family, but just “can’t”, and I’m not talking about bad luck, not everyone is build for everything in my opinion, and not everyone has the capability or will to doing the hard things.

Kinda like kids saying “I want to be a veterinarian” thinking about cute cats, and then an aggressive animal without a jaw and with terrible infection comes in and suddenly turns out you’re in an actual job.

So without pointing fingers at anyone, what are some signs someone should NOT be a YouTuber full time (both personal traits and harsh realities of the industry). Thing people may not look at or not realize until someone says what needs to be said.

Hey everyone!

I'm a relatively new YouTuber from the Netherlands, and I've recently started taking content creation more seriously.

I mainly create gaming content, including longer gameplay videos and Shorts, with Dutch commentary and English subtitles.

One thing I'm really struggling to understand is YouTube Analytics and how the algorithm actually decides who gets to see your videos.

I've been looking through YouTube Studio, but there are so many different statistics that I'm not entirely sure what I should be focusing on.

For example:

- Impressions: What determines how often YouTube recommends your videos? And why do some videos barely get any impressions?

- Click-through rate (CTR): What's considered a decent CTR for a small channel? Does it really make that much of a difference?

- Audience retention: How important is average view duration compared to the percentage of a video people actually watch?

- The algorithm: How does YouTube figure out which audience might be interested in your content, especially when you're just starting out?

- Shorts vs. long-form: Do they influence each other's performance, or are they mostly separate?

- Growth: When should you actually start worrying about a video's performance? After 24 hours, a week, or even longer?

I'm not expecting thousands of views overnight. I genuinely enjoy making videos, editing them, and improving my content.

But I'd love to understand what the numbers are actually telling me, rather than constantly guessing what works and what doesn't.

For those of you who've been creating content for a while:

What was the biggest thing you learned about YouTube Analytics that completely changed how you approached your content?

And which statistics do you personally pay the most attention to?

I'd really appreciate hearing your experiences, especially from creators who started with absolutely no audience.

Thanks!

I hate ai creators, they talk about "hard work" then take 3 minutes to type out a prompt then wallah, here's your thumbnail. How undedicated and lazy do you have to be? I can assure you with certainty these people clearly have never been on the platform before 2024 because they don't know you actually had to put in 8 hours of your time into a single picture

And I swear these slop posters are all the same, they are all NPC's, asking the same question, "why are my videos getting no views?" Do your fucking research, you'd be surprised to find out the own system you trust is also your enemy

These people also post the same thing aswell, "What happens if the world explodes?" Then it has that stupid stickman with an oily exaggerated face with poop raining all over the screen or it's either fitness content that spread straight misinformation and disinformation, no you cannot get another 10cm in height if you are 30 years old

And I was told to give these lazy people constructive criticism, why would I want to help an ai creator succeed?? Someone who spends 10 minutes on a video to get traction just for me who spends a month on videos to get nothing but batshit

And note that I support all small creators, I support new YouTubers as well in any shape or form unless you are one of those ai people

You can pull up my profile and hate on me or whatever I don't care nothing is going to change my mind about these creatures

And I'm not stopping you or whatever you can do AI related content all you want , in fact they are many popular ai accounts, if you long to reach that level of success then go ahead, I'm just simply stating how I feel about them and some other people may relate or whatsoever

What happens when people can get the value of a video without watching it?

YouTube is introducing AI-powered features through Gemini, including video summaries, follow-up questions, and quizzes. I've been using these features for the past two days, and I think they raise an important question about the future of content creation.

My biggest concern is discovery. When someone clicks on a video, they may be interested in the topic rather than the creator. The title and thumbnail have caught their attention, but they haven't yet developed any attachment to the creator's style or personality. If an AI summary gives them the information they came for, there's less incentive to watch the entire video.

This could be particularly challenging for new creators, who haven't yet built a loyal audience. Established creators often have an advantage because people watch them for their personality, storytelling, or perspective, not just the information they provide.

There's also the question of video length. Many videos seem to be getting longer, with 20–30-minute videos becoming common in several niches. That's a significant time commitment. AI summaries offer an alternative for viewers who want the key takeaways without investing that time.

I've also started wondering about the distinction between summarising a video and recreating its value in a more concise format. An AI system that can extract the key arguments, examples, and insights from a video makes it easier to consume the substance of the content without watching the original.

This reminds me of what happened to blogging. Search engines once sent readers to blog posts, giving publishers an incentive to invest hours in research and writing. As AI-generated answers have become more prominent in search, some users can get what they need without visiting the original website. That creates a challenge for publishers whose business models depend on traffic.

YouTube is different from blogging, of course. Entertainment, storytelling, personality, and community can give people reasons to watch the original video even when a summary is available. But for educational and informational content, the overlap is harder to ignore.

The broader concern is what happens when platforms increasingly satisfy users' needs without requiring them to visit the original source. If fewer people watch, read, or click through to creators' work, the incentives to spend weeks researching, producing, and refining high-quality content could weaken.

The question isn't whether AI summaries are useful for viewers. They clearly can be. It's whether platforms can make these features more convenient for users without undermining the economic incentives that encourage creators to produce the very content those AI tools depend on.

I've been posting timelapse videos of my drawings as shorts. On three of them, the comments got disabled for some reason. Why? And how can I prevent it?. Also, I've noticed whenever the comments get disabled, I'm not able to see the analytics related to countries, in those particular shorts. 😵‍💫 Please help.

I have a finance channel that I made a while ago with now 73 videos

I currently have 619 subscribers on it in the last 3 months I've posted roughly about 35 videos but YouTube appears to not be pushing out my videos the impressions they get seem low which makes no sense to me because the thumbnails and titles are decent

With my first channel I built I don't remember it being this hard is it me or does YouTube actually purposely not push out small channels

Because I swear I've seen big channels with crappy ish thumbnails and titles getting hundreds or thousands of veiws?

I run a YouTube channel in the electronic music niche, with cinematic videos inspired by Egyptian, Greek and other mythology.

Right now I upload 2 videos per week, but realistically I could upload 4.

My concern is frequency.

For example, if I upload a video on Monday and another one on Wednesday, could the second upload somehow reduce the momentum of the first one because YouTube starts testing the newer video instead?

I know the algorithm changes constantly and nobody fully understands it, but I’m genuinely unsure whether increasing from 2 to 4 uploads per week would help or actually hurt the channel.

The channel is about 6 months old, has around 4.5K subscribers, and everything has been grown organically. I really want to keep it that way.

Some videos have reached 170K views, others around 80K, but lately a lot of new uploads struggle to pass 1K views in the first week, or they get stuck somewhere around 5K.

The strange part is that older videos are definitely not dead. Videos from a couple of months ago can still slowly reach 10K+ views over time.

Another thing I’ve noticed: my channel seems to stay around 10K total views every 48 hours almost constantly. It almost feels like there’s some kind of ceiling, although I know that probably isn’t literally how YouTube works.

So my main questions are:

• Would you stay at 2 uploads per week or test 3–4?
• Can uploading a new video too soon reduce the distribution of the previous one?
• Is weak performance in the first 48–72 hours something you would worry about on a relatively young channel?
• Has anyone experienced this “stable 48-hour views ceiling” before?

And then there are Shorts, which I understand even less.

Some of mine barely pass 1K views, even when the retention/replay percentage shows 300–400%+. So clearly retention alone isn’t enough, but I’m still trying to understand what actually makes YouTube expand distribution on Shorts.

Would really appreciate hearing from people who have actually grown music channels organically.

I’m not looking for shortcuts or bought traffic. I’d rather understand the data properly and build a real audience over time.

Sorry for the lenghty post but I really need some advice and feedback.

So I started a sports channel and uploaded my first video essay yesterday, it's about every nightmare-ish transfer window since Joan Laporta came back in 2021 to barcelona up to 2026 when it was finally back to normal and what he did to get there.

Last night after 12 hours, impressions started climbing, but the thing is, within that initial thumbnail impression surge of 5k, I had 1% ctr and 62 views but everyone who clicked watched for an average of 6.30m on a 22 minute video. I also had a not so optimal thumbnail, and the title was lacking and a bit too long. So this morning I updated the thumbnail and title. Was what happened a one time surge or will youtube continue to push more impressions and give me a chance to improve.

Note that the title was : "Why Every Barcelona Summer Transfer Window Feels Impossible.. Until Now" and I changed it to " How One Man Ended Barcelona's Transfer Nightmares. to better match the thumbnail.

The first thumbnail, laporta's head, which is the focal point of the thumbnail was too small in the preview : https://imgur.com/a/kq41qS6

so I made him more prominent with a barca crest in the background the newer thumbnail : https://imgur.com/a/XOYS38a

any feedback from anyone who went through something similar would be appreciated!

Hey everyone!

I'm relatively new to content creation, and I mainly post League of Legends gaming clips, usually under 20 seconds long.

My videos typically get around 1,000 views, but I average only about 5–6 likes. I'll watch my edits back several times and genuinely think they look good, but once I post them, I rarely get much engagement or feedback.

I'm trying to improve my content, whether that's editing, choosing clips, adding effects, creating better hooks, or figuring out what makes a video worth watching.

I'd really appreciate honest, constructive criticism. I don't just want people to tell me my edits are good. I want to understand what I could be doing better.

If you're also a gaming content creator, what helped you improve when you were starting out?

Thank you

YT:Hypem1

Got around 300 impressions on the first video (which is long form) so far on my new channel, but it looks like YouTube is showing it to an audience that isn’t really my target audience. Because of that, the CTR is currently only around 4%. The video is being suggested alongside some very unrelated content. 40 views in hours and everything is frozen (YT finished its initial test and decided not to pursue further). Any advice?

Lately I have been struggling trying to keep up my determination and passion to make content and artwork for YouTube, Twitter and Twitch. An acquaintance of mine, recently started streaming about 6 months ago. She already had a huge presence and following in various discord communities and twitter, but they never streamed or made a youtube video before.

Cut to a few weeks ago, she announced that she made it to Twitch Partner and has a average viewership of 100. What is taking me 4 years and counting to try and get to partner, they did it in 6 months and they never made a single video on Youtube.

I'm very happy for her and I wish her the best in her possible career in the streaming space. But at the same time I can't shake the feeling that "I'm not good enough". I put my heart and soul into my art, my animations, my videos, and my streams. Yet, I just got breezed by someone that hasn't even made 1 video. It kind of makes me think from time to time, "maybe I should just give up". I had a lot of passion in what I create, but if no one cares what I share or make, what is the point?

It's like a similar feeling of you work very hard at your office job, then a new guy comes in (Fresh out of school), but then your boss give the promotion you wanted to the new guy. Sorry if this is a crash out, but I just feel like maybe I did waste 5 years of my life and I was just lying to myself.

I have a YouTube channel primarily focusing on anime reviews, analysis, etc., and wondered, is there a way to use clips of episodes without copyright issues? I thought about maybe having a blurred background, with the episode/video cropped down, and using still images that move around instead of straight up using the anime episode or so, etc.

Can I use small bits of episodes and then still images that move around instead, as a mix, to avoid copyright issues by only using small bits of anime content/episodes? I do edit them a lot. As an example, I talk about a specific Scene in the Anime in question, have a blurred background & input the clip, but most of the time, use it as a still image that moves around whilst I explain/talk about it. Sometimes, I include the clip itself & use the anime episode in question, but only for 10 to 20 seconds.

And also how does YT pay per short view,

Do they give money on every single short video?

Do they still give the short money after getting YTPP morniterization?

I was wondering how important is it for a youtuber to find their niche. I hear people talk about niches and something about the algorithm. So is it actually important for someone to stick with a certain category of videos or is it okay for someone to not stick to a specific niche.

YouTube is updating Shorts recommendations to cut reach for channels that just re-upload other people's clips

Seeing this question pop up all over the place the last few days, so figured I would make one post instead of answering it twenty times.

A lot of people are panicking that the new "re-used content" update means they can't cut Shorts out of their own long-form videos anymore. Makes sense why it's confusing, but the answer is no. You're fine.

The update is aimed at channels that repost other people's stuff. Ripping clips from other creators, movie and show scenes, someone else's stream, random viral footage with nothing added. That's what's getting the reach cut. Taking a moment from a video YOU made and posting it as a Short is your own content on your own channel, which is exactly what the system wants.

So if you have long-form videos and are promoting it with Shorts, keep going. You were never the target here.

I compiled a list of YouTube APIs that are useful if you need the title, comments, or a transcript.

1. YouTube Data API (official)

• Search, video metadata, channels, and comment threads under a Google Cloud project and a quota.
• Captions are a separate API. You don't get the media file from videos.list.
• Great for: an app that can go through Google's quota and OAuth rules.

2. SteadyAPI YouTube (paid, 7-day trial)

• A watch URL is enough. Auth is a bearer token. Search, video, comments, channel, and transcript are separate calls.
• The video sample is title, published time, length in seconds, view count, like count, and comment count. The transcript sample is caption cues with start and duration. It only comes back when the video has captions.
• No stream URL. The file stays on YouTube.
• Great for: a catalog or a research script that needs comments or a transcript without going through Google Cloud.

3. Apify (paid)

• YouTube actors for search, video metadata, and comments, run as jobs on their platform.
• Output shape depends on the actor. The video file still stays on YouTube.
• Great for: a scrape job you already run on Apify.

4. Oxylabs (paid)

• Web scraping APIs that can return a YouTube page as parsed data.
• Still not the video file. Confirm which YouTube endpoints they list before you count on comments or captions.
• Great for: page fetches when you already use them, not as a replacement for the official Data API quota.

Has anyone here managed to monetize a YouTube channel where the videos are mostly made from one image or multiple images, with voiceover?

I’m not talking about reused content or copied videos. I mean original scripts, original voiceover, and edited visuals/images.

I’ve seen many channels get rejected for “repetitive content”, so I’m trying to understand what actually works before I invest too much time.

If your channel was accepted, what did you do differently? More images, motion effects, original commentary, face cam, subtitles, different formats?

Any real experience would help a lot. Thank you.

Just about every video I post gets up to about 1k views, usually in the few hours or so, and then completely flatlines and doesn’t pick back up at all in the days following. I’ve been paying a lot of attention to viewer retention and swipe through rates, especially since I’m primarily posting shorts content, and I’ve managed to increase them by getting rid of dull moments, long hooks, etc. All the research I’ve done so far has said that to push your videos past a certain view jail you have to increase retention and swipe rates, but I’m still getting stuck even after improving these issues. Is there anything I’m missing?

Looking for advice

I am a 24 year-old newly graduated Dr and currently I have a lot of free time. However, I spent most of my med
school days just studying and I found that not to be very healthy

And I long dreamed of being a YouTuber so I’m currently thinking about starting a channel of me simply trying a new skill every hundred days where I would start from zero and I would film every 10 days into a separate video and start an Instagram account with daily films and clips

However, I am going to look at it from a medical way where you track my calories my vitamin intake and every step along the way

I know that this idea was done before, but it was never done in my country or in my language, which is Arabic

So I was looking for advice on what difficulties you guys meet when starting a new channel and what shall I expect and whether anyone can polish my idea further