3 lessons about Youtube
That I learned the hard way
Hey there, beautiful! 😳 Welcome to the next issue of Gamedev Notes!
As I’m working on my game “Hollow Survivors”, I’m trying to simultaneously grow my Youtube channel. Here are 3 interesting things I learned over the past month:
1. Long intros hurt watch time.
Anything other than 5 - 15 seconds of a concise introduction seems to be a bad idea on Youtube. B-rolls, titles - people don’t care, they want to watch the video. In hindsight, it’s kinda obvious (nobody likes to wait, duh) but I had to learn it the hard way.
After I posted my latest video, the views quickly dropped. After looking at the analytics, one statistic stuck out like a sore thumb:
The culprit - you guessed it - long intro. I experimented with removing parts of it in the Youtube editor (where you can edit your videos after you published them). I removed 7 seconds. Then 15 seconds. And finally, all of it. And soon after I did that viewer retention jumped up by 10% and the views skyrocketed:
The visibility boost didn’t last long though - the video wasn’t good enough, I guess. Important lesson nonetheless.
2. Promoting my videos on Reddit is a mistake.
Update: This is probably not true. According to people on the r/NewTubers subreddit youtube takes traffic source into consideration when measuring retention.
When I uploaded my videos, I always posted to Reddit, Discord, Twitter, etc. It seemed like a good idea at first, but it actually turned out to be a mistake.
People browsing Reddit are usually not in the mood to watch long videos (or maybe they’re just not my target audience). A Reddit user’s average view duration of my latest video is 1:04 minutes (compared to 3:51 of an average Youtube viewer).
The Youtube Algorithm takes average view duration into consideration when deciding if the video is worth promoting or not. So even though I would get ~200 more views short term, I think I’m losing credibility in the eyes of the Algorithm as it thinks the video is worse than it actually is.
Take this with a grain of salt though, I don’t know how the Algorithm actually works. Maybe it differentiates between internal and external traffic in its calculations. But maybe not. I decided to err on the side of caution and not post on Reddit when my new videos are out. At least not immediately.
3. My click-through rate is not as good as I thought.
When I post a video, my click-through rate peaks at about 8% and quickly falls down to 6%. From there, it steadily declines over time. It’s very hard to find data to compare to when it comes to CTR and for a long time I thought it was a very decent result. Recently though, I was watching Reece Geofroy’s devlog where he briefly showed his CTR data. Here it is:
His CTR is a staggering 10.4%. And this is data from 14 days, so his peak must have been even higher.
That’s all I have for today.
I’ll be dropping a new video this Sunday. It will be fully voice-acted as well, so keep your eyes peeled and hit that bell button on my channel if you haven’t already!
Have a great day!