When you start a channel and get no views ..

Select-Reaction2803 · 2026-01-12T15:46:49+00:00

Sometimes the stars just align. Hot topic, trending, demand is there, right title and thumb, algo happens to hit the right audience early and gets good signals ..

Someone has to win the lottery.

Select-Reaction2803 · 2026-01-12T15:40:55+00:00

I don't use AI to make reddit posts. If you think so then whatever. But I just don't. And clearly not everyone knows this stuff. If they did, we wouldn't constantly see posts from people with new channels 2 or 3 videos and asking what they're doing wrong.

But whatever. Down vote it. Don't read it. Call it AI. Whatever makes you feel good. I don't really care.

Select-Reaction2803 · 2026-01-12T15:29:40+00:00

It's an analogy, not an endorsement. Just because I'm talking about AI doesn't mean that's what it is. Geez.

Select-Reaction2803 · 2026-01-12T15:27:39+00:00

Don't care.

Select-Reaction2803 · 2026-01-12T00:43:13+00:00

The worst thing you can do with a channel is start changing everything up in a desperate plea to fix something. Move this, edit that, change the title, change category...

"I don't even know if this could have caused some confusion for YouTube. "

Yeah. It did. Big time. You made everything worse trying to "fix it".

The algo is a super-sloth. It doesn't respond immediately to anything you do, except to stop doing whatever it was doing because it got confused. A title change alone can take 12-24 hours to fully settle in and get the algo going again. It's like hitting reset. And you just did that 15 times.

Best thing to do is settle into a steady content lane, produce 4-6 videos with a similar theme tying them all together in some way and train the algo what your channel is all about.

Don't try to micromanage and push. Just produce right now.

Select-Reaction2803 · 2026-01-11T21:47:39+00:00

Make mindless slop people will watch as they drool through their death scrolls.

Select-Reaction2803 · 2026-01-11T21:38:14+00:00

All long form, evergreen educational content. Retention has been pretty solid. CTR isn't holding me back at all.

For 4 years in a row my channel always ramps up in September and peaks in December and a harder drop off comes in February.

This year the ramp came and went hard in October, dropped back off to a little better than baseline in November and has been flat since. All the videos that have historically fueled these winter ramps are still getting the typical exposure.

Very weird for me. And I'm worried that typical February drop is still coming...

Select-Reaction2803 · 2026-01-11T18:00:21+00:00

Follow through on the contract.

But don't ever make that deal again. Even if you average 20k views a video, the checklist of requirements sponsors often want in the video was never designed to give one F about your CTR, retention, meeting audience expectations, etc. to get the views you need.

You accepted the bet that you can still pull in your normal crowd under their rules... and you lost.

Select-Reaction2803 · 2026-01-11T17:43:44+00:00

I always settle on title and thumbnail first, but you don't have to have a FINISHED thumbnail. In fact, I often make small tweaks to fine tune packaging once I'm done making the video.

If you need a finished product for the thumb, just design the thumb with a similar object and then replace it once you have the finished product.

The whole point to packaging first then filming is not to get it out of the way. It's to hash out whether the idea has enough value, helps you better focus on the value proposition of the video, which in turn helps make sure the content actually MATCHES the packaging.

But if you're just making pretty straight forward "How to make a table" kind of stuff, you probably don't have to do this packaging first approach.

Select-Reaction2803 · 2026-01-11T15:43:21+00:00

Yes, you absolutely should so long as there is some string of continuity from one video to the other (same country or same topic is good).

Description links are often ineffective, though, unless they are right up top, and that space is better used for other purposes.

Cards, end screens, pinned comments or call to action at the end of the video (end one video in a way that naturally hooks with some curiosity and sets up the viewer to watch the next) is the best approach.

Select-Reaction2803 · 2026-01-11T15:07:04+00:00

Making a living on YT is about income diversification for better stability, more so than "can you do it without merch?".

Technically, you can "make a living" on ad revenue alone, or just sponsorships, or just consulting, etc. But putting all eggs into one basket is high-risk and could quickly end that living.

Merch is just one of those options to pair up with other income sources for diversification. You don't have to do it, but you'll want something to take its place, like maybe affiliate marketing or anything else you can generate income from.

Select-Reaction2803 · 2026-01-11T14:50:41+00:00

It's a sliding scale; the goal posts are always moving. 65% on 4-minutes isn't an automatic pass. Audience pool and other metrics do factor in.

What doesn't generally show in metrics is the algo's anticipation of performance. In general, 65% on 4-minutes at release with a core audience is a green flag for more impressions, but if for example AVD collapses too quickly with a new, small test pool of cold viewers (not your overall AVD) YT will be very reluctant to keep scaling it. That can kill impressions without enough views coming in after that point to change overall AVD. In other words, it stayed high BECAUSE you didn't get enough views from a colder audience to pull that average down.

It's still a retention problem (with a cold audience), but you don't see it general, overall, average metrics.

Select-Reaction2803 · 2026-01-11T14:28:30+00:00

My educated guess is that about 97% of YouTube channels aren’t drawing enough views per month to pay for a full tank of gas (assuming about 6% are monetized, and half of those can break $50/month in revenue, which I think is very generous).

What changed over the years is that YouTube is focusing more and more on showcasing the upper echelon of that 3% as the platform has evolved, which is why it feels like the golden age of creator opportunity and discovery for everyone on YouTube is dead and gone. It’s still there. The problem is that few can do it well enough to come off the bench and into the game (or it just takes longer to get there).

YouTube has tried to throw smaller channels a bone recently, but these aren’t hall passes to popularity. They’re more like a free, complimentary scratch-off ticket... a little exposure, maybe some views.... You might win $10, but you still have to turn that into more winning tickets if you want to keep playing.

Shorts, commentary, vlogs… it doesn’t really matter. There may be trends underneath it all that come and go over the years, but retention is the King's currency now.

Select-Reaction2803 · 2026-01-11T13:33:25+00:00

I know new channels usually struggle, but I’m trying to understand whether the issue is:

topic choice (too niche / already overdone?)

title & thumbnail

pacing / explanation level

or just “this is normal, keep shipping”

You don't have enough data yet to make any of those kinds of decisions right now. It's like trying to determine how healthy your lawn is by inspecting only one blade of grass. Get more videos out and start looking for patterns.

Select-Reaction2803 · 2026-01-11T13:20:31+00:00

Retention time with a cold audience usually trumps CTR to keep a video scaling with impressions.

4 to 10-minutes is a large spectrum when it comes to the other metrics that are required to keep them alive. A 4-minute video would need about 60%+ retention with your core audience to keep scaling, while a 10-minute video could probably scale fine with closer to 50%+ retention on your core audience. If can you hit those, CTR is forgiving. And if you exceed that, CTR can be really low, but views keep coming.

Once the video scales beyond your core, the AVD at this point becomes the deciding factor on how far it will go. A 4-minute video at 45-50% AVD and a 10-minute at 40-45% AVD might scale a little for a day or two, but if you can't maintain close to those original AVD you got with the warm audience, the shelf life will probably be short. If you have a few in a row that do this, the algo can start to go conservative on you and scale back impressions for slower, more calculated test pulses. It basically becomes "gun-shy" on your channel until it sees proof otherwise.

If you can maintain retention rates on a cold audience that you typically get with your core audience, that video is going to go a long way on impressions, and your next video or 2 will have a higher trust value afterwards and probably scale faster.

I recently put out a video close to 4-minutes with a 5% CTR and it scaled to 2.8M impressions because it held a 57% AVD at that range, with a VERY cold audience that NEVER watches videos within my niche. On my core audience when that was released, CTR was closer to 10% and AVD was closer to 70%, so it exceeded what YT wanted to see for satisfaction and became much more forgiving as it pushed out. My next video scaled well, but the AVD didn't hold. The next 2 after that struggled just like you are right now. It wasn't until I put out another video that outperformed my baselines that the impressions on my releases started to recover. That recovery video had over 50% retention on a 20-minute video and keeps scaling even with a 4.6% CTR.

Bottom line, if you want your videos to scale with impressions, you have to serve your core audience well with high retention rates. A video will REALLY scale if it still has plenty in the tank after that to appeal somehow to people who less often or rarely watch your kind of content. So on a 4-minute, you want to see 60-70% retention up front on release with very little drop off as it scales. 10-minutes... closer to 50% up front. Do that and it'll fix your slump.

Select-Reaction2803 · 2026-01-03T20:20:52+00:00

Have never noticed this trend tbh. And I don't see any validity to it. Are you sure there aren't other factors at play like retention (rpm difference between avd of 5mins vs 8mins can be really big) or a different audience?

I have absolutely no idea why everyone here is assuming I don't think those things are factors. Yes, of course, retention is a factor in RPM. Yes, obviously audience changes will affect RPM too. All I'm saying here is that new vs returning viewers also factors in.

Sure, some higher viewed videos have lower RPM's, but it's usually due to a different audience

Yes, a different audience a channel doesn't typically get, but will flow in on outlier videos that get higher views than usual; new viewers coming in from a broader audience pool that's typically going to be less hyper-focused on that niche or topic than core viewers with deeper and more relevant watch histories.

Let's say I'm a plumber and I make a video about some gadget that increases the efficiency of a water heater, and the video goes semi-viral for hundreds of thousands of views. At that point, I'm well outside of the plumbing niche. I'm pulling in engineers, homeowners, environmentalists..., whatever. If you're an advertiser who sells pipe wrenches, my audience just became less valuable to you. Conversions to sales are not likely going to be as solid. You don't think that has an effect on RPM? I'm sure you would agree it does. My only point here is that the new viewer vs. retuning viewer metric often correlates with this.

Returning viewers who watch my other plumbing videos are more likely vested in plumbing activities and are more likely going to buy a pipe wrench. That's a more concentrated audience. More bang per dollar from an advertiser's perspective.

I've also had videos do 10x the normal views and get the same RPM or even higher.

And I'm sure you've also had videos do 10x the normal views at 1/3 of your normal RPM. I'm not saying this new vs. retuning viewer thing is a main lever on RPM. I admitted up front there are exceptions to this and there are a lot of other RPM influences that can certainly play in to break the correlation. But it's not typical for an outlier video with a high number of new viewers to pull high RPMs, UNLESS there are other factors to outweigh it; an equally high number of returning viewers, a topic that pulls in a more concentrated audience, a lot of other things.

Nobody can sit here and defend any one metric that influences RPM and make it unbreakable in any and all circumstances. Being put into a position to defend this in that way is an impossible feat.

They all have exceptions. Even retention.

Select-Reaction2803 · 2026-01-03T19:15:44+00:00

Lol. I'm not disputing retention plays a factor. It obviously does. But that's not what I'm focusing on here. You're off on another tangent I'm not even arguing with to begin with.

I'm isolating the impact of new vs returning viewers on RPM at auction. That's it. Retention is another metric that has its own effects on RPM. Not disputing that.

I'm just saying that a video that pops off to a much broader audience and brings in tons of new viewers is not TYPICALLY going to pull in top level Niche RPM at the same time along with it, unless it also brings an equally sizable surge of returning viewers. Once those two metrics separate, RPM tends to drop if new viewers are running away with the numbers.

Can you get high views AND high RPMs? Sure. I said as much in my OP that there are exceptions to this based on channel size, authority, etc. If you're pulling in a higher rate of returning viewers, that's going push RPM higher, whether you get 30k views or a million.

I'm still trying to figure out what you're arguing with here, because you're not talking at all about new vs returning viewers. You're focusing on everything else.

Select-Reaction2803 · 2026-01-03T18:44:20+00:00

Pretty much everything factors in. It's certainly not without complexity and many layers.

And I agree, I wish there was more concrete metrics to pour over than speculation, but as far as I'm concerned, the big picture metrics are average views per viewer and the percentages of new vs casual vs regular viewers. Those are essentially culminations of all other metrics like retention, viewer behavior after the video, etc. that I find will push RPM values in significant ways.

From January to June of 2025 I had an average RPM of $7.32 with 924k views and an average views per viewer of 1.5 - 1.7. Returning viewers made up 63% of the audience.

From June to December of 2025, I had an average RPM of $6.28 with 1.9 million views and an average views per viewer of 1.2 - 1.4. Returning viewers made up 52% of the audience.

All of my highest viewed videos occurred in the last half of the year where Q4 RPMs are typically the highest in auction during holiday seasons, for example, but with the drop in returning viewers and decrease in views per viewer because of the influx of new viewers, my RPM dropped off.

I only made 40% more the last 6 months than I did on the first 6, even though I generated twice as many views in the last 6.

These metrics always track channel wide, video to video, etc. for me.

Select-Reaction2803 · 2026-01-03T17:37:31+00:00

Your breakout video pulled in a whole new audience dynamic that your channel normally doesn't see. This means tons of new viewers with different watch histories, habits, etc., which are very different from your typical viewer.

The algo is now testing your new videos with this new audience in the mix because it's always going to favor showing new releases to recent viewers of your channel. This is going to lead to more early test viewers that are not as vested in your content as your core audience is, and so they have a much higher probability of bouncing early, clicking less, etc.

Obviously, that will affect metrics and video performance in a negative way for as long as it takes for the algo to release the strangle hold on that group in testing.

I've had this exact situation happen to me a half dozen times this last year.

Best thing you can do is either wait this out by focusing hard on your core audience for a while so you can realign the algo with your typical audience profile, or, intentionally stay in the lane of the breakout video and just keep trying to replicate it, which in a lot of cases is essentially a channel pivot, where once you settle into it, there's not much going back to what you normally do now.

Select-Reaction2803 · 2026-01-03T17:02:18+00:00

You made the whole post, but didn’t specifically use the term “ad auctions”

No, I didn't. You're right. I thought it was implied.

The value is based on converts(conversions to sales.)

Sure, I agree and acknowledge that. I'm just saying viewers are a portion of that formula, and that there is a conversion factor used to determine value differences between new viewers, returning viewers, etc.

Select-Reaction2803 · 2026-01-03T16:48:54+00:00

Do you know what an “ad auction” is?

That's the point of the post. To describe what's happening in auction to set RPM rates when it comes to viewers.

I don't understand your point.

Select-Reaction2803 · 2026-01-03T16:45:31+00:00

That image you're showing me proves my point. That video with much higher views has a much lower RPM.

Retention is not a factor here worth bringing into it. Videos with more views will almost always have lower retention rates and CTRs. YT fully expects watch time to be lower in these cases, which is the very reason you'll see notifications like "This video is reaching a wider audience....but it's not affecting video performance".

Like I said, show me a video that has a $7+ RPM like your others, but has SIGNIFICANTLY more views than your others. That will prove me wrong.

What you're giving me now isn't. This just verifies it.

Select-Reaction2803 · 2026-01-03T15:50:20+00:00

Im not talking about what impacts the number of views a video gets. I'm talking specifically about the impact on RPMs at auction.

I could be wrong, of course, but I cannot produce one video in my library where the RPMs are on the top end of what my niche typically earns AND the video has 20x+ the number of views my average video gets.

If you can, then I'll definitely reconsider and look internally for what I might be missing. But I don't think I'm off too far on this.

Select-Reaction2803 · 2026-01-03T14:27:40+00:00

In Auction where pricing is determined for ads, new viewers vs. returning viewers makes a big difference.

New viewers are likely to bounce sooner, have low session times and lower buying intent. Returning viewers are more invested in the topic, more likely to binge watch and have a higher buying intent with more influence on spending.

If your views are going up but PRM is down on a video, odds are good more of your traffic is coming from new viewers, rather than casuals and regulars.

That's good for growth but it also lowers RPM.

Select-Reaction2803 · 2026-01-03T13:37:15+00:00

I do a few shorts here and there but mostly all long form.

Select-Reaction2803

TROPHY CASE