What can you learn from YouTube Metrics

Let’s talk some inside baseball about YouTube metrics, I’ve been a Full Time YouTuber for about 6 months, here are my observations on what you can learn from your channel data.

New YouTubers are focused on two key metrics, Subscribers and Watch Hours. This is because to qualify for the Partner Program you need 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours.

The average channel takes about a year to reach these figures, whilst you may be lucky and have a single video that goes viral, more likely it will take at least a year (if not longer). That’s a year of content, a minimum of 48 long form videos (8 minutes or longer), a huge investment in time. Which is why I think it’s important to treat a channel like a startup and approach it with a business mindset. This means you need to lean into the data behind your videos, identify trends and course correct where necessary. 

Whilst I’m not a data specialist by any means, I wanted to track my metrics. After all, you can’t see where you are going until you understand where you have been. Analytics provided by YouTube are clunky at best, and it’s hard to get an ‘at a glance’ overview about how your Channel is performing. 

Here is my MVP tracker (I’ll work on getting it automated once I’ve looking into the YouTube API docs at a later date):

The data tells me four things:

Taking a week off is devastating to your Channel 

In November 2023 I took a week off from content creation to give myself a break and spend more time with the family, I was not prepared for the drop off in video views & watch hours. This is more damaging as the next month is December, which has a large seasonal drop off in viewers. It took until January to recover from that mistake. When you only have 12 month Partner eligibility window, every month counts. 

Evergreen content is key for Watch Hours, Narrative content is key for subscribers 

My content broadly falls into four categories:

Narrative Content such as Project cars naturally make up the bulk of my content at 34 videos (excluding shorts, which I will talk about separately), but categories such as Car Reviews tend to over perform compared to the investment, why is this? 

Because Car Reviews are evergreen content, people will search for those topics regularly and they will tend to watch for longer (one video has over 5,000 views and 216 watch hours). If you take this data at face value, you would optimise for car reviews and not project cars. However whilst car reviews are evergreen content, they are also transactional, with a much lower subscriber count (11) for the views. Viewers searching for a particular car are unlikely to watch reviews of another car. Whereas project car content has a narrative that viewers can attach to and they are likely to continue to watch new content at the cost of not returning to older content.

What does this mean?

In order to have a successful early stage channel, you need narrative and evergreen content to grow subscribers and watch hours. As your channel grows, this blend will naturally change as your audience views for your story and you will become less reliant on the transactional viewer.

YouTube Shorts are a double edged sword 

YouTube Shorts are short form portrait content less than 60 seconds in length. Myviews for Shorts are higher, 44,000 from 56 videos compared to 40,000 views from 50 long form videos. They also take far less time to create, so the return on investment is higher. Sounds like a slam dunk right? Make more shorts and you’ll be on to a winner!

Whilst shorts are great for easy views, watch hours generated from them do not count towards partner eligibility. Instead they have a separate criteria – 10 million views in 90 days. I have not found the right approach to have a short grow beyond the seed audience (0-5,000 views), others may find shorts to be their path to the partner program, but for my channel I prioritise long form content. There is also a slight disconnect seeing a long form video underperform vs a short edited from the same content generate much higher views, but that’s a separate discussion.

I believe that early stage YouTubers should treat Shorts as a marketing funnel for subscribers but that you should not expect them to grow your long form content. As the two user bases are vastly different.  This is the double edged sword that shorts present. If you not growing your existing long form subscribers, relying on shorts may ultimately damage your channel as your short subscribers will not watch long form content. This hurts your click through rate and average view duration, ultimately killing your channel.

March is the key month for my channel

My channel started in June of last year, which means I have just over 3 months to hit both subscriber and watch hour targets, otherwise the watch hour clock resets and I start the journey all over again. The first two months of 2024 are performing much better, however I still have a long way to go (382 subscribers & 1,626 watch hours at time of writing). Which means March has to be as successful as possible to ensure I enter the final stretch in a comfortable position.

Final thoughts

As I said at the beginning, I’ve only been doing this for a short time, these are just my thoughts on the process so far. You may find your journey on YouTube, or other platform to be very different.