OPTIMIZING MY CHANNEL FOR THE YOUTUBE ALGORITHM

YouTube

Feb. 27

So I just unlisted 120 YouTube videos. Why would I do that? Because I’m optimizing my channel for the YouTube algorithm. Well at least that’s what I hope I’m doing. The truth is nobody really knows what the YouTube algorithm is all about but there is some pretty solid speculation.

One of the major points I hear more often than not is that the algorithm prefers to promote channels that keep a strict focus on a particular topic because it knows exactly what audience to market the channel to. In my case this channel focuses on photography, videography, gear reviews and tutorials. Looking at my channel’s videos one afternoon it occurred to me that a lot of my older vlogs don’t really fall in line with that focus. Also a lot of my older videos where just poorly produced because I had no clue what I was doing. I’m the type that learns on the fly. Plus being a glamour photographer I had a bunch of content that was not exactly advertiser friendly. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to put two and two together to realize that growing your channel quickly and producing content that isn’t ad friendly don’t go hand in hand.

So that’s my thought process. I wanted to optimize my channel for success on YouTube by eliminating all the videos that didn’t fall in line with the direction I wanted to grow my channel. In my case I unlisted 120 out of 241 videos. That’s 50% of my videos. It was a pretty drastic move but I’m curious to see how it all shakes out over the next few months. So subscribe to the channel and hit that bell icon because I’m going to make a follow up video in a few months to let you good people of the YouTubes know how it all worked out.

Back in June 2020 I really started to focus my channel. I made sure that all the videos I was producing were in line with my channel’s direction. I also increased my production value in several ways. I built a new computer desk/set to create a unique look for my videos. I invested in some RGB lighting to add visual impact to my scenes. I created a series of graphic overlays, a design language if you will, that would unify all my videos with my branding. I created a new intro (still not happy with it though) and finally and possibly the most important thing, I started scripting my videos so I could present information clearly. I feel like viewers really appreciated the effort and it’s led to a an uptick in numbers recently. Or it could just be my channel coming out of the US Election, riots, Christmas, New years slump. Views are just coming back to where they were a year ago for me. At this point it still feels like it’s a struggle to reach 300 views on a video.

I started going to other channels with similar subs and content to my own and saw that they were getting way more views and comments than I was. The only difference I could see was that their channels were more focused on one topic whereas my channel had a diverse range of topics if I included my older videos. So reluctantly I decided to remove all the videos that didn’t fit into the scope of my channel. So now here we are. I’m looking at a YouTube channel with 50% less videos but all the videos are focused on my topic. What happens from here is an unknown but I certainly have reason to believe that it will have a positive effect on my channel’s growth. The YouTube algorithm will eventually learn exactly what my channel is about and who to promote it to. Below is a screen shot of my numbers as of February 24th, 2020. I’m curious to see how things change over the months.