Uploading to Youtube: The Algorithm makes no sense!

Jules

About 6 months ago, I started making videos and uploading them to youtube.
The videos area all about film and sound production tips and tutorials, gear, and some behind the scenes action.

Some of my best videos that provide good information (and took quite a while to plan and produce) get only a handful of views, while others I consider trash do much better.  It makes no sense to me.

I add keywords and custom thumbnails, I've even added subtitles and uploaded in 4K on some of them to see if it makes a difference... it doesn't!   It appears completely random.

It does seam that if you name drop a product in the title, the video does better.  Otherwise nobody will see it.
My channel is www.youtube.com/picturedmedia

What's the real secret?

stearman65

My channel has the same type of response as yours. The best response I got was for tutorials on Audacity. However, none compare with the "professionals" who have a sponsor such as Patreon. I think it is a paid service that you get a return on your investment & how many videos you post. I watch a lot of sailing stuff such as La-Vagabond, the lifestyle of a couple of sailors in the carribbean    at the moment. They've just had a baby & every video they post now shows her breast feeding. Another is the Old Sea Dog an Englishman Barrie Perrins, whose just come back from the dead so to speak. Take a look at their offerings & see if you can do something similar.

Jules

Could I take a look at your channel?

stearman65

If you mean mine just click the youtube link.

arty tribe

This could run and run, we all seem to have much the same issues. On my channel, ‘Parkinson’s Walks’, You Tube I cover a lot of different walking situations. Anything to do with trains flies out the door, whereas most of the others, which in my opinion are much better, go nowhere.

Case of finding your audience I guess.

Jules

Link doesn't work as its an 'internal' link to your own channel.  So when I click it, it takes me to my channel.

georgf

People would say "yeah, just find your niche" or "if you make high quality content then the audience will find you", but I think, Youtube is so saturated now, it's really difficult to break through. I see so many channels (in my case, guitar players, music channels) that are absolutely amazing, but they get really low views. If they had been around 5 years ago, they would have been a success.

I think, new-ish channels that got popular, managed to do so through other ways than being found by people through the youtube search.
I guess they spend tons of hours doing social media marketing or "networking" to get an audience going.

chrishull3

One thing thats for certainis is that the quality of the film does not necessarily affect the the number of praising comments films on youtube get ,very good films like                                  may get none while others that that are bad in the extreme get dozens.

georgf

^^yes, but that's also due to the bulk of humanity is behaving differently than a professional filmmaker would expect.
The professional eye sees the quality and how well made something is and knows how much effort it was.

But the regular person may not immediatly turned off by bad quality, if it has something else that captivates their attention.

M Stewart

I know exactly what you are all describing.  

One of my early "trial" videos which I really ought to remake, is about optical flat fringes, and without any advertising it's scored higher than better videos of more "popular" subjects.  

The subject matter which I think had the fastest take-up was a recent one about the introduction of new style passenger stock on a local railway line.  (Underground carriages remodelled to run on the Marston Vale Network Rail line from Bletchley to Bedford.)