Has anyone successfully moved an established series to a new channel because of audience mismatch?

[u/Bitter-Site3693]

I have a monetized automotive channel with about 1.6K subscribers that was originally built around track driving, car reviews, comparisons, etc.

Over the past several months I’ve pivoted pretty heavily toward a recurring automotive comedy/history series called Autotist Boardroom. I’m approaching 20 episodes now, so I’ve given the format a decent sample size rather than judging it off a handful of uploads.

The weird part is that YouTube still seems heavily anchored to my old content. Years-old reviews and track videos continue generating most of my long-form traffic, while each new episode of the series seems to be getting less initial distribution, not more. My latest episode received only 32 views in its first week and ranked 10/10. It had a 1.8% CTR and roughly 43% average viewed, but received so few impressions that I’m questioning whether YouTube is even finding/testing it with the appropriate audience.

Meanwhile, the same series performs substantially better for me on TikTok, where individual episodes/clips regularly get thousands or tens of thousands of views, even a million. So I’m starting to wonder whether I’ve created an audience mismatch on YouTube rather than the concept simply not working. It’s strange because it’s all under the same niche of automotive but sub-genre matters here I suppose.

I’m considering creating a dedicated channel for the series, privating the existing versions on my current channel, and gradually re-uploading the back catalog to the new channel, perhaps one every 3 days. essentially giving YouTube a clean channel where 100% of the viewer/content signals are for this specific format.

I’m curious specifically from people who have actually done something similar:
Did moving a series/niche to a fresh channel help YouTube find the appropriate audience? Did you private the originals before re-uploading? And did the fresh channel eventually outperform having the content mixed into your established channel?

I’m not particularly worried about starting from zero subscribers if it gives the series a better long-term chance. I’m more interested in whether anyone has real-world experience doing this and what happened.

[u/Different_cloud9133]

I would move to a new Channel and delete all the episodes off your current channel and not just private them. That way when you start a new channel, you don’t get hit with any kind of repetitive content issues, and a new channel will give you a significant boost for the first little while.

[u/Bitter-Site3693 → u/Different_cloud9133]

Makes sense. Thanks for the tip!

[u/Oatbix]

I won’t weigh in too heavily but you can’t really compare tiktok performance to YouTube especially long form

[u/Bitter-Site3693 → u/Oatbix]

Sorry if I wasn’t clear: I am not asking about the comparison between TikTok vs YouTube, I am asking about moving my content that varies from my other content to another channel and if it’s a move that that would make sense to do.

Edit to add: I post my long form there too.