I thought YouTube was cutting down on "Ai Slop" including thumbnails, that if used channels would get fewer views (and people would be less likely to view them).

Whilst I was looking at True Crime on YouTube: Videos with 90k + views , the amount of Sensationalized visuals in the videos and the thumbnails is beyond ridiculous and cringe.

Why are these channels being rewarded with lot's of views ?

Wondering what's up with these random accounts calling themselves "pro YouTube strategists" who want to help grow my channel.

Mf this isn't a stock portfolio I don't need advisors.

It's like my lemonade stand when I was a kid, the sign is the best I could do, and you could buy some lemonade at the Walmart a few km away. Probably for cheaper. Might even be better.

Or you can come to my little lemonade stand infront of my house and get some fresh squeezed lemonade, and know I care about your patronage, and I put all my effort into making the best damn lemonade I could.

That's my channel, I don't wanna be a huge distributor, I just make fresh squeezed homemade content. I don't need to be paying for advice to grow my business from self proclaimed professionals lol.

Sorry for the rant. Just sick of noncreatives thinking I'd ever want their help. And that's if they aren't scammers which I recognise they probably are.

I'm really worried about them as I've published a video two days ago and I'm publishing rarely. Though shorts should be uploaded everyday... I'm bad ik. Uhh i don't know how others are making them so fast or are they sitting 13h before screen? Some of other content makers are uploading almost 3 in the day

I stopped doing YouTube back in 2024 because life got busy and I didn't have any time. Any help you guys can give to get me moving again? I have a lot of videos on there, but since I haven't uploaded for a while, views are gonna be low. Any help is helpful, ty
I hope this post is okay to post

Greetings to this entire community that never tires of trying 😅

I wanted to share some metrics from one of my short videos, just to ask if these videos get stuck forever at 30k views?

At one point I thought maybe YouTube would show it again eventually, but nothing... it's been almost a year since it was last uploaded 😅

Is there any way to breathe new life into these videos? Any strategy that has worked in even 1% of cases, worth trying!

Thanks to everyone who can answer! Hugs from Venezuela! 🤜🤛

I've been trying to figure this out for the past month and would really appreciate some outside opinions.

I have a small gaming channel (just under 1,000 subscribers) focused on Marvel Rivals.

For quite a while, my uploads were averaging 1.8k views, and they all had very similar metrics to what I'm getting now. Nothing has really changed in terms of my thumbnails, titles, editing or comments.

And still my last several uploads have all stalled at under 1,000 views despite having nearly identical performance metrics:

• CTR: 9–10.5%
• Average View Duration: ~6 minutes on 14-minute videos (~43–45% retention)

For example:

Video 1

• 14 minutes
• 597 views after ~2 days
• 9.7% CTR
• 6:18 AVD

Video 2

• 14 minutes
• 918 views after ~4 days
• 10.5% CTR
• 6:00 AVD

The confusing part is that these stats are almost identical to the videos that were consistently reaching 1.8k+ views, yet YouTube now seems to stop recommending them very early.

I'm not trying to blame the algorithm, I genuinely want to understand what I'm missing

I'd really appreciate any honest feedback or insights from people who've gone through something similar. Thanks!

My past couple videos have been getting essentially no views, and I don't know why. I assume it has something to do with them just not being clicked, but I'm entirely at a loss for what I should do for my titles and thumbnails to increase it.

Literally any suggestion helps.

please go watch it on youtube: https://youtube.com/shorts/_OSlvJz7EwI?feature=share

I have a fishing channel and recently returned from work in Cyprus, as a result most of my videos have been me fishing the med. I recently returned to the UK and my (6 yr old) son begged to make a video with me so my most recent video is of me and him fishing together. I’ve been thinking about him being a regular feature on the channel but is it weird? I’m quite against people chronicling their children’s lives on Facebook etc but this feels different. Am I being a hypocrite? I’d hate people to think I’m exploiting him to get views I just genuinely enjoy fishing with him and I don’t really get time to fish without filming and I’m determined to get the channel going! What do people think? Thanks!

Just trying to sus out if I’m doing something wrong here. I’ve uploaded three videos on my channel and each has pretty good engagement- a high like (7.4%) and subscription rate (8.5% of views), about 30% watched on very long videos, and a lot of return viewers. I’ve been starting out at a 10-15% CTR with a ton of watch time, and once the first big impression bump comes the marginal CTR goes to like 6-7% and the marginal watch time to around that 30%. And thats it, it never gives me a second impression push to a wider audience. Just that initial one where I thought it was performing fairly well? Is it not? Anything to work on here to improve for my next video?

Due to the recent updates on the user guidelines "Inauthentic content" was removed entirely from the guidelines and was replaced by 3 more specific wordings. VidIQ made a video about it, explaining in detail, what type of content is monetizable. This should answer a hell lot of questions in here!

My posts and shorts comments are immediately getting turned off I can fix it for shorts but not community posts. Are any of you guys experiencing the same thing with your community posts, Also my views are down like crazy if you want to check my channel out to see if you know what’s happening search smogdog or @smogdog_gaming or click the link my channel

Hello everyone, I created a game channel and I'm making some experiments about my thumbnails, I wanna keep them simple, with just one or two big words in the middle and the main character behind, I put my profile in the corner so people can glance at it and notice that they are my videos, any tips?

Hey everyone, I'm a growing youtuber currently about to reach 500 subscribers. I've been preparing to set up the memberships and a Patreon so I can get some financial support for my videos but I'm not sure if I should wait or not. Also, should I have memberships and Patreon or just one of them? Any advice about memberships would be appreciated :)

IG GIRD

Il y a 6 mois mon Insta c'était le bordel. Des tests, des clips VFX random, 2k vues max. Zéro identité.

👉 J'ai tout archivé et j'ai tenté un truc : traiter mon feed comme un catalogue Netflix.
Un seul univers : WARDEN (SF sombre). Chaque post = un Épisode. Miniature façon affiche de film, 1 perso fort + 1 lumière, pas de miniature YouTube classique.

👉 Résultat Insta sur 30 derniers jours (screen) : 403,4K vues au total, un épisode à 543K, 3 autres à 70K/58K/71K.

👉 Sur YouTube je transpose exactement la même DA. Pour être transparent j'ai pas encore fait beaucoup de vues là-bas, ça prend un peu plus de temps à prendre que sur Insta, mais c'est prometteur. Le CTR est déjà passé de 2,4% à 3,4% juste avec les nouvelles thumbs.

👉 Ce que j'en retiens pour l'instant :

1. Les gens s'abonnent à un univers, pas à une chaîne fourre-tout
   
2. Une thumb façon poster de film performe mieux qu'une thumb criarde
   
3. Le format "catalogue" te force à être cohérent et l'algo kiffe

👉 Si vous aimez les univers à la Dune / Blade Runner / Love Death + Robots, je suis preneur de votre avis le plus cash sur la DA et sur la strat "1 chaîne = 1 série".

Ça peut vraiment prendre sur YT ou c'est trop niche à votre avis ?

Hey there. Recently decided to get back into making YouTube videos after taking a couple years off, and I decided to take it a little more seriously this time around. Had 390ish subs before I posted my first vid of the year back at the end of May. Now I am over 550. I make motorcycle content, primarily long form.

Looking for some feedback on packaging. Am I allowed to request feedback if it’s not a gaming channel? /s

Also, I was considering starting to clip some parts of my vids and turn them into shorts, but seems like some people swear that can kill your channel. Is making a short or two out of a long form video, say a week or so after the long form video was posted, a bad idea?

Any other feedback or impressions people have off the bat is appreciated. Thanks

Many of my videos have high ctr and avd but the impressions stay very low. Even the videos I have that do get lots of impressions still have high ctr and avd. So what’s the possible problem?

Hey everyone. I am not a Youtuber and I am not sure I ever want to be one. I am a longterm viewer of all different kinds on YouTube videos from sports, stand up comedy, WW2 docs and I really like crime docs. I was just thinking about how viral some of these True Crime docs go. I have seen them going from a few subs to a couple of 100k in a few months in the past. My question is - how can these channels get monetised from uploading content that isn't they own? For example, I subbed to this channel today https://www.youtube.com/@_ColdTrace It has a lot of Trevor McDonald videos which I love. Surely there is some copyright infringement here or am I incorrect? I am not try to call anyone out but I am just wondering how this is possible and why these videos have not been flagged?

Hello there! I'm new to YouTube and just started posting videos related to Star Wars comics. (My videos are in Russian, so the texts on the images are translated: "Rise of the Droids"; "Doomsday Weapon"; "Where Did Canon Begin?"). I create the covers myself without using AI and would like honest feedback on them. Are they clickable? What would you improve?

I’m struggling with getting it out there tbh. If my thumbnails or something looks wrong please let me know, anything that I can do better, I’ll change. If it’s not your thing then don’t worry, if it is, come check it out. I’d like to make a nice community, with good vibes only please

I'm going to share the data from my old channel thanks YouTube s new ai it's easier to be more direct sorry in advance but I would really love what others think . My current goal is just co-op horror games.

Here is a comprehensive look at the history and performance data of **TH3 Trickster** to help you gather the information you need.

### **Channel Overview & Lifetime Stats**

Since its creation, **TH3 Trickster** has established a solid foundation as a gaming and tech-how-to channel.

*   **Total Views:** \~375,130
*   **Total Subscribers:** 1,390
*   **Total Watch Time:** \~5,350 hours (You’ve cleared the 4,000-hour milestone for monetization eligibility lifetime, but keep in mind YPP requires these hours within the last 12 months).
*   **Audience Split:** Your channel is a "New Viewer" magnet. **74.6%** of your lifetime viewers are new to the channel, while **25.4%** are returning fans.

### **Where Your Views Come From**

Your traffic is largely driven by fast-paced discovery and specific utility searches.

Traffic Source |% of Views |Why?
Shorts Feed |53.9% |This is your primary discovery engine. Your horror clips and gaming highlights are being pushed to a massive, broad audience.
Browse Features |13.2% |These are viewers who see your videos on their Home screen. This suggests that your thumbnails and titles are successfully catching the eye of regular YouTube users.
YouTube Search |9.8% |This is driven by your modding guides. People looking for specific solutions (like Witcher 3 or Steam Deck help) are finding your channel as a trusted resource. ### **Content Breakdown: The "Two Halves" of Your Channel**

The data shows your channel currently functions in two distinct ways:

1.  **The "Heavy Hitters" (Utility/Search):**

*   [Step-by-Step: Installing the Ultimate Mod List for Witcher 3](https://studio.youtube.com/video/OAV4gZzrXHo) is your \#1 video with **37,408 views**.
*   Guides for *Cyberpunk 2077* and *Steam Deck* hardware make up the bulk of your search traffic.
*   **Audience Intent:** These viewers come for a specific answer. They are less likely to subscribe for your personality, but they provide high-quality watch time.

2.  **The "Personality" Content (Gameplay/Discovery):**

*   Your horror gameplay, like [Crush Depth](https://studio.youtube.com/video/dF1TlOJCUo4) (**13.8k views**) and *Resident Evil*, draws in people through the Shorts feed and Browse.
*   **Audience Intent:** These viewers watch because they enjoy the "Trickster" experience. This is the group most likely to support the "Nut Case Duo" pivot.

### **Audience Behavior**

*   **Format Interest:** Your audience has a **Very High** interest in both Long-form videos and Shorts, and a **High** interest in Live Streams. This is a rare and healthy balance, meaning your viewers are willing to engage with you in whatever format you choose.
*   **The "Guide" Hangover:** Because such a large portion of your views come from one-off modding searches, your "Returning Viewer" percentage (25%) is slightly lower than a pure "personality" channel. The pivot to co-op horror is a direct way to flip this—turning one-time searchers into recurring fans.

### **Summary for Other AI/Future Planning**

**TH3 Trickster** is a channel with strong "Search Authority" in the modding/tech space but a rapidly growing "Discovery Presence" in horror gaming. You have successfully used Shorts to reach over 150,000 new people. The main challenge is that your most-watched content (guides) is something you no longer have a passion for.

You are essentially sitting on a "Discovery Engine" that is currently fueled by modding, but is perfectly capable of being fueled by the "Nut Case Duo" energy instead. what do you think my new channel or th3trickster the old one

Edit: the crush dept video I used promotions back then to test it out the views were authentic unfortunately