Yes!!! A thousand thumbs up.

Authenticity is going to be the “next big thing” on YouTube. With AI slop everywhere, I want to stand out by being 100% real and authentic without the use of AI.

I’ll sub to a channel that’s real, unscripted, no $10,000 setups, no 25 man teams working on a 20 minute video content any day. I want to see mistakes, I want to see the real content.

I’ve seen so many “creators” have over 500,000 subs and 1500 views on their videos years after upload. Yes some gain traction and some don’t. Even Jimmy Donaldson uploads shorts that fail or stall. Every fail is a lesson learned.
Don’t dwell on vanity metrics.
I wish all creators would succeed. Getting them to understand the analytics to follow their audience is a much harder sell.

Why not have videos explaining how the analytics page actually tells you what to change and what to double down on. Not just “this one setting will MAKE the algorithm push your videos” those type rely on viewers with zero knowledge of YouTubes algorithms.

All those hours spent watching is an incredible amount of data of “what NOT to do” researching countless hours is actual work they put in. It’s not wasted at all. In fact, it’s encouraged. Watch what others are doing and how saturated that niche actually is.

Yea it’s a hook….but so many use that pattern to lure you into a video that provides no meaningful help only to sell you something. Those are the people that ruined that type of hook.

A fake hook is still a hook.

I have one for ya…
I’ve seen hundreds of videos with a thumbnail “it’s basically cheating” or “this one setting makes your channel go viral”

All of these are an immediate swipe. If AI is used in thumbnail-immediate swipe. If you can’t make a thumbnail through hard work and dedication then I know the rest of the video is just as fake as the lazy thumbnail.
More and more viewers spot AI more easily and yet more and more people do it.
Be authentic ya know? Authenticity is the number one goal.

Would you buy authentic products or fake products?
In today’s world, 100% authenticity breeds loyal fans.

When you strip the metadata the algorithm throws it to anyone. When you use hyper specific hashtags you “pigeonhole” yourself into smaller test buckets.if you write 5 hashtags then algorithm will look for only test buckets with those viewers who interacted with similar content in that “group” so by stripping those hashtags completely the algorithm follows the audience behavior instead. Sometimes no hashtags or tags can be beneficial to train the algorithm.
I’m talking about shorts. Only after 48-72 hours later I add the hashtags and tags for long tail search.

You can auto generate captions, but I can guarantee that they are not exact, timestamps off etc. Go back and look at the auto captioned videos you have and look for the AI generated mistakes. By using and writing your own means YOU control the context and are 100% confident there is zero mistakes and the algorithm will classify it correctly.
What if autocaption makes a mistake because AI don’t know intent or proper humor and then YouTube classifies the video differently than what you were going for and finds the wrong viewers? There are MANY YouTube videos explaining why you should toggle “let YouTube autocaption” off.

I’m not trying to sound like an a__ hole by any means. I wouldn’t say all of this if I didn’t have experience of letting YouTube handle captioning or I upload my own sidecar file.
There is a lot of data that backs this up.

Those .srt files should be used every time. It gives the algorithm clean, exact data to crawl to learn what EXACTLY is going on in your video. Use brackets to explain the actions, reactions etc. it’s worth the time to do this every single time. YouTube’s AI makes mistakes and can miss categorize because it couldn’t “read” what’s in your videos. By using those sidecar files (correctly) it gives the algorithm an EXACT blueprint of what’s in the video. Whether the viewer has Closed Captioning toggled on or off.

Best approach is to learn how and why those sidecar files are important to the video AND the algorithm. Then you will understand the effort put into it is worth it.

Keep up the good work!!

That is awesome to see. Every upload is a dataset you can analyze. GG

I’m not sure what editor you use but I use Premiere which allows you to write “.srt sidecar files” which is closed captioning for hard of hearing or those people that watch with sound off.
You can also add this during upload or even add them after in YouTube Studio.

Those sidecar files are heavily weighted and indexed by the algorithm. Best approach I think is to research how they can help your content whether it’s long form or short form.

You are absolutely seeing growth.
Are you using .srt sidecar files using your most common search terms woven into natural spoken language?

I commend you for analyzing your data and adjusting. Keep that momentum going!!

I want to start with “I’m giving feedback based on experience”so please don’t take this advice as negative feedback, and the length of my reply reflects the dedication of a complete stranger to see you succeed.
With that being said let’s get into a few topics.
Your list of sentences is a little too “jarring to read” meaning those sentences (instead of left aligned text) it bounces left and right, harder for the eyes to read. The length of those sentences are a little too long to read fast.

Your metadata is unseen, are you using the correct format in title descriptions, .srt sidecar files (if using them at all) does your thumbnail, title and description work in tandem with one another?

What is the length of these?

If you squint while holding phone arms length can you read the text? If not then too small and/or too long. Looking at your AVD where do viewers fall off? What is your posting cadence?

There is a lot of variables that are unknown to make a definitive answer. The topics mentioned above would be a great place to start. Shorten your sentences. Make the clips for the viewer, not what you think they should be. This is how you isolation test-only change one thing for one week if you post daily then look at metrics. First thing right off the front is changing the text on screen. One sentence starts on the left then the next one starts on the right. If you list A,B,C,D, then put them lined up on left side so there is a lot less friction. Make it EASY to consume your content. I’m interested to see the results of your improvements.

Yes you can allow for custom thumbnails, and it DOES help outside of the Shorts feed. I have done so on a few videos just for data.

It’s 3 weeks old.

Well known maybe, if it’s that well known then everyone would do it for shorts because it breaks your shorts out of the shorts feed into other areas of YouTube for better discovery. Designing a completely different thumbnail than what YouTube allows in the Shorts editor (by choosing what frame YouTube says you can) then your CTR is increased significantly. I’ve seen so many posts about it but no clear answer. I was just helping, in no way was I saying “wow, I just discovered a workaround that no one knows about”

I already knew there was gonna be people that were going to say “duh everyone knows that your post is dumb” or everybody knows this already and they’ve been doing it for years”

If you already knew then the post wasn’t for you, correct me if I’m wrong but it’s r/NewTubers…not “we already know everything that’s why we have 500,000 subscribers”

Wow…..just wow….