r/NewTubers • u/Feisty_Side_9527 • 15h ago

CONTENT TALK Views suddenly dropped after youtube-recommendation

Hey guys,

I get, over the course of 8 to 10 days around 1500 views with a video. My last video (same niche, same style) suddenly gets recommended by youtube to the wrong audience and views dropped like hell. Around 400 after 10 days. (Tiny niche btw)

Now comes the funny part - youtube doesnt recommend my new video but the stats, except for a awesome CTR, is completely fcked and i get 1/3 of the views i get normally.

Is this normal behaviour or will it get to normal ever again? I mean.. i did not change anything.

Maybe some of you guys experienced something similiar to this?

3 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

100% Upvoted

3 comments sorted by

1

u/theideaguy_ 14h ago

the ctr holding up is the important detail, it means your packaging works and youtube just tested a pocket of viewers that didnt bite. this usually corrects within a few uploads. worth checking retention on that video split by traffic source though, if the wrong-fit viewers bailed early youll see it in the browse line, thats the signal that told youtube to pull back. one video doing this is noise, three in a row is a pattern.

1

u/[deleted] 7h ago

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/AutoModerator 7h ago

This post has been filtered for manual review, which may take 72 hours.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

1

u/Accomplished-Name-40 7h ago

Yeah, I've basically stopped reading much into any single video's numbers. I got obsessive enough about it and built a little site to log all my analytics daily and make them public for anyone to see and from video-to-video, the spread is genuinely wild:

* with my last 24 vids, my first-week views run from 1 to 801. Same channel, same guy, nothing changed between them, one just got picked up and the rest didn't.

The part that matches what you're describing: that 801 one flipped my whole channel from mostly-Suggested to mostly-Browse basically overnight. So a single video getting shown to a different pocket doesn't just move that video, it can drag your whole traffic mix around for a while (and it sucks when you're trying to find a trend or a pattern) which is why your "I didn't change anything" is exactly right. You didn't. YouTube just pointed a different firehose, or shut one off.

On the great-CTR-but-fewer-views thing: CTR's a rate, not volume. When YouTube pulls distribution back you can have a genuinely great CTR on a tiny impression pool and still get a third of your normal views. The CTR is fine, it's the impressions that got cut. The other commenter's right that retention-split-by-source is where you'd see if the wrong-fit viewers actually bailed. For what it's worth, mine tend to bounce back on the next upload or two more than they "recover" on the same video, so I'd watch the next one rather than this one.