And the first one is what I’ll call subscribers. Now, subscribers are obviously a very important part of the YouTube ecosystem. They are truly what drives channels to greatness over time. If you can get people to subscribe to your channel, keep watching your content, that’s how you will really win. But the way YouTube recommends subscriptions is a little more complicated than that.
Of course, you have the subscriber feed on YouTube itself. So when people go to the YouTube platform, they load the app, if they subscribe to your videos, they’ll get that content in their feed. You may also receive notifications on your mobile device or in other areas. But mostly, the way you tend to get views from your subscribers is through the YouTube homepage.
And not only that, when you have content that seems appealing to your subscribers, that they watch a lot, that has great retention, high click-through rates, YouTube will tend to recommend this content to other people as well, other viewers that it believes have a similar interest based on their viewing history to your existing subscribers.
And so, as you grow your subscriber count and as your subscribers’ interest in your content increases, you tend to find that you get a lot more views from the YouTube home page.
And when a video goes viral, whenever it has this kind of explosion of views, it’s normally through the YouTube homepage as the primary mechanism. So this is often encapsulated in the YouTube platform under Navigation Features. But YouTube’s home page is where you’ll find that kind of real rapid growth engine for any particularly successful video.
And so what we can do here is think of subscribers as these three different areas where you can get views.
And if you really start thinking about creating content that keeps people coming back for more, so repeatable formats, content that really meets the interest of a particular group of people, and you continue to create things that match those two things, that’s how you’re going to optimize for these particular areas.
