What I Learned Running A YouTube Channel With 120,000+ Subscribers — Video Performance (Part 3)

Not-so-humblebrag: This is what happens when you understand video performance

Let’s get straight to the point: This article’s purpose is to help you understand why your video is getting the amount of views that it is, whether it’s not as much as you want or way more than expected. If you’re reading this article, the 1st scenario is probably more applicable to you, but the 2nd is also crucial as you naturally want to figure out how to replicate success when you do come across it. Anyways, understanding your video’s performance can be broken down across 3 key metrics:

1. Click-through rate (CTR)
2. Watch time
3. Number of impressions

Click-through Rate (CTR)

In layman’s terms, this is what CTR is: When the user has a chance of clicking into your video, how often do they do it? Let’s say your video shows up in the YouTube Recommended of 10 users. If only 1 of those 10 users clicks into your video, that means your CTR is 10%. Simple enough right?

From many more months of YouTube experience since I wrote the prior 2 articles in this series (part 1, part 2), including bootstrapping a completely new channel from ~100,000 video views to 4,200,000+ video views in around a month, I can confidently say that you want your CTR to be at…