Hey guys I hope everything is going well! Today Id like to share some different explanations regarding views and engagement and how it affects your videos within YouTube's algorithm.
1. High retention views are only good for ranking but not getting your videos suggested or recommended.
The reason why this may be true is mainly because YouTube's algorithm is currently focused on user experience. This means that even though these views may give you high watch time hours, none of those views ever engaged with your video, ( liking, commenting, subscribing) which can lead to a bad signal. If you had 1000 people watch your whole video, but no one left a like, comment, subscription, or even clicked onto the next video, would you consider that a bad signal to YouTube's recommendation system? Yes they may be high retention, but what about the impressions, and everything else?
2. Subscriber engagement is everything. You can buy as many views as you want; they can be the best retention in the world, but if none of your actual subscribers engage with your video then that's a terrible signal to YouTube. Why would thousands of random botted views watch your video, but none of your subscribers engage with your video beforehand. It should be the other way around. This is why buying views could possibly put you in a weird spot with your channel if your subscribers don't engage, it makes no sense.
3. We all know CTR and Watch time are basically the biggest metrics for getting ranked and suggested, so couldn't we just easily buy HR views, get tons of watch time hours and then get suggested? Well don't worry guys, i did the scariest part for you. I've tested it and I got results. And honestly, I'm not surprised, nothing happened. Ill provide you some screenshots below!
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These results were on a 40 minute video, and you're are probably thinking. "wow these are amazing results. you found a goldmine!" And I assure you I did not.
The reason why these botted HR "YouTube Search Views" are bad for getting your channel recommended is mainly because they don't count as impressions. None of the views engage with your video in anyway except for watching the whole thing then leaving YouTube. (bad signal, YouTube wants people to click onto another video, not click off.) As you can see, after the views were delivered, there was no organic growth after, even if I got so many watch time hours and an insane retention.
I'll say this again guys, High Retention Views are only decent for ranking your videos for keywords. I did rank for keywords using these but they were very low competition.
You can buy HR views to maybe rank and then get organic views from search, but for competitive niches, that's going to cost a lot of money and then again these views can easily drop, which happened after 5 days of being delivered.
This is what I suggest to do for now, since YouTube is on a roll for being very strict. Make good content, thumbnails, titles and description, but also make videos similar to creators in your niche that already have viral videos.
I see many channels that went from 500 subs, getting a 100-400 views per video, then making videos on already successful videos, that blew their channels up to 30k subs within a month. You DONT need to buy views. And as you can see, buying really good High Retention views really did nothing for my video except give me some watch time hours.
A organic and active subscriber base is all you need to succeed on YouTube. so if you are able to rank for keywords with HR views, GREAT! But its going to cost some money and there's no guarantee that the views will stay.
I would really appreciate if you guys could leave your own input and thoughts, as I would really love to see what other people have to say as well! LET'S TALK ABOUT IT!
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