The 4 S’s of YouTube Success

And the first is one I will call subscribers. Now, subscribers are obviously a very important part of the YouTube ecosystem. They’re really the thing that drives channels to greatness over time. If you can get people to subscribe to your channel, keep watching your content, that’s how you’re going to really win. But the way in which YouTube recommends subscriptions is slightly more complicated than that.

Obviously, you have the subscriber feed in YouTube itself. So when people go to the YouTube platform, load up the app, if they subscribe to your videos, they’re going to get that content within their feed. They also may get notifications on their mobile device or in other areas. But most critically, the way in which you tend to get views from your subscribers is through the YouTube homepage.

And not only that, when you have content that seems to be appealing to your subscribers, that they’re watching a lot, that has very good retention, high click-through rates, YouTube will then tend to recommend this content to other people as well, other viewers that it thinks have a similar interest based on their own viewing history to your existing subscribers.

And so as you grow that subscriber count and as you grow interest from your subscribers in your content, you tend to find that you get a lot more views from the YouTube homepage.

And when any video goes viral, whenever it has that kind of explosion of views, it’s normally through the YouTube homepage as that primary mechanism. So this is often encapsulated in the YouTube platform under Browse features. But the YouTube homepage is where you will find that kind of real engine of fast growth for any particularly successful video.

And so what we can do here is think about subscribers as these three different areas in which you can get views.

And if you really start to think about creating content that’s going to get people coming back for more, so repeatable formats, content that really meets the interest of a particular group of people, and keep creating stuff that matches those two things, this is how you’re going to optimize for these particular areas.