Getting youtube views?

F

firehawk

Veteran
When it comes to helping clients get more youtube and facebook views, short of luck does it pretty much come down to paying a company specializing in this to help it happen?
I've watched some successful youtubers build up a channel over time (years) until they have millions of views but working on it for years is not really an answer a client wants to hear. There is so much out there that someone can make good content but still go virtually unseen.
Thoughts?
 
Yes, it's all over the place...truly no formula to follow.

Some work very hard and get nowhere and some work very little and get very far, and then there is everything in between.

No company can really help you much.

Celerity endorsements like 'The Rock' telling his 200 million followers on Instagram to check this out would help...
 
I was having a convo with my brother about it. In some ways he has the potential to create a channel but the amount of time and effort might get you very little. I'm sure there are places you could get tips but it's still very hard. A lot of the modern day platforms are very attractive because you have the freedom to create and post content. The issue is only a few at the top get the views. Even if you manage to create good content, get views, to consistently follow that up to generate equally compelling content to build a following is daunting.
 
I got more views on my first "on topic" post than on the subsequent ones. The channel was probably throttled. I thought I was going to be a star.

As to clients, if you got one video, it ain't gonna do much.
 
One of the key things seems to be uploading new content frequently...several times a week or at least once a week. Something every few weeks or months may not cut it.
 
The big time YouTubers can get away with once or twice a month, but I'd concur one video per week is probably universally recommended for most and twice a week for the up-and-coming whom are gaining some traction (100K subs, 250K subs, etc).

The field you choose (or you maybe have no choice if it's your hobby) is so so so important because some require much less work and effort and research than others.
 
I've been watching a lot of political videos from Russia and Ukraine (and sometimes Belarus) lately. The cost of making a talking head/narrative clip is very low. The most popular vloggers produce 4-6 clips per day (!). They may get 15,000-150,000 views per clip but multiply that 4-6 times and and you're getting some serious numbers.

I assume the top ones have several writers and the on-air talents. Clips last anywhere from three to fifteen minutes. Some are very fact based; others will give extensive background before jumping into the main point.
 
Actually that's a good point...the type of channel (not just its content) matters too.

I watch tons of sports highlights and some of those channels can have over 50, 100 short videos in one day depending on what's going on in the world.

(Obviously that's a bigger operation than most solo creators.)
 
I found one political vlogger from Ukraine getting about half a mil views per day off his 4-6 videos but some videos end up getting half a mil by themselves within a week or so. Short form helps too. His shortest clips are under five min.

Of course, then there's Joe Rogan and his (alleged) $30M/Y contract. For those who thought that long form could no longer work

tenor.gif
 
He has a personality and got in at a good time - built his brand up - but I'm not big into long form myself. But I guess if you like someone enough and their format and presentation, the longer the better.

Personally, I love to watch dozens of 2-3 minutes per day.

Anything over 3 minutes really tests my patience unless I am trying to learn something very complicated (like certain software tutorials).
 
Peter C. said:
I was having a convo with my brother about it. In some ways he has the potential to create a channel but the amount of time and effort might get you very little. I'm sure there are places you could get tips but it's still very hard. A lot of the modern day platforms are very attractive because you have the freedom to create and post content. The issue is only a few at the top get the views. Even if you manage to create good content, get views, to consistently follow that up to generate equally compelling content to build a following is daunting.
Click to expand...

I find the best artistic visual quality and over all content quality to be found on Vimeo. A hidden gem. :) The YT rat-race for views is a bit much sometimes and even with Twitch as in the constant husseling for money is a bit much at times. :)

//Making money on YT? IDK. :)
 
Last edited:
From my research, YouTube is really no different than FB or IG and the only way to gain a lot of viewers, unless you experience growth through a viral or celebrity endorsement, is to literally buy them. From what I have read, many of the videos you see with huge viewer
numbers are essentially bought and paid for.

I will say that my daughter dabbled around with her YT channel for a while. She was vegan and made a video in our kitchen about how to prepare Jackfruit and use it as a Pork Substitute. The video sat there with a
few hundred views for six months but than inexplicably last year and into Quarantine this year, her video skyrocketed to 75k views. She has no idea why and none of her other videos have caught any traction beyond just a few hundred
views. She now has over 1,000 subscribers and her views on that one video keep growing. In YT terms, these numbers, of course, are still tiny but considering she just put it out there and built up 75k views, I thought
that was interesting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JG38hjUkiuc&t=55s
 
I always wonder just how much money is really being taken home by these Youtubers? It seems to me that Google has built the perfect mousetrap. Design a system where people are jumping for the opportunity to run around and make you money. Internet attention seems so fleeting that how can one expect to keep the entertainment levels up? Subscriptions do not vanish if people choose not to visit the channel anymore. Maybe that is coming up... :)

I am thankful for the system though as we have a lot more access to things/info than before. Which is Google's objective (along with profit).
 
Off Google search (hmm, I wonder if that even tries to be accurate), one can make $3,000-$5,000 off one million views. That doesn't count any sponsor money or, as in the case of Gerald Undone, free gear. There's also presumably the "subscriber" renting, where a popular channel gets some scrumptious offers to mail advertising to their followers.

And folks like Tony Northrup make good money selling the tutorials. In photo-video, that seems like the best way to cash in on popularity. You got 1,000,000 subscribers, even 1% of that is 10,000 tutorials. At $35-$50/per - chump change for those who drop well over $1K on a camera and lenses - that's big money.
 
It is money in the long tail. Once a clip gets viewers it can do so for many years.
By the way it is just hard working to maintaining a youtube channel, just business.
 
Last edited:
puredrifting said:
From my research, YouTube is really no different than FB or IG and the only way to gain a lot of viewers, unless you experience growth through a viral or celebrity endorsement, is to literally buy them. From what I have read, many of the videos you see with huge viewer
numbers are essentially bought and paid for.

I will say that my daughter dabbled around with her YT channel for a while. She was vegan and made a video in our kitchen about how to prepare Jackfruit and use it as a Pork Substitute. The video sat there with a
few hundred views for six months but than inexplicably last year and into Quarantine this year, her video skyrocketed to 75k views. She has no idea why and none of her other videos have caught any traction beyond just a few hundred
views. She now has over 1,000 subscribers and her views on that one video keep growing. In YT terms, these numbers, of course, are still tiny but considering she just put it out there and built up 75k views, I thought
that was interesting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JG38hjUkiuc&t=55s
Click to expand...

Check the video's analytics and see if anyone embedded it anywhere.

That's almost always the case for a surge in traffic.

___

As far as money, making hundreds of thousands/millions (for the bigger players) was much easier before the AD-pocalypse years ago in the golden age of YouTube.

Now everything is more controlled and regulated through the algorithms and I imagine YouTube has their internal preferences and relationships as well.
 
Bassman2003 said:
I always wonder just how much money is really being taken home by these Youtubers?
Click to expand...
It's like anything else -- the top 0.1% are making millions, the bottom 99.9% are making pennies off their views.

The base metric is that a view is worth 1/10 of a penny (give or take, depending on a million different factors, but on average it's about 1/10 of a penny from all I can find). So you need a thousand views to make a single dollar from ad revenues. A hundred thousand views sounds like a truckload, right? It's a hundred bucks. A million views, wow, that's a viral sensation spreading across the world, right? Yay, there's a whole thousand dollars.

I worked for about five years building up a channel in an unrelated field, got almost 50,000 subscribers and over 9 million views. Google still sends me a check for $150 every month. I think I can retire now.

Of course, I picked the wrong field. If I'd done makeup tips, and had some seriously actually interesting techniques to demonstrate, and put up videos every day, I'd probably have 50 million subscribers and be making a fortune off sponsors, product placement, and free product, and then you add in direct sales of some product or tutorial or something, and it can add up to seriously real money.

Either makeup tips, or video game playthroughs, those two fields seem astoundingly successful.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top