Why The Algorithm “Hates” You transcript

If you are stuck and none of your videos are getting views, there is a clear reason why and you can absolutely change it. Feel like I need to point out this is my bed sheet and I'm trying to get rid of the echo in this room right now. So hopefully it's not too bad. First of all, I have been where you are. I had a 6-month period of time that I was posting videos consistently and I thought they were the best that I could possibly make.

And every week I lost subscribers when people were reminded that I existed. It sucked, but it's been like five years now and I now know how to break out of that. And I've helped a bunch of other people break out of it as well. And I want to show you some examples of how you can break out of this like normal people jail of being a small channel doing your absolute best and just nothing clicks. No matter what you do, it's just not clicking.

You think the algorithm hates you, you've been shadowbanned, all this stuff. That is not the reason. You are the reason, which is awesome news because that means that you can also take control, change it, get your channel back on track. So, let's start by just talking a little bit about the algorithm. First off, the algorithm loves you. It is your friend. It wants you to succeed because when you succeed, YouTube makes money.

It is on your team. So, stop blaming it for everything and just assume if a video does terribly, it is your fault. I'm going to show you some examples of myself and other people. And it's my fault. Every time I get a bad video, it is 100% my fault. If I look back a month later, a week later, a year later, I can pretty much explain why that video did bad where at the time I'm like, "Oh, this sucks. The algorithm hates me.

I don't know what happened." But if you like take the emotions out of it and you look back later, you can generally figure out why the video didn't do well. And hopefully you'll be able to do this by the end of this video. And just kind of as an example that YouTube is really on your side from my own personal experience, I've had this channel, which is new, uh, get a video with 50,000 views in the past couple weeks. I've had another channel, a totally different niche, get 100,000 views.

I've had my wife's channel, which I kind of helped to manage, get half a million views in one video. My main channel obviously has gotten like 50 60 million views. So, to start off with, before I show some smaller channels doing this exact same thing, I want to show myself uh when I first started YouTube and what I did wrong and how I could avoid that and what I do now. So, when I started off, I didn't exactly know what I wanted to talk about.

I wanted to talk about finance and investing. That was my idea because that's what I was into at the time, but that was just what I was trying to do. And as you can see, this is my first video. It's 3 minutes long. It doesn't have any edits cuz I didn't know how to edit. I didn't know what a thumbnail was. This is a screenshot from inside the video. Looking back, none of these videos really deserve to get views. This one was okay.

Mostly because this thumbnail is not a picture that I took. It's something that I downloaded from somewhere. But a lot of this was just throwing spaghetti at the wall, seeing if something stuck. And then eventually when we get to right here, this is the first video that ever did well on my channel. Frugal living for early retirement. I never really thought I would be talking about frugal living. Honestly, I was just showing my lifestyle, how I was living at the time.

I was just trying something new and it ended up really clicking and it's because I literally looked up a keyword, the keyword frugal living. It had a great Vid IQ score and the rest of the content on there was very bad. It was very just loweffort, low quality and I just put way more effort than everybody else and that video did well cuz I found out hole in the market. But besides the next video, which I had already had planned, none of these other ones really did great.

Some of these numbers are skewed now because it's been 6 years, but most of these did not do very well at the time. And that's because my channel was not clear and I wasn't going with what was working. I had a podcast on there. I was doing apartment renovations. I was doing the 4% rule, highinterest bank accounts. And all of these kind of sound like they're similar, like they were in my head, but they were also a little bit all over the place.

And I even had like a cooking video in there that I've since taken down. Then I had this other video on minimalism that did really well. And a lot of this time I was still figuring out YouTube. But eventually I became one of the top people in the both the keywords minimalism and frugal living because that's what YouTube was telling me that people liked. Whenever I talked about frugal living and minimalism, it did really well.

Whenever I talked about almost anything else I talked about, it didn't do that great. So even though I didn't ever think I would be talking about minimalism and that's what I would be known for and that type of stuff, I kept trying new things until I found something that stick. If you think about minimalism and I tried living like Matt Davevelare week, which is that video that popped off, that has almost nothing to do with anything I was making content about at the time.

I was doing finance and investing accounts and things like that had nothing to do with minimalism and a challenge like that. But because of that and how my entire channel is built around minimalism, because of one video that did well. And when you have one video that does well, it is much easier to ride that wave than it is to keep fighting against it. So now you can see anytime I mention the keywords frugal living or minimalism, my videos did a lot better than when I did other stuff even though I was into the other stuff too.

It was mostly the minimalism and saving money content uh that was actually doing well. And if we flash forward to today, I like minimalism and frugal living. I still talk about that 5 years later. But sometimes the algorithm tells you that's not what you're allowed to do here and it's actually going to hurt your channel if you keep fighting me. Recently I did a video on how to sell a digital product in 5 hours. I'm really into that.

I talk a lot about that on this channel here actually. But I wanted to see how it would do on my main channel and I posted it there and it did terrible. Like absolutely terrible. The video before and after that did really good because they were about the things that I am known for on that channel now. So even though this video I think was just as good qualitywise, it had almost no chance of success looking back at it because when a video is served out, it's going to go to your most recent subscribers which are going to be minimalism and basic finance people saving money people. and they're not generally the target demographic of a very very specific niche of people who want to build a digital product.

So niche. So looking back, that video had very low chance of success. It does show up in search, so like over the long run, it might do okay, but it's just not going to bang right off the bat because it's so niche for my audience. And that's actually why I started the second channel, because I could say that the algorithm hates me because I've had a bunch of videos that have not done great recently. But in reality, I was getting away from my core.

And when I went back to my core, which is minimalism and saving money, my videos do great. And so there is kind of this trap that you can get stuck in of like you can only talk about a few things on your channel. But if you're okay with that and you're passionate about all the things that you talk about, then you can just separate it. You can have like I talk about this side of my life on this channel and I talk about this side of my life on this channel or I don't get to talk about this side of my life, but I I I'm going to run this and it could still turn into a massive business just talking about certain areas.

I want to show you a couple examples here. This is one of my students, Noah, who was in uh the Fiverr YouTuber, which we're about to open up. You can join the wait list down below. Uh not trying to turn this into an ad for that, but I've had two people leave their jobs through that already, and I really want it to be more. So, I'm trying to make it you. I wanted it to be you. But he kind of came back to YouTube and he had this random video that did well.

He didn't know why. It was just a random outlier cast iron skillets video, but he really wanted to make self-improvement content. So, he kept making self-improvement content. 1,000 views, 300 views, um 1,500 views, 1,500, 16, you know, like like very low views. And then one of the things uh that we teach is looking back at outlier videos like what had happened to me and saying, "Okay, the audience is clearly interested in this.

This met a need in the market. People are interested and they're intrigued and there's a desire for this type of content. Do I want to make this type of content and should I make more?" So he said, "Yes, you know what? I had this one outlier video. I'm into cast iron skillets. Let me try another one." got a million views in like a month, pretty close. And then since then, he's said, "Okay, I know I wanted to make self-improvement content.

Clearly, that's not working." And I can either keep slamming my head against the wall. He can He could have just never made another cast iron skillet video. Kept making self-improvement. Kept not really having them do well, even though the videos are really good, just because that previous video kind of screwed up the algorithm for him. But since he kind of embraced what had worked and continued to try new things, he eventually landed on this cast iron skillet and now he can get uh way more views than he was doing before.

And usually you only have like one out of 10 videos that kind of pop off, get this type of viral. Um but he's going to have, you know, another one and probably in the next couple months that's going to pop off and get, you know, 10,000, 50,000, 100,000, a million views because now he is working with the algorithm instead of against it. Another good example is uh Natasha. So, she started doing minimalism, like a bunch of kind of random things, honestly.

Um, there's I think other ones that she deleted cuz she had a bunch of like investing stuff, too. But she was really just trying to figure out what was going to work for her and nothing was really sticking. It was a couple years of making videos and making no money at all. But she kept sticking with it, kept trying new things, kept talking about things that she was interested in and trying things slightly outside of that.

And then right in here is actually when she joined our cohort as well. She's part of our team now. and she had this first video pop off, get 50,000 views. This one got 200,000 views. This one got 50,000 views. And she realized that, okay, what I wanted to talk about was maybe some of this other stuff, but these floor sitting videos and floor desk videos really popped off for her. So now her entire channel is based around floor sitting.

She has digital products about floor sitting. She is uh been making thousands of dollars every single month from affiliates for floor uh desks and floor beds and things like that. So, she's going to be one of the top affiliates and and people who who own this little niche of floor sitting and floor desks. And with 10,000 subscribers, I think she made close to $5,000 last month because she stopped fighting the algorithm and just went with what was working.

After continued trying new things, she realized what she was doing wasn't working. So, she changed her thumbnail. She changed what she was talking about a little bit. She kept experimenting with new things, not just doing the same thing over and over. And not having it click, she realized like, "Okay, what I'm doing is not working. I need to adapt and try new areas. I need to change my thumbnails. I need to change my style." Until she eventually found a a thumbnail pattern that worked.

As you notice, like these are very clean, simple thumbnails. She's great at thumbnails. Now, when she started, these are really bad. Um, sorry to bad thumbnails. They're just covered with text. There's so much going on. They're not really realistic. They're just kind of crazy looking. Just like they're very cluttered feeling, I guess. And now they are simple and very, very clean. Especially like these ones are so clean and so easy to understand what's going on.

And yes, not every single one of these is going to click. Like you see her floor sitting ones, floor bed ones do great. How to get ahead of 95% of people. If this was on a different channel, it might do great, but because it's on this channel, it's going to have a very low chance of success. So even good content on a channel that doesn't have an audience that wants that type of content just isn't going to go well. So the algorithm doesn't hate you.

Generally the people that I see and I've seen hundreds of creators have this similar problem is like they're doing the same thing over and over again and it's not working. Generally it's like okay stop whatever you're doing. Make better thumbnails first of all. Think about your ideas way more than you're doing. Probably learn the skills of YouTube a little bit better. But ultimately, if you're saying like, I really want to talk about this and it's just not clicking, then you maybe have to experiment in how you're talking about it in the subjects around it.

Might have to do different areas of your life. Again, I never thought I would talk about minimalism decluttering ever. I never thought that would be a thing, but because that's kind of what worked. I followed what worked and I was able to build a, you know, 600,000 people on that channel. So, if you're just trying to force something, force something, force something and it's not working, it's going to change. Like even this channel right here, the videos that take off are going to determine what this channel ends up being.

I can disregard those and really just stay hyperfocused on what I want to talk about. And that's actually a different strategy of just targeting your exact group of people. It depends on what your ideal is for making money. If your idea is like you have a high ticket course or something like that, then you don't want a ton of views. You want the right people who are going to buy. If your goal is like Natasha's where you want to get affiliate sales, then you want those specific people. you make way more from like a,000 people watching something about a floor sitting desk than you do 10,000 or even 50,000 or 100,000 people talking about some other random thing.

So really your monetization strategy has a lot to do with if you just kind of roll with what YouTube wants you to do or not. So again, if you've been trying really hard, your videos might suck. You might not be good enough at making videos yet. Your thumbnails probably suck. That's most people's drawback. Or you might be just trying the same thing. If you tried it 20, 30, 50 times and it's not working, move to something else and eventually that will stick.

Or I've even just done like what I did with this channel. I just started a new channel. Instead of trying to get my existing channel into what I'm currently, you know, interested in talking about, I just let it stay with what it wants to do. And I start a new channel hyperfocused on finding literally you and helping you leave your job uh through YouTube, which literally after having a couple people uh be able to do it, that's literally all I want to do now.

And it's super fun and that's what I like talking about. So, uh, I got to build my office. But, um, thanks for watching. Feel like I was slouching that whole video. I got to I got to figure out how to sit better on the floor. I have a desk. Why wasn't I sitting there? Oh well.