Why Your Videos Get Ignored (And How To Fix It) transcript

This quarter represents the choice everybody makes when they see a video on YouTube. It's a simple coin flip. Should I watch this video or not? Have you ever uploaded something that you felt like you put your blood, sweat, and tears into only to watch it go nowhere? Yeah, then you've probably felt this feeling of the game is rigged. A lot of people will instantly blame the algorithm for this happening, but today we're going to talk about how the algorithm is actually the last thing standing between you and people landing on heads and clicking on your video.

The first thing standing in the way is the person watching. They're making a judgment call about your video before they've even clicked on it. They have no information as to the quality of your content, and yet they've made a choice. There's actually six reasons why good videos get ignored on YouTube, but we're going to start with the one that kills most channels before they've even had a chance. Let's think about Charlie for a second.

Moist Critical, Penguin Zero. For those who don't know who this person is, they see a thumbnail pop up with a plain thumbnail, a person sitting in a room with a white t-shirt. But if that new viewer decides to click on that video anyway, they're going to find and what they expected to see, a guy sitting in his room in a white t-shirt talking about whatever's going on that day on the internet, whatever is of interest to him.

And when he does this, he gets 3 million views in 24 hours. Now, on the flip side, imagine you're a new creator who is publishing their second, third, fourth video. You've done animation, you've done editing, you've had your transitions built, you've color graded it, and it gets 52 views. When you compare the effort of that creator to the views Charlie's getting, the contrast feels really stark. But that's YouTube. Nobody's watching Charlie's videos and going, "Oh my gosh, the production value here is incredible." They watch his videos because he's familiar to them.

It's comfortable. It's automatic. That new creator is losing not because their video is worse than Charlie's. They're losing because they're a stranger. And unfortunately on YouTube, strangers don't get the benefit of the doubt, they get swiped past. So, what do you do about it? Well, you can't fake familiarity, but you can build it and consistently. Every time you post a new video, that is another deposit into that trust account.

The more they see your face, hear your voice, and recognize your style, the more familiar you become to them. Charlie didn't wake up with 3 million viewers overnight. He started zero like everybody else, but he showed up again and again until eventually watching him became a habit. Unfortunately, that's the only way through this one. All right, story time. It's January 2024. Target releases a limited edition pink Valentine's Day Stanley Cup.

And what happens next is one of the most unintentionally unhinged things the internet has ever produced. Fully grown adults trampling each other in the aisles of Target for a pink water bottle. Naturally, YouTube and TikTok and social media at large lost its collective minds over this. Because that one moment created waves so big, it didn't matter who you were or how many subscribers you had. If you were anywhere near this topic, if you managed to get your hands on one of these bottles, you won.

And look at what happened. Different creators, different angles, different subscriber accounts, hauls, rants, essays, drama, reviews, shorts, all riding the exact same wave, landing millions of views and creating outliers for themselves. That is trend bias. The algorithm, aka the audience, didn't care what your angle was, who you were, how good your content was. They just wanted to see more damn Stanley Cups. Stanley, earth to Stanley.

Whether your channel was about sustainability or you covered drama or you did lifestyle vlogs, this trend was carrying you. These moments come and go. They feel like a flash in the pan, but what can we learn from them? What can you do about this? Well, you don't have to choose between trends and quality. The smartest creators use trends as a vehicle, and there are two ways to do this. Number [music] one is expertise first.

Legal Eagle is a real practicing lawyer. So, when a massive trial breaks the news cycle, he doesn't scramble to become more relevant overnight. He's already a lawyer. He's already relevant. He attaches his existing expertise to the moment and lets the trend carry the distribution while his credibility does the rest. Then there's Dr. Todd Grande, a mental health counselor with over a million subscribers. And here's what's interesting about him.

He doesn't even chase trends. He just shows up so consistently on psychology, personality, and human behavior that when the Amber Heard trial takes over the internet or Kanye's behavior becomes a cultural conversation, the algorithm [music] finds it. The second approach though is pure timing. Peak Platinum's is a gaming channel in a pretty crowded niche on YouTube, platinum trophy hunting, 6,000 subscribers, 508 videos.

By any metric, a small channel. But when the Spider-Man brand new day trailer dropped and the internet lost its mind over it, they already had a Spider-Man platinum video ready. 39,000 views on a 6,000 subscriber channel. That is enormous. And it's the same idea with this Minecraft video. I survived 100 days in Avatar in Minecraft, posted right as Avatar 3 was dominating pop culture. The game didn't change, the format didn't change, it was just about timing. 790,000 views on a channel with 97,000 subscribers.

Was it luck or was this a creator who understood that the right cultural moment could carry their channel so much farther than posting 100 videos ever could. So, find a trending moment and attach your genuine expertise to it and allow the trend to handle the distribution while your content handles the retention. The flip side of trend bias is something that proves just how irrational our clicking behaviors are. Even if a video survives the trend window, time is quietly working against it.

And I don't even mean just in the eyes of viewers. I'm now talking about the algorithm itself. YouTube published data on how daily views change as a video ages. A brand new how-to video gets 88 views on average. At 1 year old, 7.7. At 3 years old, well, four. That's a 95% drop in a video's daily reach just because the video got a little older. And that's not even a theory, YouTube has actually confirmed this in their own documentation.

The algorithm favors recency, especially when it comes to shorts. Newer content always seems to win and that's not always fair. Think about your basic fitness tutorial. How to do the perfect push-up. The human body hasn't exactly had a software update in a while, right? Maybe there's a few different methods out there, but the biomechanics of actually doing a push-up haven't changed since before YouTube was invented. But without me sitting here explaining it to you, I bet you this coin that [music] if you were doing a search for a similar tutorial and you saw a masterclass from 2016, >> [music] >> you would ignore it over the more recent videos because you saw the little gray 10 years ago timestamp underneath the content.

If the perfectly average video that masterclass was competing against was said it was uploaded 3 weeks ago, you are more likely to click that one. I don't necessarily mean you specifically, but we are psychologically conditioned to view anything that's old as obsolete. It doesn't matter if the lesson is about literal biology. If something is old, it just automatically feels less reliable than the new thing. And big creators on YouTube know this.

They know that you are less likely to click something if it's older. And you've probably seen this trick a time or two. I know I've fallen for it myself. In fact, we're guilty of playing this trick, too. You go out and you search for some advice. How to start a YouTube channel in 2025. You click on it and something smells a little off. You scroll down a little bit and you see that this video is actually uploaded in 2022.

Turns out the creator didn't actually make a new video. They just log in every year and update the title of the old video. 2023, 2024, 2025. And sometimes it just makes sense to do this. If we leave that video there with the old date on it, people will maybe see it and simply not click on it because there's so many other videos out there that are updated, that have been uploaded more recently, that talk about a similar thing.

From our perspective, it makes sense to do this because if the video has good information in it that isn't expired due to YouTube updates and the changing landscape, then saying it's how to grow on YouTube in 2025 when it was uploaded in 2022 is accurate if nothing's really changed. Not changing it means people could scroll right past it. So, what's the right answer? Well, there's two pretty easy things to do. One of them is to be careful with your language.

Making a video and saying right now in 2026 or this year puts kind of an automatic expiration date on the content. If your language is timeless, the content stays relevant longer. The second thing you can do is to update that old video. Go back and give it a new title and a fresh thumbnail and show viewers and YouTube alike that this video is still relevant today. But the third harder thing you can do, and the thing I recommend the most, is actually go in and make a new video on that topic.

This is of course if there's something new to say. Go in and figure out why that video did so well. Look at the comments from that old video, and then make the next version of it. Update the titles, tighten up the pacing, and add new information, things you learned that fill in the gaps from reading the comments of that old video. This keeps recency bias from being your opponent. You're actively working with it and using it to your advantage.

For this next one, let's discuss a slightly embarrassing fact about how our brains actually work. I want to think about the last time you were going to make an objectively terrible decision. Maybe you were going to buy something you couldn't afford on credit, or you were going to contact an ex. And before you do, maybe you decide to talk to a friend or family member for some advice. Do you choose the friend or family member who's going to give you good advice, or do you go for the person who you're pretty confident would tell you kind of what you want to hear?

You're looking for the person in your life who's going to tell you, "Honestly, go for it." Because surprise, surprise, we're all humans. We love it when our feelings are validated. We're not searching for the best answer, we're searching for our answer. And when a video pops up that tells people the opposite of what they want to hear, they're likely not to click. But the scariest part of this isn't just that viewers will already do this, it's that YouTube and social media algorithms are actively helping them do this.

But here's where it gets really interesting because we actually have some data on this. To pull this data, we used the VidIQ MCP attached to Claude. This is something you have access to if you'd like to check it out, link down below. But basically, we looked at a sample of 137 million YouTube videos from 2025 to 2026. We looked at how title framing affected views, and the results were interesting if not a little uncomfortable.

A neutral how-to title, just pure information, no opinion, gets 650 median views. That's the baseline. Now watch what happens when you validate a belief. Thing is dead/dying/ruining something. 1,371 views. Why did that title structure get double the amount of views? Well, that's because there were plenty of viewers out there who were already kind of feeling that way, and your video was confirming what was in their gut and so they clicked.

Thing is backslash we were right, 1,215 views. It's the same idea in reverse. You're telling somebody that the thing they already believe is actually true. They're not crazy and now they feel vindicated. That's why they click. But this last example, the one that obliterates everything [music] else, I was wrong about thing, 3,181 median views. Nearly five times that of our neutral how-to title baseline. Think about why that is.

In this instance, that title works for anyone who thought that the mainstream opinion of a thing was wrong and they've just been waiting for somebody, anybody to finally say it out loud. It kind of sucks, but the most clicked on videos on YouTube aren't the most informative ones, they're the most validating ones. So, what do you do with this information? Well, first of all, don't be dishonest, but do pick a lane. Lead with your conclusion, not your question.

Package a video around a belief that someone already holds or one that someone's been waiting for you to challenge. All the nuance in the world can live inside the video, but that title and thumbnail, the front door to your video, needs to be clear. It needs to be a door for somebody specifically. And even when you nail the framing and your title is perfect and your topic is timely, there's still one thing standing in the way between you and the click and it's so shallow that it's almost embarrassing.

Let's call this one view count bias. Let's imagine it this way. You're taking a walk downtown and there are two restaurants side by side that are relatively similar, similar prices, except the difference is one of them has a line outside the door and the tables are all full. The other one is a total ghost town. Which one are you choosing? Might depend on how hungry you are. You might take the chance on the empty one, but for the most part, people are going to be very curious about the one that has the line outside the door.

This phenomenon is happening right now with every single viewer on YouTube who sees a page of videos and they're trying to make a decision on which one to watch. High view count, must be worth watching. Can't be that bad. Low view count, I don't know if I want to take the risk. Not because anyone actually looks at the quality of that video, but because a number is telling them that no one's watching this. And here's where it gets interesting because the low view count bias doesn't necessarily only affect videos.

This can also impact which channels people trust. And some creators have actually figured out how to exploit this. I do not agree with this tactic nor condone it, but take a look at what's happening here. These are real YouTube channels. Look at their names. Those aren't view counts, those are channel names. And they're designed to show up in search results and look exactly like view counts do in the YouTube interface.

If you're not paying attention, your brain is going to read the channel name, the number, the timestamp, and they're going to process all of that social proof before they've even really registered what they're looking at. This is a calculated exploit of the exact bias we're talking about. In my opinion, this behavior should be bannable. But zooming back out here, I want to get into the nuance because this is important.

View count bias isn't going to hit every single channel or video the same exact way. For example, if I see a breaking news story from a channel I don't know, and that video happens to only have 800 views and it was released several hours ago, I might not take a risk on it. I'm going to wait to see if someone who is a larger channel that I've already heard of before covers that topic because I automatically trust them more.

But if it's a channel doing a fun challenge or sharing a cool recipe or just having a funny reaction to something, and that thumbnail works and the title makes sense, I may click on it regardless of how many views it has. When it comes to entertainment content, the stakes are pretty low. The video isn't going to influence my opinion on a world event. It's just something fun to watch. So, in my opinion, view count bias is content dependent.

When it comes to news information, the stakes are pretty high and I'd like to see a high view count. When it comes to entertainment, I'm not as bothered. All right, one more bias to go and this is one that not enough people are talking about because it's not about psychology, it's not about the algorithm, it's not even about timing. It's about expectation. Number six is length bias. Say you stick a 20-minute deep dive in front of somebody who wants to watch a YouTube short.

They're in for 3 seconds and then they're gone. On the flip side, let's say you give a 60-second tutorial to somebody who kind of needs a full 15-minute breakdown. Now they feel cheated. You've addressed the wrong room. I can show you this in action on our own channel. We posted this short, which was one YouTube setting tip. It was 60 seconds, it got 3.1 million views. We also posted a full breakdown of 16 settings, which was 15 minutes of genuinely useful information and it got 354,000 views.

That's nine times fewer views on a video that took much, much longer to make. Now before you say it, yes, shorts get distributed around this platform differently. The algorithm pushes them to a completely different audience. That's definitely a thing because let's flip it completely. Kurzgesagt. If you don't know them, they're an animated science channel with 24 million subscribers. Their videos run anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes.

They're dense, they're deep, there's no shortcuts and they consistently pull two, five, 20, sometimes 50 million views per video. If Kurzgesagt pushes a 60-second short out on the Fermi paradox and they leave it at that, their audience feels cheated. People watch this channel for the full deep dive. They want the music, the animation, the feeling of actually understanding something complex that they didn't before by the end of the video.

Just doing one short on that topic and leaving it at that wouldn't paint the complete picture. And that's what we need to talk about. That's the point. Length isn't the enemy. Mismatched length is. But there's also something else I want to point out here about watch time specifically because if a viewer sits through an entire 15-minute video, that viewer is exponentially more valuable to a channel than somebody who watches a 60-second short.

This 27-minute video has 43,000 views, which is modest on the surface, but it generated 5,200 hours of watch time. This was huge for our entire channel because the people who watched that video, they clicked on it and they stayed, which is a really strong signal to YouTube that this is content worth pushing. It also, in my opinion, nearly guarantees that those viewers would absolutely have seen our next upload. We're in their watch history at that point and YouTube knows full well that when they watch our content now, they sit down, they watch it for quite a long time.

So before you decide on the length of your videos, take a broader look at what's working in your niche. How long do those videos typically run? Are they shorts or are they long-form videos? Think about that from the viewers' perspective. This is what they come to expect from content in this space. Now, here's the thing. Knowing why good videos get ignored only matters if you have the right foundation underneath your channel.

And that's why I made this video here about how you can take a YouTube channel and grow it forever, not relying on the luck of one viral video. So, go watch that next. Otherwise, all of the stuff we just talked about isn't going to do you much good.