Tuesday, August 11, 2015

Dramatic fall-off in YouTube views

In the past I have never been slow to (boast) report about reaching milestones such as 7 or 8 million views on my YouTube channel. Since I founded the channel in 2006 the rate of growth has been steady and followed fairly distinct patterns. 

I expected (and hoped) for growth to continue - on 25th March 2014 the channel reached a record high daily view of 11,944 views. Had previous patterns been followed, this would have been exceeded later in 2014 and nearly doubled by March 2015 - not so. While late 2014 and early 2015 were similar to corresponding periods 12 months earlier, since May this year there has been quite a dramatic fall-off in views, dropping down to 2012 levels, and even lower than Christmas 2013 and 2014.


I have no explanation for this. In April/May this year I did introduce custom thumbnails and updated keywords/descriptions on the advice of my YouTube Partner Manager. I'd be really surprised if this caused the drop-off, as most of my views are the result of searches in YouTube and these changes should have improved that. Perhaps this fall-off was going to happen anyway if I had reached a saturation point. I have been adding more videos, and hope to keep this up in the next few months - but it has always taken time for a new video to gather views

There is some evidence in the chart above that the downward trend is reversing, this normally happens after the summer - so hopefully it will soon be in five figures a day again.

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