I have been trying to grow my YouTube channel for about 4 years now, and learned some interesting lessons by looking into the data. I show some examples from my videos of what happened and how to learn from the data. Ultimately, I’ve concluded that it’s very difficult if not impossible for small YouTube channels to get lots of views.

For small channels to get big views, it takes one of 3 things – A high ranking SEO term to hit, an external source linking to your video sending lots of views with high authority, or a very high click through rate (ctr). In order to have a high CTR however, you need to have a pretty sizable number of subscribers so it’s somewhat a chicken and egg scenario.

This leads to lots of videos being produced in a war of attrition – testing and experimenting with tons of content, titles, thumbnails, click bait, and whatever you can throw at it to see what sticks.