I've been promoting my channel on YouTube. Here's what happened!

To the person reading this, you’re gonna get a successful Youtube Channel, I believe in you

The reason why everyone has had a loss in viewership, and a lot of content creators are leaving, is because YouTube now wants you to buy viewership and platform space. I said this same thing in the Think Media live chat, and they kicked me out and scolded me for it, so what does that tell you?

We are gonna make it guys! Keep grinding!

Yes, I've tried it. Views and subscribers increase substantially. One bad thing. View duration drops significantly. Unfortunately, YouTube doesn't promote to a target audience. Promotes to everyone. Not everyone will like and may turn away. I was surprised how My view duration decreased substantially. Something fishy. Also if your looking to get monetized. The views, subs from the promotion does not count towards this

I'm fairly new here and have been using YouTube promotions. I understand that these views are counted if the duration is over 30 seconds, but do they count towards monetization too? I meant if YouTube pays for those views too.

Another question I have - I am not sure if you've seen this issue or not. When I do YouTube Promotions, they only seem to run overnight (North America's night-time that is). My audience in my testing has been English-speakers in US and Canada. But the promos only seem to be active overnight like between midnight and (say) 4am, my time. I'll run a promo for 7 days and it only seems to be active during those hours every night - never during the daytime. Any ideas on how or why YouTube decides WHEN the promo will run time-of-day wise? It seems like I might have better results if the promo ran during the day (North America time). Thanks again!

Great walk-through! I think something I’d like to see from Youtube are more Targeting options besides locations—like topics & interests. But great tutorial nonetheless! 🙌🏾

I am now torn between using the promotion feature and just simply creating in feed ads directly in google ads manager. The subscribe button on the promotion campaign is intriguing.

I think most people are negative on the subject. Just create good content and have faith that your promotion would go well. Who cares about retention? Youre paying for views and subscribers right? You will lose subscribers if you don’t keep posting. Most often original content (3 videos every 90 days for starters) and forget about bots and being afraid that your numbers will tank: just create good content and post!

This is a great find! New subscriber here. Thank you for the data!

The problem is that these views usually have very low avg view time and tanks the overall numbers for the video. I am not sure if this has any negative impact on the channel or the video itself. Otherwise I find that it brings good number of subs (not sure about the quality of those subs). You can't control the type of ad as well, sometimes it's display sometimes it's in stream.

Nice and interesting stuff, man, thanks for your test and advices! I've been monetized from 3 weeks now, was good 10 days and now I'm going really down! Cheers and good luck everybody!

This is a great video which break’s everything down in a very easy to understand way. I’ve also tested the promotion feature in studio with great results. I only set my budget to $10 so it costs roughly $0.60 per day. Definitely helps in my opinion to help get your new content out there for a small creator

Well, I subscribed because you spoke real common sense.

Based on your last experiment, just plop down $300k and voila you could have over 1 million subscribers in no time. Thanks for sharing. Gave me a lot to think about.

This was a really great video and I need to think about it. I know it sounds strange, but part of me likes a small barrier to subscribing (e.g. need to click on the video, then hit subscribe on the screen) because you'll likely build a quality subscriber viewership that way - people who are genuinely interested in the channel and content. I wish I knew how these subs acted when compared to other subs but that data is too granular. But great video nonetheless and I will try this out vs the in-feed ads and then make a gut call on cost-per-subscriber.

🤔Interesting, you said you are promoting a video that didn't do very well on its own. My theory is you should promote the best performing video you have, because in the YT game, the more your video goes up in quality in a linear fashion, the rewards (views, subs) go up exponentially.

Thank you for testing and showing us the result. The comments are also inspiring. I think I will try this promo one time to see how it works for me. ☺

I appreciate your video. My channel had a respectable amount of viewers and subscribers in the past. However, when I promoted a single video on You Tube, the channel completely stopped moving (it was shadow banned), which meant that the number of subscribers and views had completely decreased. Any suggestions on how I might return it to normal?

Thank you for this!