The number people will skip past here is the watch time. 166K hours across 1.6M views works out to roughly six minutes average view duration, and that's the thing actually driving the revenue - the RPM follows retention, not raw views. Curious what you're doing in the first thirty seconds to hold that, because most channels at this view count are sitting closer to two or three minutes.

Congrats on shipping. Two things that matter more than raw upvotes on launch day: the first few hours set your ranking for the whole day, and comment threads count for more than a silent vote does - so it's worth nudging people to actually say something rather than just click. Reply to every single comment yourself, fast. That thread is what people read when they land on the page later, and a launch with ten real conversations reads far better than one with a hundred anonymous votes.