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21d (edited) • 💬 General discussion
What happens after you publish your YouTube video
If you have questions about what happens after you publish your video, you might find this helpful. I’m warning you now, this is a long post, but I promise if you are new to YouTube, it’s worth the read! And FYI I used AI to break it into cohesive sections, but it’s still 100% my own words.
First, let’s go back to the uploading portion. As tempting as it might be to set your video to public right off the bat, this is not what I recommend. The reason for this is that it takes time for YouTube to process your video in standard definition, high definition, and 4K, as well as run their copyright checks. Standard definition usually processes first, and then some viewers might watch your video before the high definition or 4K processing is completed, meaning that they’ll think your video quality is not so great.
This period of time where your video is private is also when YouTube looks at all the components of your video—including the title, thumbnail, tags, description, and transcript—to see what the content in the video actually is. And I’m sure there are a host of other things they look at that we don’t even know about. But you want YouTube to be able to gather all of this data before the video actually goes live. Everyone has different feelings on this and it’s certainly not an exact science because we’re not really sure what YouTube is doing behind the scenes, but I typically like to leave my video private for at least 15 or 20 minutes, if not a few hours. Some people even like to schedule it to go live the next day.
Once Your Video is Live… Nothing Happens
At least that’s what it might seem like at first! If you uploaded a long-form video, it might be a couple hours or even longer before you start to see any impressions for this video. If it’s a YouTube short, this waiting period might not be as long, but I have seen it take as long as six hours.
So what is an impression? Well, an impression is every time that YouTube puts your video in front of the eyes of a potential viewer. Anytime they see your thumbnail—whether that be on the browse page, in search, in a list of recommended videos, or anywhere else—as soon as your thumbnail comes on the screen, YouTube counts that as an impression. You’ll start to see a few impressions trickle in at first, and you might think “what the heck is going on,” and then out of nowhere you might see a large surge in impressions relative to what came before it. This is YouTube testing your video with an initial audience. If you’re a small channel, then this first surge of impressions might only be between 100 and 500. But as you post more videos and gain some subscribers and viewers who have seen your videos before, then YouTube knows who to put your video in front of the next time, and so this initial surge might go into the thousands, tens of thousands, or even higher as you become a more established channel.
Now, impressions are great because every impression is a chance for someone to click on your video, but it doesn’t mean that they will actually click and watch. The quality of your title and thumbnail, how it stands out against all the other titles and thumbnails that the viewer is seeing, and how intriguing the topic is are going to be the key factors in whether or not they click on your video. The number of people who click on your video is represented by the click-through rate metric, or CTR. So if one person clicks on your video for every 10 impressions, then that would be a 10% CTR, and if three people click on your video for every 100 impressions, then that would be a 3% CTR. There is much debate over how much of a CTR you need for a video to go viral, but it is not the only factor—just a piece of the puzzle. That being said, when you’re just starting out, if you can get 5 to 7% CTR on a video, that’s usually pretty good, and if you can get 10% or above, that is fantastic.
What Happens Next?
After your first surge of impressions, you might see that you got a surge of views as well, and this is always exciting. But what comes next is not. After YouTube has finished testing your video with the initial audience, you will see your impressions and views typically flatline. Ooh, scary. Nobody ever likes to see this, but it’s just part of the process, and I promise if you take a breath, everything will be OK! After a period of time, YouTube will have analyzed the data collected from the first test, and then it will either choose to continue testing with a larger audience or it may give up. Our goal is to make videos that people like watching so that the data from the first test is good and the YouTube algorithm decides to continue pushing it to another larger audience to test it even further. So what other factors are they looking at?
Watch time is probably the most important metric after click-through rate, and I only say that it’s important after click-through rate because you can’t have watch time without them clicking on the video. But if 1% of people click on your video, but then they always watch 90% of your video, then eventually that video is going to do really well with a very specific audience. It may not get viral views, but YouTube will know exactly who to show it to in the future.
Be Careful Watching Your Own Video
Keeping this watch time in mind, you want to be careful about going to watch your own video after you post it. You also want to be careful about sharing it with friends and family because they might only watch a small portion of it, and that could harm the initial testing data that YouTube tries to gather on your video. Also, just because they are your friends and family does not mean they are your channel’s ideal viewer, and so that might confuse the algorithm even further. Personally, I would recommend waiting to share your video with friends and family until the video has been live for at least a week or two to give it a fair shot at performing well organically. After a week or two, if your video flatlines, then I think a little boost from some outside sources probably can’t hurt—at least that’s the way I think about it.
Now, a second ago I said that you need to be careful about watching your own video, and I want to expand on that further. If you are going to watch the video just to watch it, that’s cool, but make sure you watch all of it to the very end. While you’re there, you might as well click like because why not. If you are going to put a pinned comment on the video, then you should also be prepared to let the entire video play. You want to make sure that you don’t harm the success of your own video because you only watched 15 seconds of it while you were adding your pinned comment.
Understanding AVD and AVP
After that, YouTube looks at the average view duration for all people who have watched your video, and this number is represented as, you guessed it, the average view duration! The AVD will always be represented by an amount of time—for example, five minutes and 23 seconds, or 42 minutes and 17 seconds if you’ve got some monster long videos. But there’s another metric called AVP, which is your average view percentage, and that is what percentage of the video did people watch on average. When you’re just starting out, I would say anything over 25% is good, but if you can get that up to 50%, 75%, or 90%, that is where you can tell people are really loving your content. That’s how YouTube knows they love it, and that is one of the strongest things that will signal to the algorithm to push your video out to even more viewers, giving you a chance to go viral.
Other Signals That Help
There are other signals that can help boost the performance of your video, and that is how many people liked your video, as well as how many people subscribed to your channel while watching this video, and of course positive comments. I say positive comments because YouTube is smart enough to know the difference between a positive and a negative comment, and although one argument is that any press is good press, we do prefer press that is actually good. Now I’m not telling you to be afraid of negative comments, and I’m definitely not telling you to go in and remove them, although you are totally free to do that, especially if people are commenting inappropriate things. You have every right to remove comments that are not kosher. But don’t be petty and remove someone who is just disagreeing with a point you made in your video in a totally reasonable way.
End Screens and Playlists
The last thing that can help boost the performance of your video and the performance of your channel overall is if you have an end screen at the end of your video that links viewers to the next video that they should watch on your channel, and you actually get people to click on that and watch the following video. When YouTube sees people watch one video and then they go and click on another one of your videos and then they watch all of that video, this is a huge signal to the algorithm that you make videos that keep people on the platform, and YouTube loves that. So make sure that every video at the end has some kind of call to action, or CTA, which guides people towards watching the following video. Sometimes you might have a specific video in mind that you can point them to, or sometimes your CTA can be a little more generic. I’ve used lines such as “and if you enjoyed what we covered in this video, then you are really going to love what we talk about in this next video, so go ahead and click on this and I will see you in the next video.”
Another way to get people watching multiple videos is to utilize playlists so that when they finish watching one video, the next video will automatically play, and this is also a great signal to the algorithm. Plus, YouTube treats a playlist almost as a separate thing from the videos itself, so by having your video and then by also having your video in a playlist, you are giving YouTube two different ways to recommend your video. And by putting videos into a playlist together, you are signaling to the algorithm that these videos have something in common. You’re creating a relationship between them, and so it knows if somebody finds the one video outside of the playlist, maybe it should recommend another video from within that playlist to the viewer. Yet another strategy is to put a playlist as the end card on your video instead of just putting another video as the end card. If you can get people to click into a playlist, then you are more likely to have longer watch time from that viewer during that viewing session.
Wrap Up:
Phew! That was a lot of information, but I hope you found it valuable! If you have any questions or comments, or agree with what I said or disagree with what I said, I would love to hear about it, so please let me know by leaving a comment below this post. Happy filming!
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What happens after you publish your YouTube video
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