There are tons of reasons you want to be on YouTube, building an audience, and getting discovered in the YouTube algorithm.
YouTube is the second most popular website in the world, and YouTube videos can appear in Google Search results. This makes a YouTube presence a combined social media and SEO strategy. Entire businesses can be built on YouTube.
But, most YouTube videos suck.
Maybe “suck” is an unkind or imprecise word. It might be more accurate to say that the majority of YouTube videos don’t find an audience. That’s probably because they’re not good videos.
In this article, we’re going to talk about what makes YouTube videos good, how to identify if you have the potential to create them, what to do if you don’t, and why a poorly executed YouTube strategy can hurt your business.
Why It’s Difficult To Succeed On YouTube
There are 14 billion videos on YouTube and 65.4 million YouTube creators. Only 21% of all YouTube channels have more than 1,000 subscribers. 1,000 subscribers is the threshold to apply for advertising revenue.
YouTube represents a huge opportunity, but capitalizing on it isn’t easy. You need to be in the top 21% of the platform just to start earning advertising revenue.
To put it another way, you need to be better than 79% of all other creators as a baseline – better than all the hobbyists, enthusiasts, amateur and professional filmmakers, businesses, essayists, and commentators in that broad segment.
Creative Talent Is Difficult To Develop Or Find
Making good YouTube videos is hard because not everyone has the stuff. If you want to succeed on YouTube, your first question needs to be: do you have the stuff?
“The stuff” can be lots of things. Drive and passion, experience and knowledge, charisma, technical skills, artistic vision…it’s a long list, and anything could be on it as long as it gives you an edge.
There needs to be something unique about you or your business that will translate well into a creative, entertainment-focused medium.
What this means for businesses is that producing good YouTube videos is expensive. The kind of people who can make good YouTube videos, and their time, cost a lot of money.
YouTube’s Algorithm Pulls Videos For Users
Many people mistakenly assume that YouTube’s algorithm “pushes” videos out to audiences. As I explain in my article about YouTube SEO, YouTube’s algorithm finds videos for users, not users for videos.
It’s more than a semantic difference in word order. The algorithm pulls videos for users, finding what they might like. It doesn’t take your video and try to find an audience to push it to. It’s user-first, not video-first.
If your video isn’t genuinely interesting and engaging, if it doesn’t catch interest quickly and hold it, then the algorithm will notice that people aren’t very engaged, or the video doesn’t appeal to the audiences you’re trying to push it to, and won’t recommend it to similar users.
Users Have High Expectations
YouTube is an enthusiast platform. People create because they want to. As they learn and get better, their content improves, and audiences come to expect certain standards.
The standards might not be what you think.
While many successful channels have high production values and tight editing, there are still many successful “vlog” channels and low-budget, low-tech creators.
What I mean by high expectations is that users expect high effort. Whatever that effort looks like for your skill level and maturity with video production. Users are surprisingly willing to forgive junk if they can see the passion, authenticity, and value in a video.
This is one of the reasons that brands can struggle to find audiences on YouTube. It’s primarily an entertainment platform – brand-focused content without human connection and authenticity isn’t set up to perform well.
Users Don’t Want To Be Sold To On YouTube
Take a look at the top 100 biggest YouTube channels and you will see creators, music brands, musicians, movies, kids shows, etc. What you won’t see is a single product-focused brand.
SEJ keeps a list of the most subscribed-to individuals on YouTube, cutting out production companies. It’s mostly musicians, entertainers like MrBeast, and children’s creators such as Like Nastya.
People are on YouTube to be entertained or informed, not sold to. There are plenty of ads and in-video sponsorships already trying to sell things.
Is your content entertaining? Do you provide information that people actually care about?
Time Is Precious And There’s Always Something Else To Watch
Users are spoiled for choice. If they don’t find a video immediately compelling, YouTube has other recommendations they can click on right on the page.
They don’t even need to click the “back” button. There’s something new right there, with a colorful thumbnail ready to catch their eye.
This not only makes it difficult to distribute videos, it also makes it hard to make good videos.
Sometimes A Video’s Performance Is Just Luck
Videos you’re sure are good won’t take off. Videos you’re sure are bad will get traction. People are baffling, especially when it comes to what they watch and why. They’ll watch something they hate to have the experience of hating it. They’ll stop watching something they like when they’ve gotten what they need from it.
More than many other search platforms, sometimes you just have to be lucky to succeed on YouTube.
What Makes A YouTube Video “Good”?
Good videos on YouTube must begin with knowledge of your audience, passion for and knowledge of your subject matter, and love of the craft of video production.
That might sound a little wishy-washy but it’s what built the YouTube platform and it’s what users continue to look for.
Videos Must Be Engaging AND Satisfying
Videos are more difficult to skim than text. You can improve it by using chapters and timestamps, but a reader can’t just scroll past what they aren’t interested in. A viewer has to wait for it to pass or actively skip it.
It doesn’t really benefit you to have people skipping around, because it means they’re not engaged, and being engaging is the first rule of a good video.
Engagement means watch time, interaction signals, and even what users do after watching your video.
This makes introductions and hooks critical to a video’s success. Right away, you need to convince someone that it’s worth it to keep watching.
However, it’s easy to go too far and create “clickbait” that over-promises and under-delivers. Even if this gets you watch time, YouTube’s algorithm filters for satisfaction as well as raw engagement.
It can tell the difference between good engagement and not-so-good engagement. If someone watches a whole video expecting something specific and they don’t get it, that’s high engagement but a bad experience.
User signals on YouTube are much more complicated than raw CTR and watch time numbers. Watch time, however, is still one of the major markers of success.
Self-Assessment Is Difficult: So Do It More
Self-assessing creative content is difficult. It’s not easy to look at something you made and ask yourself: is this actually any good? Would anyone watch it? Is it worth someone else’s time?
But you need to practice self-critique and seek critique from others. You need to approach videos from the point of view of the person watching and find the point between what you need to communicate and what they’re willing to watch.
Selling Must Be Incidental To The Content
Unless you’re a BIG brand with an exciting release that people are genuinely anticipating, users are unlikely to care about your business or what you’re trying to sell while they’re on YouTube.
YouTube isn’t really the platform for promotional videos, about us videos, product videos, etc., at least not if you expect algorithmic success.
That doesn’t mean you can’t be successful with mid to low funnel type videos, but they need to be part of a broader strategy — not be your whole approach to the platform.
Your first duty with a YouTube video is to provide genuine value to the viewer. “Value” could be learning, news, or laughing at memes. If you focus on your business conversion goals first, you’ll lose audiences early and harm your metrics, burying your videos.
If you know SEO, you know this already. YouTube videos are most successful when they’re a “top funnel” strategy. Give something of value, and expect only time in return.
As a user gets to know and like you through your videos, they’ll become more interested in your value proposition as a business or service provider.
Good YouTube Videos Are Made For The Love Of It
Doing things because you love them isn’t reserved only for individual creators. As a team, as a professional, as a business, you can do this too. It just means caring about what you’re publishing and who you’re publishing it for.
If you have a brilliant creative team, set them to work on a YouTube channel! If you’re passionate about helping people, solving problems, providing good information, or just letting your team be goobers for the camera, it’s a great idea to start some kind of production.
This could look like a podcast, a tutorial, or a demonstration series. Or even something unrelated to your businesses but that is a special interest to someone on your team, that you can use for testing.
This might feel like nothing advice but believe me, users can tell when videos are made with love and when they aren’t. There’s no way to replicate or fake it. You’ve just got to do it. Or fund people who do it with advertising.
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Featured Image: metamorworks/Shutterstock
