I was able to make 2019 the best year ever for my related YouTube channel. In this article I’m going to reflect on the statistics and compare it to my previous performance. This level of effort came with sacrifices. Hopefully, in time, I’ll be able to make the online media and video thing… my thing. I still don’t feel like I’m that close. Anyways, on to the statistics!
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| Some of the primary statistics for 2019. |
For calculations, I’ll be going by the internal totals for the channel rather than the public stats. There is a difference between the two of over 100,000 views due to videos I’ve deleted over the years. On the admin end, those videos count toward totals. Also, sorry if some of the calculations are off! I’m not a math wizard and won’t likely be proofreading this too much. It’s all just for fun and to get a general feel for how I did in 2019.
For some of the initial comparisons, I’ll be including the 2019 data. Though, for the rest I’ll be using the time span 1/29/2011-12/31/2018, so that I can get a better look at improvements made in 2019.
The channel was started on January 29th in 2011. So from then until the end of 2019, that’s 8 years and 339 days. I released 104 public videos in 2019. That’s around 3.5 days per video, or 2 videos per week.
From the start of the channel to before 2019 there were 361 public videos, so I produced around 22% of my channel’s total content in 2019. The channel’s total days from start to the end of 2019 is 3259. That means in 11% of the channel’s existence I made 22% of the total content.
910.9k total video views for 2019. From the start of the channel until the end of 2019, there have been 2.934M views. That means 31% of the views on the channel happened in 2019. A pretty significant percentage!
Subscriber count is also a number that increased a large percentage in 2019. At the end of 2019 there were 4.9k subscribers. In 2019, 2.1k people joined me, so 42.8% of that final total for the year happened in 2019.
According to the Creator Insider channel, watch time is a very important statistic. In 2019, all of the video views translated into 40.6k hours of watch time. Thinking about the scale of that, we all experience 8760 hours of life per year. That means between 4 and 5 humans would have to be watching one of my videos non-stop for an entire year to reach that amount of watch time in total for 2019.
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| New features in the new Youtube Studio (formerly known as YTS Beta) |
Impressions are basically any instance where the YouTube system places a video within access to a potential viewer. There are probably a lot of factors involved in whether the potential viewer even notices the thumbnail and title, but basically it’s one case of a potential video view. It’s one chance. I had 7.3 million chances in 2019.
Click-through is an instance where a potential viewer turned into a viewer of a video. I’ve heard statistics of 1% to 10% as being average. Creator insider has also said that the value can go down based on how strongly the system suggests a video. That happens because the “net” is widened into larger, less related, matches of content to potential viewers. You can see that impressions and click-through are up, but those increases probably related to how much data is kept on those statistics. They are new to the system, so I’m not sure how long that data has been around or what the increases mean off-hand.
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| Average view duration is apparently important. |
One of my difficulties is in view duration. That’s a combination of the average as shown above as well as percent watched for each video view. The goal is to have more of both. There is a real art to keeping viewers engaged. Just focusing on the channel average view duration in 2019 compared to the value of 1/29/2011-12/31/2018, it’s 2:40 versus 2:20. So for 2019 I gained 20 seconds on average to my views. Better than nothing!
View duration is a “me problem”. One I’m not exactly sure on how to work on. It’s probably a huge combination of factors from my personality to what I decide is in each video and how I edit my videos. The total length of each video can factor into this specific statistic. I’ve noticed and have seen people mention that having longer videos does help AVD. The people that care will stick with a longer video to help that average increase naturally. I’m not sure how to tackle longer content. Anyways, that’s my problem.
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| A lot of interesting stats here! |
I have a few YouTube channels. This one is, by far, the most successful. I basically stopped uploading to the others after the YouTube Partner Program requirements changed. However, I can see that topic plays into gender. My other channel that’s focused on cosplay, crafting, and sewing has a flip-flopped gender ratio. So it’s not that women are fewer in number on the platform, but rather they find my crafting videos more interesting to them than the stuff I make on SWPB.
However, I’ve very happy that my percentage of female viewers has increased. For the period before 2019 I had an average of 10.9% female viewers, so an increase of around 4% is good!
My viewership in the USA has actually decreased from a total percentage aspect. Before 2019, I had a USA average of 26.2% instead of 22.2%. The same for the UK with a change from 8.3% to 6.1%. In contrast, India has increased from 3.8% to 8.9%. I hear it’s a growing market and the population there is huge. The drawback is that AD rates in India are much less than places such as the USA, Canada, or UK. Indonesia is another place that increased with 3.6% in 2019 compared to 1.6% of previous years combined.
I’ve been very passionate about adding clean understandable captions to my videos. There are probably hundreds of videos on the channel now with captions I’ve fixed up. Most of the time I use YouTube’s auto-captions as a starting point, but there have been a few cases where I had to transcribe them (not easy on the hands…). Anyways, I see a lot of benefits to captions/subtitles and will continue to get them in my new videos and I hope to go back to the majority of older content too.
I don’t know if captions are factoring into the expansion of my audience location, but maybe it does help. I could see a foreign audience prefer videos with English subtitles over ones with only auto-captions or none at all. There is also a newer feature in the mobile app where it auto-plays videos muted with captions on. For those cases I’d have a better chance at gaining a viewer than if I only had auto generated captions.
In 2019, you can see that 11.2% of views had captions enabled. That feels like a sizable percent of total views in 2019. From the start of the channel to the end of 2018, only 2.2% had them enabled. I’m sure the amount of videos with captions mattered a lot here, but it’s nice to see an increase.
As for the age of the audience, it’s somewhat similar, but more distributed in 2019 compared to previous years. My actual age fits into 35-44 bracket (yeah, I’m getting up there…), which increased a bit with 19.9% in 2019 compared to 14.6% in all years previous.
That’s it! A lot on interesting data. I can safely say that 2019 was the best year I’ve managed to achieve on YouTube, though it was also a year I put in a huge amount of time and effort. I’m not sure where the turning point will be where I can call this my “job”, or have to significantly cut back on how much time I put into it. We will see…