Why Your Channel Died  ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Audience Shift Beats Shadowban Myths** - Views usually drop because audience interests shift, not because of a shadowban or YouTube 'hating' you. - Successful creators reinvent content over time to stay relevant as the platform and audience evolve. Transcript: Travis Because a lot of times, the reason views go down isn't because of a shadow ban or anything like that. Typically, it's because it's not because the algorithm hates you, which is another thing we hear. They go down because the audience attention has shifted and you didn't move with it a lot of times. And what do you think that means? Like what typically in your in your experience, Rob, what does it mean when like the audience shifts and you just kind of keep doing the same thing? Rob I think maybe the best analogy might be if you consider television and comedy ([Time 0:02:08](https://share.snipd.com/snip/df137e3c-23cb-4754-b99c-91c5f64446d0)) - **Watch Average View Duration Closely** - Monitor average view duration (AVD) trends across several videos to detect declining engagement early. - If AVD drops while views decline, assume the content no longer connects and test format or topic changes. Transcript: Travis But one of the best ways to look at is your CTR and average view duration. If your average view duration, if your typical video length is about the same and you noticed over the last three to five videos, your average view duration is going down, that means Either people are bored with the content or they're getting the value very early on or something about your content is no longer connecting with people as much as it perhaps used to. Now, I'm saying going down. I don't mean that, like, you're not going to see variance between them because you will. There will be, you know, 30 seconds a minute depending on how long your video is of variance. ([Time 0:06:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b9dd3606-7d4a-4dd0-9dd4-4f188f8b112e)) - **Metrics Interact; Watch The Channel Heartbeat** - Metrics rarely exist in isolation: rising AVD but falling views can mean new competitors are capturing broader attention. - Track channel cadence and views-per-hour as a 'heartbeat' metric to spot prolonged declines. Transcript: Rob Here's the thing to to consider that what happens if your average view direction goes up like ever so slightly and yet you're still getting less views, less impressions. The unknown quantity might be there that you can't really measure is that you have new competitors in your space, and their videos are getting even higher average view duration because They're something new, something fresh, something better. And so this idea of attaching yourself to one analytic and seeing that as a golden number can be a bit of a risk, I think. ([Time 0:07:32](https://share.snipd.com/snip/12f8b568-2bd4-488f-81e7-097ba35b250b)) - **Give New Topics Three Tries** - Test any new topic at least three times before deciding if it fails or succeeds on your channel. - If views decline across a 3+ video mini-series, the topic may be fatigued and it's time to pivot. Transcript: Travis So obviously as you have a channel, you'll, you know, you'll shift between topics on your channel and not everything works, but I always say if you if you've done the research or if you're Interested in a particular topic within your niche, you should do it no minute, no less than three times just to know whether or not it's going to work for your audience. If you do something one time and it doesn't work, that doesn't mean anything. A, it could work over the course of time, like it might take a couple months before it catches on and finds the right audience. But one time is just not enough to know. So let's say you did a playlist or a topic about something three to five videos long. If you post about that specific topic three or four times in a row and the views decline each time, there's a good chance the topic is fatigued. It doesn't necessarily mean that's the only thing, but it's definitely an indication because what should happen is as you're growing content about around a particular subject is Popular, they should over time go up. Like as you release stuff, they should go up. Every once in a while, you'll start a new content. The first video pops off. You're like, oh, I need to double down on that. And then you'll see them go down a little bit. But if you're seeing something started, let's say, you know, you get something that has 10,000 views, like, oh, my God, that's a great subject. You put the next one out and it's like 4,000 views. Like, okay, that's still really good for my channel. You put out a third video and over two weeks it gets like 500 views. Okay, I think maybe the time has passed. Like if we were to do a Sora video now, probably not going to do as well as when we did them initially, right? So that topic has passed. ([Time 0:12:56](https://share.snipd.com/snip/28ec0293-0707-49e2-bbc6-15ec7f8aeba8)) - **Use Content Buckets With Regular Experiments** - Build 'content buckets' (pillars) and cycle through them so viewers find consistent themes and can binge related videos. - Reserve 1–2 out of every 5–10 videos for experiments to attract new audiences. Transcript: Rob Yeah. Travis And, you know, let's talk a little bit about buckets because this is actually really important. A lot of people, listen, we've talked about buckets before, but not everyone has watched every video. And that's actually another thing real quick I'll just mention. Don't assume that your viewers have seen every video you've ever made. Don't assume that when you start talking. That's a real challenge, isn't it? Rob Like both respecting the new audience who doesn't know what you're talking about sometimes versus the regulars who like oh god come on we've heard about this i've heard about this before Travis So the regulars hang tight hang tight we're gonna talk a little bit about buckets right quick for the new people who are coming in they're like i don't know what you're talking about but What is this bucket thing it's a great strategy that when you think about your overall channel, I'll give you an example. ([Time 0:16:38](https://share.snipd.com/snip/9644c394-2583-4c3d-810d-333588469d79)) - **Match Content To Viewer Intent** - Viewer intent splits into discovery, community, and conversion content, each needing different expectations and reach. - Design videos deliberately for the intent you want rather than expecting one format to serve all goals. Transcript: Rob And I think it's kind of dialed down into like three basic types, which is discovery. This is where you're trying to make a video for the highest, broadest potential reach. Like you want this to be maybe your viral moment. Cool. Brilliant. Now, there are other videos you may make on the same topic, might even be the same formats, which don't get as much of a reach because you don't realize that this is more about the community The the regular viewers who you've already built up some trust and relationship with and that just naturally reaches a smaller group of viewers and then finally like when we think about The next level of audience intent viewer intent is maybe the the call to action So you've reached this audience with your discovery content. You've built a trust and relationship with them. And now you're actually offering them something, whether it's like free advice, mailing list, like you want them to buy a product or a service. You have to naturally expect that the viewers for that content ([Time 0:20:53](https://share.snipd.com/snip/75a394e5-bd4e-4f09-a171-298a29fcbc5e)) - **Resurrect Videos With Targeted Repackaging** - Use the Lazarus strategy: find past videos that performed well and inspect recent 28-day metrics to identify packaging problems. - Fix low CTR with new titles/thumbnails and avoid changing both at once so you can measure impact. Transcript: Travis Now, how do you do that? And how do you know which ones to pick? I get this question quite often. One of the best ways to figure out what videos you should choose, you go back in your back catalog, look at videos that performed pretty well. They either performed excellently or pretty well. Then you, what I tend to do is I'll go to, let's say the video is like a year old. I'll go to the the metrics portion of that video. And I will list the last 28 days of views and metrics, I don't look at the the overall once I know that, hey, this video got a pretty good amount of views. So it was successful in some degree. I'm then going to look at the last 28 days and see what's been happening there. If you notice that maybe your click through rate is low, but your view duration is pretty high, that means when people get in, they're enjoying the video, but they're just not clicking. So that's just a package. It's just redoing the package. That could be the title or the thumbnail. So maybe you redo the thumbnail. Maybe you redo the title. Maybe you redo both. You just have to see like what the problem is. Then you might see the opposite problem. You might see high click-through rate, low view duration. Not a lot you can do about that. I mean, technically you can go in and edit the video using the youtube editor i don't necessarily recommend that because that takes that's like a very surgical touch i'm what i'm basically Saying especially for content creators that are new or smaller go in find the ones that have kind of low ctr for the last 28 days but high view durations and see if you can just change the Packaging a little bit. Start with one thing, the title or the thumbnail. Actually, the vidIQ plugin can help you with some really great title ideas. It'll give you a suggestion of what your title can be. Try that. See what happens. And if that doesn't work, then change the thumbnail. So do one or the other, not both at the same time, because then you'll never know what fixed the issue. ([Time 0:23:25](https://share.snipd.com/snip/99523e5c-b172-4ce4-b78a-a6c6b0b8a755)) - **Re-edit Or Reupload Evergreen Hits** - Consider re-editing or re-uploading a high-potential old video after removing retention dips or updating the intro/outro. - Unlist the old version first so platforms treat the upload as new and avoid obvious duplication. Transcript: Rob Everybody if they're on twitter or x as it's called these days has seen somebody posting a graph whereby the video did nothing for like 300 days and then all of a sudden it has an upwards Curve which tells us that youtube doesn't completely give up on videos, even if they've been out for a long time. But also if you make changes to an old video, it can have an impact way down the line. So I'm agreeing with everything you suggested previously there, Travis, especially in terms of packaging and especially in terms of looking at the engagement metrics, those being Like likes to dislikes ratio and comments. If it's high and the comments are positive and yet the video isn't doing as you would hope, then yeah, it's probably a packaging opportunity to be had there. Some other things you can also try as well. The classic one is you've made a video six to 12 months ago and it performed well. Well, chances are you're a better creator or you have a new opinion or you have a better way of communicating this message of its value. You can recreate that video in that new style. There's certainly that opportunity. And I've also heard of other people having this radical idea of just, if a video's performed well, but it's reached its natural end of life cycle, unlisting that video and then re-uploading Pretty much exactly the same video, but with an adjusted intro and outro. So it isn't detected as exactly the same video. The thought here is well the video that i put out has now come to its final end you know it's the end of its natural life but i want to reuse this content but i don't want to spend all of this Time making a brand new video so let's just try and see what happens yeah this is when the video is maybe getting like one or two views an hour it's clearly just kind of dead in the so-called Algorithm. So there is that technique. Or there is the technique of you basically take the script of a video and just kind of re-film it again, like in your new setup. But it's pretty much the same video. ([Time 0:27:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/9c7af69d-b955-449a-8495-00a7489d72f2)) - **Use Retention Graphs To Tighten Edits** - Use the retention graph to find dips, cut them, and produce a tighter 'supercharged' version of an already successful evergreen video. - Small surgical edits to retention points can significantly improve overall performance. Transcript: Travis And completely i'll give you a way to supercharge that um because you already know to a certain degree how successful it can be, use the retention graph to re-edit it because you'll see Where the dips are. Edit those out. So now you have a supercharged version of that video, one that already worked, assuming it's evergreen, right? I mean, obviously you talk about something that happened in 2020. Rob Yeah, it's usually going to be like search-based content. Travis Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you can go back, look at the retention graph, and take out any of the dips and just make sure it's just a banger video from start to end and it could perform better. I actually considered doing that for this channel mainly because a lot of the stuff we put out initially, which I still think is very valuable. ([Time 0:30:36](https://share.snipd.com/snip/505ead6c-083c-4eba-abe6-db47c828554c)) - **Onboard Strangers In The First 25%** - Design every video's first ~25% so strangers immediately understand context and aren't excluded by inside jokes or jargon. - Make intros accessible, then add insider bits later once viewers are invested. Transcript: Travis Need to know how to tie my tie i have no idea i came here because you said you could help me tie my tie i don't know about your auntie and what happened last video. That's different. The thing that I was talking about was like, I really want to watch. Rob Actually, Travis, where can I find this video about somebody tying their tie and they had an incident with her auntie? Travis It's somewhere on YouTube. I'm all in. Guaranteed. It's somewhere on YouTube. But like I said, there's a way to do it where it's more branding, where you can talk about things that like your viewership knows, and they'll engage within the comment section to make Other people want to be a part of it. But what we're talking about here mostly is just know that the vast majority of people watching any of the videos you have don't know who you are, have never seen any of your videos before. And as hard as that might be to believe, it's absolutely true. And you can look at your own analytics to see that being the case. Now, some people go, well, my analytics show that most of my people are subscribed. Well, that's bad. It should not be that way. Because if you want to grow, you need to have more people who don't know who you are, then do that's how you grow, because then they can subscribe and become part of your community. So how do you do that? ([Time 0:32:58](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e69a6a29-e9dc-40b6-9d4f-372e03d84d46)) - **Platform Changes Often Drive View Drops** - Some view changes stem from platform-wide shifts, policy updates, or seasonality that creators can't directly control. - Stay informed about policy and algorithm changes because adaptation, not blame, is the practical response. Transcript: Travis A bunch of tips so far that can help you if your channel is dying or doing doing not so good and these are actionable things we've just told you this last thing we're going to talk about isn't Necessarily a thing you can do anything about which might be frustrating but it should be talked about because you just need to know. And to be educated about what's going on on YouTube and the platform at any particular time is super important. And sometimes the answer is there's nothing you can do. So sometimes YouTube will change a policy and then certain things that were okay before are not okay. Now, some things that were monetized before are not monetized now. Also, YouTube is constantly doing things algorithmically to to make it better for viewers and sometimes views go down and there's nothing you can do it sometimes it's seasonality There's nothing well there's some things you can do about seasonality but we're talking about things you can't control so even this past year um and we talked about it here on this podcast Views kind of saw a dip across a lot of channels and by the way that's still happening people are still seeing views go down. Even channels like Mr. Beast are seeing actual impact to their subscribers number. Now, his problem might be different, but he's seeing the same thing. We see channels go through this all the time. We feel the same pain. And sometimes you can't do anything about that, but you should be educated. So when the platform changes and things that you used to be able to do are no longer something you can get away with, a lot of that surrounding AI and such, you should absolutely know about Those things. ([Time 0:40:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/3e32c69d-d6a4-451a-aca6-06921492ca3a)) - **Reused Content Rules Changed The Game** - The rise of AI and 'reused/repetitious' policy changes forced creators to transform derivative content or face demonetization and removal. - YouTube's 'spirit of the content creator' enforces transformation rather than pure aggregation. Transcript: Rob So to go to the question of what's changed recently, we think about the influx of AI content that started in 2022. Creators have been having a field day with this. Unfortunately, bad actors have also been having a field day with this. And then in, I think, the July period, YouTube said that they were just, again, tweaking their rules around reused and repetitious content. And I still, to this day, don't think creators truly understand the rules around that. And to be fair to YouTube, it's really difficult to explain such a big, all-encompassing idea in two words, reuse and repetitious. What a lot of YouTube automation channels seem to be reporting, especially in the last month, is that all of a sudden, channels that they were having success with are now being terminated Or demonetized. And so that's a YouTube policy that's changed right there. If we rewind about three or four years, that same topic of reuse and repetitious content caused issues whereby for several years, channels could upload compilations, montages, and Pretty much have a free reign on the channel. And the example I always use is News Be Funny. And what they did is they collated funny things that happened in the news from like interviews and reporters and whatnot. And every clip would be like 20 or 30 seconds long. And there would be no what's called transformation. They would just jump from clip to clip to clip, and it was fine and then all of a sudden YouTube introduced this idea of that I think it was called like the spirit of the content creator whereby We don't want you just taking content from other sources and then uploading it onto YouTube we want you to transform it in some way. And so what News Be Funny had to do all of a sudden was add a little bit of a voiceover or a narration between every single clip. And that really slowed down the pace of the content and it changed the way News Be Funny was as a channel. ([Time 0:42:47](https://share.snipd.com/snip/dfe5a033-18d3-4ffd-9e80-0d88a5b7fa59))