Hey DTED,
I would certainly recommend spending time looking in your analytics to see where the majority of your views came from and continue to do more of that. As well are you putting a lot of effort into your tags, description and title? I would ensure that these are on point. As well as your thumbnails, are you using the key points of creating successful thumbnails? Bright contrasts, fully viewable on mobile devices, very little text especially if it is repeated from your title, rule of thirds, etc. These basic things will help your videos stand out. Hope that these help.
Cheers,
Mike
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Oh I know exactly which video it came from!! XD It was actually just one video that was about 5 minutes long. It got over 31k watch minutes and 15k views within the last month or so! It was a video I had released a long time ago before my channel was approved for monetization back in October. A game called Subnautica was released in late January after being in Early Access for years. It is an open world survival game. Your ship crash lands on an alien planet called 4546B. It is an uncharted ocean planet at the far end of space. You eventually have to get into your ship to find supplies as well as repair the engine which started leaking radiation into the environment. In order to get into the ship you have to find the entrances and figure out how to get inside. There are 2 entrances. One entrance requires the use of a tool called the Propulsion Cannon, which is sort of like a space age fork lift, to move objects from a doorway.. If you have ever played Half Life 2 it is basically the same as the Gravity Gun but with a much cooler looking visual effect!!! The second door and its method either again involves the Propulsion Cannon or you can do some simple parkour to scale the crates blocking the door.
This video was likely to get a LOT of attention due to that game being released last month because all the new players would surely be looking for tutorial and how to videos for the game when they get frustrated!! XD So about a week prior to the games release, I slightly tweaked the tags, made the title a bit clearer and dropped at least 1 ad smack in the middle of the video between those 2 entrance explanations!! The video revenue has now reached $17.43 in the last 2 days!
I took a moment while writing this reply to get a deeper look into the analytics of that specific video. Apparently, it was viewed a lot via external links(34%) which was a ton of google searches (which was expected at the time of the games release), and there is also an unknown source which accounted for 30% of the watch time (about 10k minutes).
As far as the YouTube searches it came up in, it registered in over 500 different search lines(YouTube is only able to list the top 500 search lines). All very similar of course. The video itself had 8 tags. Full versions of the "subnautica aurora entrances", each of those words individually , as well as a few closely related tags.
All things considered, I am glad I am seeing this information!! It will definitely help me get my other videos watched and any of my new content seen more easily!!