nightshiftmodeller
patreon
A little update about early access
🕑 Added 2019-11-08 23:44:16 +0000 UTCTLDR: don't worry, nothing bad happened, you're still getting early videos as usual.
So, something strange has been happening... I've noticed that my views dropped quite hard in the past 3 weeks... like, normally a video gets around 700-900 views in the first 30 minutes since posting, and if it's something that people like, Youtube will push it to get more views and it might get 20-30K until the next vid is posted... but now the videos get barely 400 views in those first 30 mins and perform very bad even after that.
At first I thought people just find the KV meh, so I thought oh well I'll just get it done asap and move on, but I had my suspicions... because I don't believe a video like a winter whitewash tutorial would be so uninteresting.
Well, one of my suspicions was it had to do something with the early access, so I dug around a little and found out it actually does... because Youtube has something like "view velocity". In short, when the "unlisted" video gets so little views in 24 hours (early access), Youtube won't push it to new viewers, even most subscribers won't see it in their feed, because the algorithm sees it as 1-day old and performing extremely bad. If you're curious, just check out how well did the KV restoration video and the 4BO tutorial, and compare them to the more recent videos, which were all early access.
So the next week I'll try something different. I'll upload the video twice: 1 for your early viewing the usual way, ads off and unlisted, and 1 to be set to "private" and published on Friday for everyone else. I'll probably change the photos during the blooper reel (you'll get your Patron exclusive pictures) just to be safe because I don't know if uploading two identical videos in a row won't cause any problems. And just to be extra safe, I'll delete the unlisted video after I set the second one to public.
This might not bring immediate results so I'll experiment with it for at least 2-3 weeks and see if the rest of the KV series (there will be only 2 more videos) and the next vid after that perform better.
If you've read all the way here, just know that basically nothing will change for you, but I wanted to let you know to avoid any confusion if you'd notice something like your early comment not appearing in the published video, or you clicking on your early access link on Saturday and getting a "not available".
Comments
Night Shift
I considered Vimeo, but it's a paid platform and if I were uploading videos there, it would cost me more than my Photoshop+Lightroom license :( Right now it's not really a viable option, but maybe in the future I'll go for it, as it has direct video integration for Patreon (whatever that means). Thanks so much for your support and don't worry too much, just a small bump in the road and I'm sure it'll be fixed in no time :)
Manuel Garcia Urreta
Oh man! so sad that this impacted somehow the growth of your channel, but I'm glad you "figured" what might be the cause... these algorithms are smart and quite unpredictable, they also change all the time. There may be other options to avoid the risk or unpredictability... Does Patreon platform allows you to upload high res videos? Or maybe you can use Vimeo? Then delete it when you publish the final video on YouTube? Just a couple of ideas that may help, but yeah all of them will add load to your workflow. Cheers my friend!
