A video gets views when people click it and keep watching it. A channel grows when those people come back for the next video. Each step of making a video is one job a creator does, and each step here comes with the measured number behind it and a link to a full article on that step.
| Step in making a video | The number behind the step | Where the number comes from | How solid the evidence is |
|---|---|---|---|
| How often to post | Channels posting 12 or more videos a month grew views 4.1 times faster than channels posting less than once a month | vidIQ, 10,210,278 YouTube channels | A pattern, not proof that posting more causes growth |
| Writing the script | People asked the test questions before reading scored 75% on the final test, against 56% for people given extra study time | Five 2009 memory experiments on university undergraduates | Controlled experiments, but they measured learning, not views |
| The hook in the first seconds | 29% of swipes away from a short video land in its first fifth | 15,344 swipes recorded on a real short video feed | Recorded behaviour, not a survey |
| Thumbnail and title | In an eye-tracking study, 21 of the 26 choices a thumbnail decided were people choosing to skip a video | An eye-tracking study of 24 people | A small sample choosing from a fixed page of results |
| Showing your face or not | Viral YouTube videos performed about the same whether or not their thumbnails showed a face | 1of10, more than 300,000 viral videos | One large study, by one analytics company |
| Shorts versus long videos | About 74% of YouTube Shorts views come from people who do not subscribe to the channel | Companies that sell social media tools | A rough guide only |
| When to post | YouTube Shorts posted between 6 and 11 in the evening got the most engagement | Buffer, 1.8 million YouTube videos | The five biggest posting time studies name best posting hours twelve hours apart |
| Promoting a video for free | A paid YouTube Promote campaign does not change how a video performs in YouTube's free, unpaid recommendations | YouTube's own help pages | A direct statement by the platform |
| Live streaming on Twitch | Twitch's browse page can sort live channels by how many people are watching, highest first | Twitch's own browse page | A feature anyone can check on Twitch |
Post more and edit less, because YouTube channels posting 12 or more videos a month grew fastest
vidIQ, a YouTube analytics tool, tracked 10,210,278 YouTube channels with at least 1,000 subscribers for a year.
- YouTube channels posting 12 or more videos a month grew views 4.1 times faster than channels posting less than once a month.
- In vidIQ's study, the median YouTube channel posting less than once a month gained zero subscribers.
- Colour grading, motion graphics, a second camera angle and perfect retakes add up to 8 to 22 hours of video editing work, with no measured effect on clicks or watch time.
- Science, education, health, home and travel YouTube channels had the most subscribers when they posted 2 to 5 videos a month, according to AIR Media-Tech, a YouTube creator services company that studied 18,000 channels.
Read the full quality versus quantity on YouTube breakdown →
Open your script with the wrong belief viewers hold, because a clear lecture raised no test scores
Derek Muller, who runs the science YouTube channel Veritasium, tested teaching videos during a PhD at the University of Sydney.
- In Muller's PhD study of 364 first-year physics students, a clear physics video made students more confident but did not raise their test scores.
- The versions of Muller's physics lesson that stated common wrong beliefs about Newton's laws and then explained why they were wrong moved a typical student from the middle of the class into the top third of test scores.
- In memory experiments at the University of California, Irvine, people asked the test questions before reading scored 75% on the final test, against 56% for people given extra study time.
- Write the opening 15 seconds of a video script last, and never spend those seconds on a greeting.
Read the full video script breakdown →
Show one moment in the first 3 seconds, because 29% of swipes away hit a short video's first fifth
Engineers building Dashlet, a short video streaming system, recorded 15,344 swipes from 133 online workers watching a short video feed.
- 29% of the 15,344 swipes away recorded in the Dashlet streaming study landed inside the first 20% of a short video's length.
- Over 63% of TikTok's videos with the highest click-through rate show their key message or product inside the first 3 seconds, according to TikTok's own creative guidance for advertisers.
- The "viewed versus swiped away" figure in YouTube Studio for each Short is the closest thing YouTube gives you to a score for a Short's opening seconds.
Read the full TikTok and YouTube Shorts hook breakdown →
Use Repeat Recorder to rehearse your hook and script out loud
The only way to know whether the opening line of a video grabs a listener is to hear that line out loud. Repeat Recorder, one of my own apps, records your voice and plays each recording straight back without you touching the phone.
- Repeat Recorder replays each recording and then starts recording again on its own, so you can practise one opening line twenty times in a row.
- Repeat Recorder's automatic mode starts recording when you speak and replays when you stop, so you can drill the first 15 seconds of a script while walking.
- Hearing the opening line of a video played back shows whether its point arrives within 1.7 seconds, the average time Facebook, now Meta, says people spend on one piece of content in a mobile feed.
Make your thumbnail plain and readable, because people use thumbnails to decide what to skip
In a 2023 eye-tracking study led by Philipp Bitzenbauer, a physics education researcher, 24 trainee physics teachers chose from eight real YouTube results.
- In Bitzenbauer's eye-tracking study, 21 of the 26 choices a thumbnail decided were people choosing to skip a video.
- In Bitzenbauer's eye-tracking study, the thumbnail got 45.6% of all the glances people gave a YouTube video card, against 11.6% for the title.
- A 2024 study of almost 500,000 thumbnails by Loebbecke and colleagues found that more text on a thumbnail meant fewer people watched the video.
- Put about three words on a YouTube thumbnail, and never more than five.
Read the full YouTube thumbnail breakdown →
Use Camera to Clipboard to get thumbnail photos off your phone
In Bitzenbauer's eye-tracking study, a thumbnail that looked boring or unprofessional was one of the two reasons people gave most often for a choice. A real photograph is a cheap way to stop a thumbnail looking amateur. Camera to Clipboard, one of my own apps, moves a photo from your phone to your computer in a single step.
- A photo you take inside Camera to Clipboard is ready to paste on your computer the moment you take it.
- Pasting a Camera to Clipboard photo into Photoshop drops the photo in as a new layer, ready to build a thumbnail on.
- Camera to Clipboard can send several photos at once from your phone's library, so every photo of the same subject arrives on your computer together.
Stay off camera if you prefer, because 5-Minute Crafts reached 80.6 million subscribers with no face
No analytics company and no academic study has compared faceless and face-on-camera YouTube channels at scale.
- 5-Minute Crafts, the largest confirmed faceless YouTube channel outside kids and music content, built 80.6 million subscribers while showing only a person's hands.
- Across more than 300,000 viral videos studied by 1of10, a YouTube analytics company, a face in the thumbnail made no overall difference to how the videos performed.
- About 100 controlled studies of educational video say a presenter on screen changes how viewers feel about the presenter, not what viewers remember.
- Contesting a YouTube copyright claim requires your full legal name, address and phone number, and YouTube is legally required to share that counter notification with the person who made the claim.
Read the full faceless YouTube channel breakdown →
Read what going faceless on YouTube really costs →
Post Shorts to reach strangers, and point them to your long videos yourself in every Short
YouTube Shorts are shown to strangers, but the people who watch a Short do not automatically go on to watch the channel's long videos.
- About 74% of YouTube Shorts views come from people who do not subscribe to the channel.
- YouTube has said it recommends Shorts and long videos separately, so a viewer finding a channel through its Shorts does not make YouTube recommend that channel's long videos to that viewer.
- In each YouTube Short, say out loud where viewers can find your long video on the same subject.
- A series of short videos that asks viewers to follow for part two is the strongest way to turn short video viewers into followers.
Read the full Reels and Shorts breakdown →
Post short videos in the evening or later, the best hours in four large posting time studies
Four large studies of posting times disagree about the best hour to post short videos, but all four put that hour in the evening or later, in the audience's local time.
- Buffer, a social media scheduling tool, measured 1.8 million YouTube videos and found YouTube Shorts posted between 6 and 11 in the evening got the most engagement.
- Buffer's study of 1.8 million YouTube videos found long YouTube videos do best when posted in the morning, with Sunday at 10 in the morning the strongest slot of the week.
- Metricool, a social media analytics tool, measured 2,314,756 TikToks and found the heaviest concentration of views between 6 and 8 in the evening.
- Check your own audience's best hours in each platform's analytics, because the five biggest short video posting time studies name best hours twelve hours apart.
Read the full best time to post short videos breakdown →
Promote a video with free links off YouTube, because YouTube says paid promotion adds no free reach
YouTube's own help pages say what money buys on YouTube and what money does not buy.
- YouTube says it does not accept payment for better placement in its organic search results, the free results nobody pays for.
- YouTube says a paid Promote campaign in YouTube Studio does not change a video's organic performance, meaning how the video does in YouTube's free recommendations.
- YouTube says watch hours from ad campaigns do not count toward the YouTube Partner Program's 4,000 watch hour threshold.
- Never buy views from a reseller, because YouTube's fake engagement policy bans bought views and lets YouTube remove the buyer's channel.
- Views from links you post outside YouTube are ordinary organic views, so they count toward the YouTube Partner Program's 4,000 watch hours.
Read the full breakdown of promoting a YouTube video for free →
Bring your own audience to Twitch with clips, because Twitch can rank live channels by viewer count
Twitch's browse page can sort live channels by how many people are watching, highest first, which puts a Twitch channel nobody is watching at the bottom of that list.
- The large majority of Twitch channels average five or fewer people watching at once.
- In a Columbia University study of 17,682 Twitch streamers, long gaps between streams did about three times more harm to follower growth than streaming more often did good.
- Kai Cenat, the most-followed streamer on Twitch, ended his first Twitch stream in February 2021 with roughly 5,000 followers, most of them from his YouTube audience.
- Jynxzi, a Twitch streamer who started with nobody watching, averaged about four viewers in 2019, until clips of him on TikTok later brought viewers to his Twitch channel.
Read the full breakdown of getting more viewers on Twitch →
Conclusion: how to make videos that get views and grow a channel
The steps to making videos that get views run from the steps that decide whether anybody watches a video at all to the steps that bring viewers in from other sites.
- Post more videos and edit them less.
- Make your thumbnail plain, with about three words.
- Show one specific moment in the first 3 seconds of a short video.
- Open your video script with the wrong answer your viewers believe.
- Post Shorts to reach strangers, and point them to your long videos yourself.
- Stay off camera if you prefer, because the faceless channel 5-Minute Crafts has 80.6 million subscribers.
- Post short videos in the evening or later, in your audience's local time.
- Promote a video with free links outside YouTube, and never buy views.
- Bring your own audience to Twitch through clips posted on TikTok and YouTube.