We took a closer look at Porsche’s YouTube channel. Of course, a subscriber base of over 750,000 is quite a number at first glance. However, if you look at the individual videos, you quickly notice that some of the views range between 6,000 and 40,000, but there are also a few outliers with several million views. However, the video with the most views (over 18 million) has only about 2,000 likes and only 100 comments. How does this high discrepancy come about?
Many companies, like Porsche, make the mistake of investing more in advertising instead of organically building the channel. We’re talking millions of dollars in media spend on pre-rolls, which play as ads before other videos on YouTube. If you only look at the superficial metric of views, you could of course be satisfied with the result. But that’s not what the YouTube algorithm cares about and what makes a channel successful in the long run.
YouTube wants to retain viewers on the platform for as long as possible. Key KPIs that have a positive impact on the algorithm and thus on the long-term success of a channel are therefore playback time and audience engagement.
And it is precisely here that the crucial difficulty arises when it comes to organic growth of a channel with the simultaneous use of media spending. For the YouTube algorithm, it is also decisive how much playback time and viewer loyalty the subsequently played video generates. With pre-rolls, however, there is no follow-up video in the sense that the value here would be zero, which would be fatal for the algorithm and thus for the organic growth of the channel. Here, however, YouTube is still very opaque about whether pre-rolls and “normal” videos are really viewed separately from each other.
In addition, while a high media investment can quickly boost views, the increase in views after the end of the media campaign stagnates due to a lack of added value. The companies concerned are resting here on the strong growth in views at the beginning and are not questioning whether the content of the videos really reflects what the users are interested in. This is where the vicious circle begins: subscribers stop watching the channel videos because the content is too superficial. Accordingly, new videos will no longer be displayed to them. Thousands of deadbeats are created.
To get around this problem, it is extremely important to produce sustainable content with added value. This can take a lot of time, but in the end the effort more than pays off in terms of key KPIs. So creators need to ask themselves the question: What is my community interested in? How can I continue to build watchtime, audience retention, user interaction, and reactions?
At TACSY, we deal with precisely these issues on a daily basis and develop formats tailored to our customers that master precisely these challenges. If you have any questions about this topic, you can of course contact us here at any time.
