Why Creators Are LOSING Viewers on YouTube

Welcome everybody to an edition of The Jeff Adams Show. And before I get to the topic at hand, let me say who I am. I've been doing this identity The Jeff Adams Show for many many years. Started off as a online talk radio show, variety show. We talk about the news, current events, and then you know, it morphed into other things, same thing, and then come to a hiatus because I went to go work for a terrestrial radio station on another show. And yeah, and then I kind of brought it back doing like these short clips daily news. And now you know, I would always kind of mess around with the channel a little bit, always kind of updating, but not consistent with this channel. And so now I am. You know, last December the channel actually got monetized, which I wish it was my other channel. We got monetized with this channel somehow got monetized to a certain video that I did that was really done with audio, believe it or not. So any event, I just wanted to come out here and I wanted to talk about YouTube in general, and you know, my idea probably for this channel, and you know, just to kind of give you a background, you know, especially in broadcasting. I tend to spend a lot of time on YouTube and listening to a lot of people's opinions, some of the experts in the field of YouTube and what they're saying about the algorithms and you know, title thumbnails. I've just been immersed in that for like three years. I didn't really care anything about YouTube, didn't really understand how it worked until I worked for this big YouTube personality for a little while, and then I understood the power of YouTube, what you could do with it, and I was like, wow, why was I missing this the whole time? So now I have clients that I can sol do SEO. Titles and descriptions, kind of explaining the back end how everything works. But typically, yeah, I've seen a lot of data as of lately, as of late, and it's it's it's kind of the president. I had this other channel I just kind of started and experimenting back in twenty twenty three. It you know, it was called Creative on the Mend. If you know what it is, I'll put the link down in the description down below. But you know, it's just kind of like a recovery vlog of a creative trying to find his way in his fifties, you know, showing him showing I say him myself showing myself restarting, rebooting, and it just I switched it, you know, switched it around. I just never was really getting traction with it. But that's a lot with YouTube. I was feeding it. I think I have a you know, probably one hundred and eight long form videos on there, and as of coming January next year to be three, the channel will be three years old. But I noticed last year in December, I started getting crazy subscribers and I was like, wow, it's really growing. I think I probably grew two to three thousand subs when I started uploading. I'm like, man, something's happening here. And I saw my numbers started going up too. But I was like, I started looking at the hard data that YouTube was giving me, and basically, you know, it comes down the retention rate. Right you might have. I think in the last video I did on the other channel, I had you know, twelve hundred plus views, but I started seeing the retention rate go down, so mathematically kind of got discouraged the other night. But I'm grateful too at the same time, and I did the mathematics of that last vlog from the other channel, and I basically did the mathematics on the retention rate and it dropped down to like there was you know, three, you know, three percent watching the whole video all the way to the end. So I did the mathematics of that, and that's probably thirty nine people out of twelve hundred plus to watch the video. Half of them stayed halfway point. I'm like, man, how can I keep this audience? So but it's not it's just not with these upstart channels either. It's across the board with bigger channels. I have access to bigger channels. I have a client. I'm not going to mention his name, you know, big TV. He was a big TV person that I still is a personality, and you know he's he's got a pretty healthy YouTube channel and his retention rate I noticed too, because you know, he gets anywhere between you know, twenty thousand to twenty five thousand per view with his podcast. But I noticed in his retention rate it was the same thing. There was a dip and retention where you know, he was getting you know, eight ten percent of his audience staying with him, which is fantastic by the way, So you know, out of that. You know, he's getting about twenty twenty five hundred people that are watching it from start to finish, which is pretty darn good. But I think a lot of times we get discouraged. I got discouraged to look at that, and everybody's trying to find this mathematical approach. Of how to keep people with you. And you know, typically, you know, from the radio world that I came from for a little while, there was you know, drive home if you if you had someone listening to you for you know, ten to fifteen minutes, you were winning, right. But now with retention rate, we were so segmented with this algorithm, you know, because when I was in talk radio, we had something you called a program director. You got to do air checks and he would listen to your air checks and you would have to he would adjust you, like, hey, maybe you should craft a little bit more like this and this and segue this into this. But we don't really have that. We have like an algorithm that is so segmented on YouTube that you have to do this video for this. You can't do a variety of things because YouTube doesn't understand it. It doesn't understand it where to push your audience. So for like this channel. That's why I feel confused, right, So it's like maybe I'm going to start talking about the back ends of YouTube, but also like talking about a variety of thing because at this point I really don't care. You know, if it works, it works, If it doesn't, it doesn't. But as a talk rad even when I was doing conservative news talk radio, we were like a variety show too. After we joked, you know, we had we did, we did parody songs. And even when I was doing the Jeff Adams Show prior to that, we were talking about political things, uh, you know, spiritual things, Christianity, comedy. And it works. But you do that now, it doesn't really resonate too well on YouTube, not that's you can really find your audience. So you know, if you watch this channel, that's what you're gonna get. You're gonna get some news. And you know, by the way, June sixth through the tenth, I'm gonna be you know, filling in for Mark k who's a you know, big time radio conservative talk radio host. I'll be filling in for his YouTube channel and his Rumble channel and all his other platforms when he is on vacation. So that's why I'm kind of getting back on the saddle and you know, getting this content on this YouTube page of Jeff Adams Show and try to just stay really current with it. It's just tough. It's really tough because I'm doing a lot of different things running out of the channels, and it's just a time thing. I know I could make this channel successful, but it's just a time consumption thing. And that's another thing too. It's like people always say their two cents about man if I can, I can do this, you can monetize and you can make this. But the reality is I started the other channel. I started putting a lot of times, just really understanding the hooks, pacing, editing, and you put so much work into it and you realize that thirty nine people watched it out of the twelve hundred. You're like, man, what am I doing? You know? So I think with this channel, I'm just gonna simplify. I'm gonna turn on the camera, go I'm not gonna do a lot of super editing on this. I'm just gonna be talking and I'm gonna mathematically I'm going to share these you know, super super high end produced, mid level produced, and then this just raw content, not a lot to it, just eventing talking because I might talk about some political things, I might talk about some spiritual stuff. I might talk about YouTube stuff. So deal with YouTube and if you like this content, cool, stay with it. I'm expecting someone like so because I got monetized and there's people watching this thing. So hey, this is what it's going to be about. The Jeff Adam Show is going to be a variety of things. YouTube center focused content creation, a variety of what's going on in the world, and just you know, personal stuff and you know, Christianity stuff is the stuff I live. So yeah, but you know, I'm not discouraged by that because I am grateful that thirty nine people. I had thirty nine people's attention for fifteen minutes straight. That's powerful because we look at that, we look at the bigger numbers of like, oh man, you know we got this because I even looked at it back in the day. I you know, I was a popular Facebook live personality. When Facebook Live came out, I was on a platform called Blive dot tv, and I would go do these shows immediately. I would have, you know. Thousands of thousands of concurrent viewers at the same time, three thousand, thirty five hundred or one time I had I like one hundred thousand and concurrent live years watching me live, which is which was unreal back back then. Now you can barely do that because everything's controlled and pushed down. But yeah, you know, and I always thought that was that was awesome. I had so much attention, all those people's attention for that moment that second. Yeah, people were bouncing in and out, but it always balance it out. I had access to one hundred thousand ears and eyes for that moment. Now with it with analytics, now we have so much concrete data that if you get someone you know watching listen to you on YouTube for five to ten minutes, that's great, right. But I'm thankful for the thirty nine people that stuck with me and my other channel's blog. And I was like, because you discouraged, Like, man, that's stings. I God, no, man, I'm grateful. I'm grateful with that. Thirty nine people took fifteen minutes out of their day to hear what I had to say or just look into my life of law. I'm grateful for that. And I think sometimes and being the reality of YouTube. We get so caught up in numbers. It's so easy to get caught up in numbers, and especially I don't have to do that anymore because I'm not controlled. I don't work for a media company anymore. I don't work where I have to produce numbers to keep my job. I don't even have to produce numbers. And you know, make money on here. Yeah, I've got some money owed to me here on this channel, but it's not why I do it. The why I do this is because I'm called to do it, and I do this because I want to stay current of helping other people that are in media become number one. So I know the back end well, I know how to structure content well and tell stories well. So my whole goal is a lot different than other people. Mine is to stay current on trends and use these channels to experiment to help other people achieve their goals, because that's how I make my money. People will hire me. Out the producer podcast, their content, their documentaries. So I do this for data purposes, to see what's working and what's not working. So if you enjoy this content, hey, I'm going to say it hit the subscribe button down below and share it and comment down below and say, hey, man, I'm with you. I'm frustrated because you know, on this YouTube journey, you know, you're not alone. And the more we communicate together people are trying to figure this thing out, the better, right, and we can have conversations because you know, one. Day it might pop up. I might do like YouTube curiated content like once a week here information content creation, and then do like a variety something another day. So the segment of that segmented that way. I don't care what people have to say you can't do variety anymore. I don't care. I just got to do something with this channel, and I think that's what I want to do with it, and that's what I'm gonna do, So deal with it. YouTube. Yeah, So if you like, get hit the describe down below it hey, comment too, say hey, what's up. I'm Joe Blow. Let's share storage, let's share data, let's figure this thing out. You know, because YouTube is this big, huge ocean, it's always changing. There's always these experts popping up and go, you know, you need to be doing this and this, and you know, look, it's easy to get distracted. But I think different things work for different people, and I've studied the pros I've been. I worked for some of the top tier YouTube personalities. I've been all the way down below, so I know what works, and you know what works on YouTube. It's you. It's what you bring to the table. There's nothing. You can take things from people and try to overanalyze your videos. But the end of the day, it's about you and what you bring to the table and what works best for you. And I think there's just so many cobbon copy, carbon copy people just trying to chase trends of YouTube to monetize faster or or get there faster, and there's just really no quick way to do it. You have to have a discipline, lifestyle of communicating and creating engaging content. Is this engaging content right now? No, it's raw. I'm just talking like I'm talking on I usually talk on talk radio, unfiltered, very limited editing. On this, I might take the UDDs and ANNs out, but outside of that, this is what you're gonna get, raw and authentic. So I'll catch you on the next one here on the Jeff Adams Show. See you soon when Jeffisbal The Prime Rips Fry