When 68 Views Doesn’t Mean Your Video Failed
My latest video flopped, but the numbers told a different story.
After a week, it only had 68 views. Not great, but sometimes a video just doesn’t connect, and you learn something in the process. The first film on House Notes, my architecture channel, had gained some traction. Nothing groundbreaking, but enough that this result felt strange.
Except when I looked at the analytics, something didn't quite add up. Those 68 views had come from just 266 impressions. The click-through rate was 7.9% and average percentage viewed was 43.7%.
None of this meant I secretly had a hit on my hands, but it didn't feel like enough information to conclude the video had failed either. And it wasn't just the main film. A Short from the same material had only managed 153 views. It wasn't that people had rejected the work as hardly anyone had seen it in the first place.
So, I did something I’ve never done before. I re-uploaded both videos and went again.
Questioning the failure
Now, I wouldn't recommend uploading the same video again simply because it hasn't performed.
Sometimes a video just doesn't connect. I've made plenty of those. Changing thumbnails, tweaking titles and blaming the algorithm can quickly become a way of avoiding the more useful conclusion that people simply weren't interested.
But this felt different, so I started with the Short.
The first version had reached 153 views. The second has now passed 77,000. That was enough for me to try the thing I normally wouldn't with the main film. I unlisted the original, tweaked the title and uploaded it again. The film itself was the same.
Within seven days, the re-upload had passed 100,000 views.
The effect wasn't limited to the new video. Before this happened, House Notes had 131 subscribers. Seven days after the re-upload, it had 2,046. The first House Notes film had been sitting just below 4,000 views after eight months. The new audience started finding that too, pushing it past 10,000. The same Short I'd re-uploaded to YouTube also went onto Instagram. That Reel has now passed 521,000 views, and the account has grown to more than 6,000 followers.
Within a week of re-uploading the main film, House Notes had also generated enough qualifying watch time to meet YouTube's full monetisation requirements.
All from a film that, one week earlier, appeared to have failed.
So should you re-upload videos that flop?
No.
Or at least, that's not the lesson I'm taking from this.
If the first version had received 50,000 impressions and nobody clicked on it, that would have told me something. If people had clicked and immediately left, that would have told me something too. The interesting thing about those original 68 views was that there wasn't enough evidence to tell me much of anything.
That's the distinction I've found useful. A bad result and a failed piece of work aren't necessarily the same thing. Analytics can't tell you whether your film is good. And decent analytics on a tiny sample can't prove that thousands of people are waiting to watch it. But they can give you reasons to question what happened.
There is an enormous amount of randomness involved in publishing work online, and I don't think I've discovered a trick for defeating it. What I have learned is not to confuse a result with an explanation.
If at first you don't succeed, question it.
Sometimes the answer will be that the work didn't connect. Sometimes you'll need to make it better. And sometimes, hardly anyone was shown it in the first place…
