Comment on What's the best day and time to post a YouTube video weekly?
Chozo@fedia.io 1 week ago
We'd need quite a bit more context to answer this. "Best" under what metric? Total views, new subscribers, etc? Is this a normal video or a YT Short? Do you already have subscribers or are you trying to find a new audience? Is your channel already regularly active, and if so have you checked your analytics page to review audience behaviors?
DylanMc6@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
Views and subscribers and such, and normal videos. Oh and I’m just being curious.
Chozo@fedia.io 1 week ago
So, generally speaking, the "best" time to upload is going to depend on when your viewers are active, as YouTube will slightly favor newly-published videos in the recommendation algorithm, so you'd want to catch them at the times they're looking at their screens. But to know when your viewers are active, you need to already have viewers. For context, it took me roughly ~70,000 views on my YT shorts before there was enough data for YouTube to determine when my audience was active (the graph won't even unlock in your analytics page until you reach some similar threshold). For comparison, here is my audience activity graph, showing that my viewers are typically active somewhat early in the morning (in PST, for me).
However, all of this really only affects the initial, first few hours of the videos' viewership; most of my videos will generally even out over a couple days or so, regardless of the upload time. Good timing will give me an initial boost to early views, but that doesn't really carry any momentum for long-term viewership.
But my channel is also about 95% YT Shorts, and 100% video game footage. The format and subject of your videos will also have an impact on this. My audience is mostly male, 25-34 years old, mostly in the USA and Asia, and the video descriptions and tags are targeting this viewer base. If your video is on a different subject material, you'll likely have a much different demographic makeup in your audience, which may come with different active times throughout the week. If your videos are about science, or about social issues, or about the news, etc... these will all affect when the appropriate viewers will be active.
Ultimately, I don't think timing is super important (with the exception to videos about breaking/current events, in which case you want to get those published as soon as possible). Consistency is a lot more important, in my experience, as YouTube will favor channels that upload at regular intervals (either daily, weekly, etc) when recommending content to other viewers, as your channel will have a higher "reliability" rating.