Should you start a new YouTube channel?

A friend mine has been struggling lately.

They have a YouTube channel with over 70k subscribers but can’t seem to break 2-5k views on a “good” video.

I took a look at the content itself and with the exception of a few slop videos created by another agency, it wasn’t bad at all.

This had me wondering:

“How did he get all these subscribers to begin with?”

I did some more probing and it turned out that these guys had spent almost A MILLION in discovery ads for their YouTube channel a few years back.

(This was fairly easy to confirm when I saw a video with 75k views with only 393 likes on his channel.)

Long story short, it seems like they brought in a decent amount of said subscribers through ads, not organic.

Now this is not a dig at YouTube ads at all…

My friend Brian Moncada has an awesome mastermind that I’m a part of and I know several people that are seeing great results from this strategy.

HOWEVER.

YouTube’s algorithm changed late last year.

TLDR your videos now have to pass a series of “tests” that YouTube uses to determine whether your content is worthy of being pushed out.

Before your video has a shot of being pushed to “cold” or new audiences, it first has to get past your existing subscribers.

If positive response (high AVD, solid engagement) = sent to next cluster

If negative response (low AVD, poor engagement) = video dies

You see where I’m going with this?

If someone were to have a highly inactive, or generally “disinterested” subscriber base that subscribed 4 years ago off an ad they can’t even remember…

How likely is it that they’re watching that creator’s videos, let alone start to finish?

This is where problems arise.

Based on YouTube’s criteria our friend’s videos are “bad” because all they see is an extremely low % of his total audience enjoying his videos…

So their interpretation is “video bad = don’t serve to new people.“

I’ve seen the same thing happen to people that pivot niches drastically on the same channel and had their views fall off a cliff.

I know someone that posted fitness tutorials for years, built an audience around working out, then one day started making content on medical device sales.

(He’s currently averaging <200 views on a channel with almost 9k subs.)

This is another example of your old “audience” coming back to haunt you.

In both scenarios you’re playing YouTube on nightmare difficulty.

If you think this is just “theory” we also have data from clients to support this.

We were working with a trader with ~10k subs on a “dead” channel and were struggling to break 500-1k views a video even with GREAT topics.

After a month, we started a brand new channel.

On this brand new channel, we went from 0 - 1.5k subs almost immediately and within a few videos had one crack 10.5k views.

This test supported the fact that it was in fact the damn channel.

If any of this sounds familiar, use this checklist to determine whether it makes sense for you to start fresh:

1) Is the content you’re posting objectively good?

2) Do you have a large enough sample size to draw this conclusion, or is the poor performance just due to a lack of consistency + volume?

3) Did you at any point make a dramatic brand pivot that could “disqualify” previous subscribers from watching your new content OR did you acquire over 50% of your existing subscriber base from ads?

4) If you have correct tracking set up, are you struggling to bring in any kind of qualified leads/calls from this channel?

5) Are your views significantly lagging behind others in your niche with a similar subscriber count?

If you answered “yes” to most of these, it might be time for a new channel.

But this time, just do it right and hire us.

-Presley

Work With Us

The Clip Curator: Our DFY YouTube + ads agency for B2B service providers, coaches, and consultants