Ask any YouTuber and they will tell you that generating significant views and subscribers isn't easy. But with the right strategy and tools, any video creator can build an engaged subscriber base when they understand what those subscribers want to watch.

Appealing to an audience to watch content you are passionate about making is just the first step, you need to know how to reach them and get your videos discovered. Our guides to how to guide more views on YouTube will give you the best tips to succeed on the platform.

How To Get More Views on YouTube

Do you want to make money on YouTube? Millions of creators are earning a very good living from the platform by uploading content that drives huge views and engagements. Whether that income is from advertising revenue, merch sales, or brand deals, we keep you updated with best practises and ideas.

How To Make Money on YouTube

Do you know how to do keyword research so you understand what videos people are actually searching for on YouTube? Do you know how to create a custom YouTube thumbnail? Do you know how to create a Playlist on YouTube?

vidIQ has a ton of tips that will help every creator maximise their video content. We publish content every week to keep you up to date with all the best practices.

YouTube Tips & Tricks

If you’ve put off creating your own YouTube channel because you’re overwhelmed with the choices you need to make or are panicking because you feel you lack the right skills to succeed, worry no more and welcome to the only resource you’ll need to fulfill your video creator dreams.

If this is your first time here, we have a 

 that aims to educate you on your YouTube journey. And if it is your plan to grow your channel, make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel, and click on our notification bell so you don't miss any of our latest tips, tricks, advice, and news.

How to Start Your YouTube Channel: 10 Top Tips

We promised 20 tips to kickstart your YouTube channel, so let's start delivering on that promise with 10 tips in this post and 10 tips in the 

. All the tips are covered in this video too:

So amazingly, there are still some people out there who are thinking of starting a YouTube channel and have been for months, possibly even years. My advice to you is, ready or not, start now. And I'm not telling you this as a New Year's resolution. Every moment you hesitate or procrastinate, there are thousands of video creators starting their YouTube channel today, and gobbling up all your potential audience. You don't want that.

Feel the fear, do it anyway. Start, press record. Record whatever you want today. It doesn't matter if it doesn't end up on YouTube. You need to gain experience in getting in front of the camera, getting behind the camera, using your editing program. You need to start creating content to find out whether or not you enjoy making videos before you know whether or not you enjoy being a YouTuber.

Tip #2 Learn How YouTube Works, No Seriously:

The chances are, that the first video you make is going to absolutely suck. Fantastic, you've made a video. You've made the first step, and in six months’ time, you'll look back at that first video and think yeah, that really was terrible, but you've gotta start the journey somewhere. And with that, you've gotta start your YouTube channel somewhere as well, even if you're not ready. Create a YouTube account, upload a video to YouTube. You don't have to publish it, that's the important thing.

You need to gain experience going through the workflow of uploading videos. The last thing you want is having a brilliant video ready to upload, but you don't know how the YouTube system works. Again, experience is going to trump any advice any of us can give you, so record a video, upload it to YouTube. You don't have to publish it.

Tip #3 Develop a Strategy you Will Actually Follow:

While getting some practical experience behind you is obviously a good thing, you also want some form of strategy. So, answer these questions:

What do you want your channel to achieve on YouTube

, and when you're answering this, try and answer it from a viewer's perspective, not your perspective. So I don't want to hear about hitting 10,000 subscribers, a million views, or whatever. If your viewers know that you're in it for your own self-gain, they will see through it and immediately switch off. Viewers want to know what they can gain from the content, and you want to sell that as much as possible in your videos.

 Again, try and be as specific as possible. What age range? What gender, if you are going to a particular gender? What type of demographic? What are they interested in? You need to know who's going to watch your content.

 There are millions of gaming channels out there, hundreds of thousands of Fortnite channels out there. How are you going to distinguish your content from everybody else who's already on YouTube making content? You need to disrupt the status quo, not join it, because you'll never be seen.

how are you going to deliver this content?

 Is it going to be every day, once a week, at a particular time of the day? Think about when your audience is most likely to watch YouTube, and how much YouTube they can watch per week, and then tailor your content to those watching habits, and think about whether you're going to do video on demand, live streams, what's going to be best for you and your audience?

Tip #4 Find Your Niche and Build the Hell Out of It:

live streams, you'll know this one off by heart. Niche down. Let me give you a quick example. What's your channel about? If you're giving an answer such as, "My channel's about beauty, and it's about travel, "and it's about vlogging," then it's about too many things. 

. It should be about one specific topic, when you start your channel, because you need to appeal to a very specific audience.

Once you've grown your channel, and you've got millions of subscribers who fall in love with you, you can take them on a journey wherever you want, but to begin with, the audience is only interested in the content. They have no investment in you. Try and remember that. It's a cruel lesson to understand, but it will help you when you first start out on YouTube.

Once you've thought about and answered all of these questions, I want you to wrap it all up in a nice little present, called your value proposition. This is your elevator pitch. Try and tell your audience who you are, and why they should watch you, in around about six words.

. It tells you the who, YouTubers, video creators, and why they should watch, because they will learn how to grow their channels. But we've managed to do that in four words. Now it's your turn.

Tip #6 Invest in the Right Audio Equipment:

If you've just started out on YouTube, and you're wondering what your first tech upgrade should be, it is 100% audio, and here's why. Bad audio is so much more distracting than bad video, and everybody hates onboard microphones. 

So if you can, get yourself a dedicated microphone for your camera,

 and if you're recording from a computer, you can't go far wrong with a Blue Yeti.

Tip #7 Create a Formula with Template Videos:

Videos need structure, so when you make your next video, try to think of how you will develop a show formula, that you can use as a template for your future videos. Remember at the beginning of this video, I literally gave you a hook. An introduction, a teaser to what's going to be going on for the rest of this video. Then we have the branded intro, followed by an introduction to who we are for new viewers, a call to action to subscribe to our channel, and then we jumped into the meat of the content where we are right now, and at the end of this video, you'll see how we round this all up.

Your show formula will take time to structure, and it will evolve over the course of your YouTube journey. Try and keep an eye out for this when you watch your favorite YouTubers. As rough and as random as they might appear, there is always structure and story behind each video, and that's why you watch them.

Some people love analytics, others hate them, but there are a couple that are crucial to keep an eye on, whether or not you want to look at that analytics. The first is 

This represents how enticing your titles are, and how clickable your thumbnails are. Check the click-through rate for your channel as a whole, and on individual videos as you test. I'm not going to give you all of the same target to reach. Check what your current click-through rate is, and whether it's two, four, six, or eight percent. I want you to try and improve that by two to three percent this year. It will bring in so many more views.

The other metric, as it always has been, is 

. Generally speaking, the more watch time you get, the more YouTube is going to promote your content. But if you make shorter videos, that doesn't necessarily mean you must make longer videos, because your audience might not react very well to those longer videos.

What I will say is maximize the value of your watch time in the videos that you have. That's by looking at relative audience retention. How does your video stack up to similar videos, in terms of whether people are still watching or not, and try and improve the relative audience retention. Having said that, if your average view duration is 60, 70, 80%, you're doing really well, and it gives you a license to try testing longer videos.

Verify your YouTube account. That will give you access to the most important tool on YouTube, which is custom thumbnails. We've got a video here on how to do it.

Tip #10 Create an Engaging, Interesting Channel Banner:

If I see another generic cityscape, or rolling hills in the channel banner when we do channel audits, I'm going to rip out my hair.

10 more tips or creating and growing your YouTube channel

If you want to take your YouTube channel to the next level and 

 then make sure to download vidIQ. Join over 1 million other users and use vidIQ to help you research YouTube, analyze videos, audit your own channel, and take actionable steps 

Members of the vidIQ family that have upgraded to our Boost and Pro packages get immediate access to the Academy 

 so you can kickstart your YouTube success today! Access to the exclusive vidIQ academy will give you a huge advantage over your competitors from the get-go. 

Kick off your YouTube dreams with the tools you need to launch YOUR channel. We've got the top tips just for you!

How to Start a YouTube Channel: 10 Brilliant Tips

 has reached an incredible arsenal of (at time of writing) 304,131 subscribers! What did we learn from the journey? This is not going to be a perfect list of how-to tips and tricks to get to 300,000+ subscribers. These are my personal views and opinions from a genuine YouTube enthusiast.

Custom Thumbnails are KEY to Success on YouTube

I have made a lot of YouTube videos. I think around about 1,500 at this point. But for a very long time there is something I always neglected because I wanted to make the video and just get it out there onto YouTube. What I didn't spend much time on was thumbnails. A lot of channels have questionable thumbnails, which doesn't do their YouTube brand any favours, but since vidIQ began focusing on the very best thumbnails for our YouTube videos, our click-through rates have increased from 2.5% to 5% in just one year. That's much more views for effectively the same amount of work, just doing it better. Just as readers judge books by their covers, viewers judge videos by their thumbnails. If you can improve your thumbnails that can have a massive and positive impact on the entirety of your channel.

Improve Something by 1% on EVERY YouTube Video You Create

Something I am a strong advocate for, is striving to improve with every video that you make. Whether it is thumbnails, lighting, camera presence, voice narration or editing, you should always be looking for that 1% where you can get better. Trying to improve 100% every single video is going to drive you insane. But if you can come away from every single video thinking, I like that new thing that I tried there. Or that was some really tight editing, or I like the way I presented at that particular point in the video then that is one more step in the right direction.

Experiment With Your Content as Often as Possible

This next tip may fly in the face of YouTube experts and indeed myself recommend. And that is to experiment as often as possible. Now the reason I say this is because it comes from a foundation of consistency. If you are a regular visitor to vidIQ, you should have a general sense of the type of content that we create. We want to help educate you on your YouTube journey. Get more views, more subscribers, grow your channel, ultimately and potentially earn an income from it. I've been doing that for a couple years now here at vidIQ. Showing you how to use all of our tools and general tips about getting more views and subscribers.

But we decided to do last year was to follow YouTube news stories a little more closely and report on them if we found them interesting to our audience. It's why we jumped on ‘

’ as soon as they came out and the reason we rank number one for that search term now.

Going Viral: PewDiePie vs T Series on YouTube

. This started out as an experimentation in fame hacking. Seeing if we could latch on to a trending topic and add our own unique analytical spin on things. We didn't realize it at the time but we'd stumbled on some viral content. Now while we we're experimenting, we also practice what we preach. When those videos started to do really well, what else could we do but double down on them and make more content on the already successful stuff on our channel.

YouTube Watch Time: How we Increased Our Numbers

Now people may say that it's all down to PewDiePie versus T-Series stuff. And while I agree it has helped a lot, it's not what we are banking our channel on. These are the baseline numbers I'm more interested in. The day-to-day watch time hours that have increased around 75% in the last nine months. Outside of the viral hits, this is our bedrock. Our subscribers, our fans, the people who are watching this video and are invested in a channel at a much deeper level than anything our PewDiePie versus T-Series content could ever achieve.

Now as is always the case, when you start to create alternative content to what your community is used to, you will get push back. And we have here at vidIQ. But here's the ironic thing, we haven't produced less content than what we normally would do, in fact we're doing more content. On our 

, we're doing videos on a Monday, live stream on a Tuesday, news on Wednesdays and Thursdays. And beginner's guides on Fridays. What's changed is we're creating a lot more content that includes stuff about PewDiePie versus T-Series. And that is bringing in a lot more exposure for the channel and building a bigger community for the stuff that we're really interested in. Which is helping you grow your channel.

Now I know this post is not full of really useful tips and tricks. Make better thumbnails, make viral videos. That's hardly going to help you day to day. But consider this my open letter to the vidIQ community. This is the type of stuff I learnt in my last nine months getting from 200 subscribers to 304,131 subscribers.

If you want to take your YouTube channel to the next level then make sure to download vidIQ. It will help you research YouTube, analyze videos, audit your own channel, and take actionable steps 

Want to know how to grow your YouTube Channel to over 300K subscribers? Take a look at what vidIQ did to reach that goal and what you can do to build up your subscriber base right now.

How to Generate 300,000 Subscribers for Your YouTube Channel

Did you know that by adding a hashtag word in your YouTube description, you will trigger their appearance just above your YouTube video title? These hashtags are now an official source of categorizing your content on the platform, and they are clickable, and therefore searchable on YouTube. They allow the viewer to perform one click searches for particular search hashtag terms.

If you want to know how to use these hashtags for your videos, just 

click on this full tutorial to find out more

Use hashtags as a way of keeping viewers watching your content. Whether you use your Channel name as your hashtag, or a popular slogan you have, or you have a series of videos, whether it be Fortnite tips, beauty makeup challenge or the best Trump memes, use hashtags for consistency.

You have a limit of three hashtags per video. You can include them in the title or the video description. We've found that if you include them in the video description, then it adds them above your title. If you add the hashtags to your title it doesn't add them to above your title. So, add the hashtags to your description so it sits there just nicely above your title and save the title for really delivering that strong message that gets people to click on your videos.

These hashtags have a range of policies that must meet the community guidelines on YouTube much like all metadata on the platform. So, don’t use spaces, no over usage of hashtags, no harassment, no sexual content. Keep on the right side of YouTube and you shouldn’t have any issues.

Consider adding hashtags to your legacy content, particularly if you’ve uploaded videos with different topics.

Think about your future videos. If you consistently upload content around a certain theme then add 2-3 hashtags to your default description so you never forget.

Be patient. Hashtags can take a few minutes to appear so just keep refreshing the screen until you see them.

Some users are reporting that their hashtags are jumbled up with random spaces where they don't expect them to. That seems to happen when there are emojis in the vicinity of your hashtags. If you are having problems trying to represent hashtags properly in your videos, maybe just clean up the text and characters around your hashtags, especially emojis, and that should fix the issue.

Did you know you can test the performance of your YouTube hashtags? Just go to YouTube Analytics, then Traffic Sources and YouTube Search, and your hashtag results will appear like all of it YouTube searches in those analytics.

YouTube Hashtags - are they a legitimate way to grow your Channel? Here’s 8 things you need to know about them.

YouTube Hashtags: What Are They and How to Use Them!

If you’re thinking about deleting your YouTube channel it’s a fairly easy process. On any YouTube page, click on your profile icon in your top right-hand corner of your screen, and select ‘Settings’, then ‘Advanced Settings’. Now, this is where things start to get a little scary. At the bottom of this screen is a "delete channel" button. Don't worry, if you click this button, nothing happens just yet, as you will first need to provide your password. Once you do that, then you will be on the big decision-making screens.

How to Permanently Delete Your YouTube Channel

Let's start with permanently deleting your channel first. This will delete your videos, the users subscribed to your channel, all forms of engagements, your subscriptions to other channels, and your search and watch history. It also removes not only the videos you have created, but your preferences as a video viewer.

If you feel that this is a step too far, then consider the "Hide Channel" option instead. This will make private your channel, likes, users subscribed to your channel, and your subscriptions to other channels. What it will also do is permanently delete comments you posted, but it will not delete your search and watch history. You will be asked to tick all of the checkboxes to confirm you understand what will happen to your channel. This option however, does allow you to re-enable your channel at any time. When your channel is hidden from public view, you may see the message, "Your YouTube channel has content but is disabled," on your YouTube video manager page.

If you do want to quit YouTube, here's my personal advice. Think really, really hard before you click that button. If you're finding the whole process too frustrating, if you think YouTube is against you, or you're simply burnt out, there is nothing wrong with taking a break. Many video creators do this. I have struggled with the pressures of YouTube in the past. I took an entire year off when I moved to a different country. But when I came back, I had a new fire lit within me. So, even if you think YouTube is not the right fit for you right now, things can and will change. And if you do decide to carry on with your YouTube venture, then don't forget that vidIQ is here to help.

Do you want to delete your YouTube Channel, or simply hide it while you take a break and consider your options? We show you how.

How to Delete (or Hide) a YouTube Channel

I'm sure you all have your own horror stories of when you've accidentally deleted your YouTube videos - it’s more common than you think. But there’s a quick and easy solution videos, just pop onto Youtube and download it from there.

When you are logged into YouTube you should see your channel logo in the top right hand corner of most YouTube screens. If you click on that, you have the option to go to 

. This is currently in beta, but will become a standard as 2019 progresses.

This is your new dashboard or analytics homepage and from here you want to click on the Videos tab. This will list all of your videos, with most recent first.

When you roll your mouse over these it will show three dots. Click on this and you should find yourself with a download option. And this part's a bit of a no brainer. Click download to save it to your computer.

You can't officially download other peoples YouTube videos

 although you can download them to watch offline if you are part of the YouTube Premium Service on a mobile application of Youtube.

And there's also this extra little tidbit that you might want to know if you're downloading your own videos from YouTube. The file that you download from Youtube is a radically different beast of the one you originally uploaded. First of all you'll notice just how small it is. In this case, ten percent of the size of the original. You'll also notice that by default the resolution is set to 1280 by 720 which may differ from the original. If nothing else this is a testament to the compression technology over at YouTube because other than resolution, I can't tell a difference.

 then make sure to download vidIQ. It will help you research YouTube, analyze videos, audit your own channel, and take actionable steps 

Forgot to back up your YouTube uploads? There's a new method of downloading your content from your YouTube Channel and we show you what you need to do.

How to Download a YouTube Video: New Method

The old saying that readers will often judge a book by its cover is true, and the same goes for viewers that judge videos by their thumbnails. So ensure that you have custom thumbnails enabled on your YouTube Channel so you can upload your own images to the viewer as they browse for something interesting or entertaining to watch.

How To Enable Custom Thumbnails on YouTube

When you are logged into YouTube, you should see your profile logo in the top right hand corner. Click this and then go to settings. From here you need to click on the view additional features link, which will then show you all the YouTube features that are available and whether or not you have access to them.

There are no views, subscribers, or watch time requirements to unlock custom thumbnails. All you need to do is verify your YouTube account. And you can do that from this very screen. Next to your profile logo and channel name at the top, you will find a blue verify button. Click that to start the process. To verify your YouTube account, Google will send you a verification code to a phone number either through an automated voice or text message, which you can choose on the screen. Do note so you can only verify two YouTube accounts per phone number, per year.

Once you put your phone number, click submit, and you should see this screen that asks you for that verification code. Whichever solution you decide to use, you should almost instantly get a ping on your phone in this example I requested a text message, which sent me the verification code. Now all you need to do is go back to your computer, input the six digit verification code, click submit and that will verify your account. Which instantly gives you access to adding custom thumbnails to your videos.

Why Custom Thumbnails on YouTube are Critical to Success

Now for a very quick demonstration on why custom thumbnails are so important. This video you see on screen is about how to download a thumbnail from YouTube. But the current thumbnail for this video that's been selected by YouTube automatically is a rather useless picture of myself that tells the viewer absolutely nothing. But with the help of a custom thumbnail, we can tell a much more colorful, intriguing, and direct visual story that might just earn this video an extra click.

Here's a very simple way to look at it. We increase the number of clicks we get on our videos, (this is called click through rates) by more than 100% simply by making better thumbnails. So remember, you can make a fantastic video, but if you can't get people through the door then it is a waste of time. Pay attention to that first impression.

Enabling custom thumbnails is one of the easiest but most important things you can do for your YouTube channel. We show you how.

How to Enable Custom Thumbnails On YouTube

If you’re new to YouTube, or you just want to up your YouTube game, then learning how to create the most effective custom thumbnails is absolutely essential. Just as readers judge books by their covers, viewers judge videos by their thumbnails. It's unavoidable. You have just a tiny window of opportunity to grab that person's attention and draw them into your video. So let's jump into how to make custom thumbnails.

Custom Thumbnails on YouTube: Your Winning Feature

When you upload a video to YouTube, the platform will select a few options for thumbnails based on the content of the video. But the chances are very, very high that the frames selected will be off the mark and tell the viewer absolutely nothing. But with the help of a custom thumbnail, we can tell a much more colorful, intriguing, and direct visual story that might just earn this video an extra click.

And here is the good news. To start using custom thumbnails, you don't need a single view, subscriber, or minute of watch time, but you do need to verify your YouTube account. Verifying your YouTube account to unlock custom thumbnails, along with lots of other things, has just jumped to the top of your YouTube priority list. Get it done now. Now you've got access to custom thumbnails, let's have a look at some of the technical aspects of how to create them.

The minimum recommended resolution is 1280 by 720. If you go any higher, then you're gonna face two problems. First of all, when you start to create really high resolution images, when you shrink them down to thumbnail preview size, they can look a little weird. But more importantly, YouTube has a very restrictive file size when it comes to thumbnails. You have just two meg to play with. Keep that in mind if you intend to create really complex images. And finally, make sure to save your thumbnails in one of the following file formats. JPEG, GIF, or jiff, BMP, and PNG.

Another advantage of creating thumbnails at this resolution is that it matches the aspect ratio of how 99.9% of your potential audience will see them, which is the classic 16 by 9 widescreen shape. If you stick to these basic YouTube thumbnail principles, you should be off and running.

Custom Thumbnails on YouTube: The 10% Rule

Pay attention folks, because if there is one thing you take away from this guide, it's this next tip. It is absolutely crucial for the success of your thumbnails. When you design your thumbnail, you get the whole experience, but everybody else gets a smaller experience, and I like to call it the 10% rule. At full size, this thumbnail looks colorful, but pretty basic. There are maybe three elements to it. A person, and object, and a background. However, when you shrink it down to 10% of its original size, is everything you saw before still recognizable and easy to understand? It's the same for YouTube thumbnails as seen on mobile devices, although this might be more the 25% rule, or the 30% rule. Basically when you create your custom thumbnail, make sure to shrink it down to 10% of its size to see how everybody else is gonna see that thumbnail when it ends up on YouTube.

Great Custom Thumbnails: Higher Click Through Rates

Hopefully every YouTube content creator is aware of their click through rate. Every time a viewer sees one of your thumbnails, that counts as an impression. Every time somebody clicks on one of those thumbnails, that is a view, of course And you can calculate the click-through rate from that. For example, let's say your thumbnail is shown 100 times, and it's clicked on 10 times, that's 10% click-through rate. Basically, click-through rate is a representation of how powerful and effective your titles and your thumbnails are.

To review the click-through rate on your channel, you will need to go to the new YouTube Studio beta. From the dashboard screen, click on Analytics, and then from the top row of tabs, click on Reach Viewers, and finally Impressions to click-through rate box. A question that's often asked at this point is, what is a good click-through rate? And YouTube's answer is between 2% and 10%. But what I would say is forget all that and set your current click-through rate as a benchmark and aim to improve on that. The reason I say that is because it's impossible to compare your click-through rate to anybody else's because the type of content, and the style of a channel, and the size of a channel, amongst many other things, can have a huge influence on how many people click on your thumbnails. All that you should be doing is working with the numbers you know and understand. Working with somebody else's numbers is going to drive you utterly insane. The exciting thing is that as click through rate goes up, so does everything else!

Custom Thumbnails: Keep on the Right Side of YouTube

Time for a little bit of fun. Did you know that Google can tell you all sorts of things about your thumbnail, which are unnervingly accurate, including, really importantly for YouTube, whether or not your thumbnail is safe. A great tool for checking a thumbnail is safe is 

, and it’s free to use right now. All you need to do is upload a thumbnail to it and it will spit out the following information. It can tell me, with 94% confidence, that the main emotion in this thumbnail is surprise. It knows this thumbnail contains a person, a man, in fact, and it can even pick out the traffic sign. It's even trying to pick out specific body parts and actions. Perhaps the most important tab, however, is the last one, Safe Search. This tells us how safe Google thinks the image is, and we know that YouTube does analyze thumbnails to ensure that they are safe for the viewer. So if you do create a thumbnail that is a little edgy, it might be a good idea to run it through this first. Cloud Vision is certainly an impressive glance into the world of artificial intelligence.

Beyond the video content itself, custom thumbnails are probably the most important YouTube tool you have in your arsenal. Take a look at our essential guide and get it right first time, every time.

How to Make Custom Thumbnails - The Essential Guide!

As the PewDiePie vs T Series battle continues we’re taking a look back at all the high points and learnings from the race for the Channel with the most subscribers on YouTube. In this post, we ask if PewDiePie really tried to hack YouTube in a bid to hold on to his crown?

 that automatically played at twice the speed as normal. This naturally intrigued us as it brought Watch Time and playback speed into focus. Let's talk about the theory first. You can change playback speed on any YouTube video by going to settings, clicking on speed, and then changing it to a quarter speed or double speed. With some very rudimentary math, that means that you could watch a ten minute video at double speed, and it actually only takes you five minutes to watch. And a lot of people do that, including myself. If I am very short on time, and it's a very conversational video, then I'll watch it at double speed, just so I can get through it quicker and watch more content with the time that I have.

That's the viewer's perspective on playback, but what about the video creator? Is there something to gain from this? It's generally accepted that watch time is the most important metric on YouTube. So does slowing down or indeed speeding up the playback of your videos affect watch times positively or negatively.

In this example, what PewDiePie has done is slow his video down in his video editor, so that when you play back at normal speed it's just excruciating. This forces the viewer to change the playback speed to double speed so that it looks and sounds normal. But in YouTube land what actually counts, the 21 minutes of the actual video length, or the ten and a half minutes of real world time that it took you to watch the video? I'm glad you asked because we have the answer.

Earlier in 2018, we uploaded an 18 minute video and set it to private so nobody else could watch it. Then we watched the entire video at double speed, so that we could check the analytics on it. That single view, watching an 18 minute video at double speed resulted in a watch time of nine minutes, exactly half the length of the video itself. What it also gave us, rather weirdly, was audience retention of exactly 50 percent, which is a little confusing.

The next thing we tested was the complete opposite. We uploaded a one minute video to YouTube, set it to private, and watched it at a quarter speed. That meant that in real life it took us four minutes to watch this one minute video. And what did the analytics say? Yep, you guessed it. Four minutes of watch time and rather impressively, four hundred percent audience retention from a single view. Just to clarify that, You Tube watch time is calculated from your physical presence in the real world watching the video. If, and I hasten to underline that, if PewDiePie was trying to game the YouTube system, he got it all backwards.

The simplest way of looking at this, is if you double the playback speed, you have the watch time. Let's say for argument's sake that five million people watched this PewDiePie video, and they watched a full duration of the video at 20 minutes. That would give you, in normal circumstances, one hundred million minutes of watch time. But if it's played at double speed, that halves the physical amount of time the video is watched, and it brings us down to fifty million minutes of watch time. That's still quite a lot of cost.

If you were going to try and hack the YouTube watch time analytics, which of course we do not recommend, you would have to do this. There you have it folks. If our testing was accurate and the analytics haven't changed since then, this video will have had a detrimental effect on PewDiePie's watch time. Which begs the question, why did the currently most subscribed to You Tube channel on the planet do this? I don't know, it's PewDiePie.

ICYMI: As the PewDiePie vs T Series battle rages on we take a look back at the stunts pulled, including the time PewDiePie may have tried to hack YouTube Watch Time in a bid to hold on to his crown.

Did PewDiePie Really Try to Hack YouTube to Beat T Series?

First of all, let's say congratulations to PewDiePie. The first independent YouTube channel to reach 90 million subscribers. If he was a country, he'd find himself in between Vietnam and Germany. And, of course, let's not forget T Series, who hit the same phenomenal landmark just half an hour later. But, this continued neck-and-neck race between two channels is starting to raise some interesting and hard questions

I think we've all got used to the idea of PewDiePie being overtaken by T Series on occasion. It's happened a number of times, but the curious question is this, having taken a lead, why can't T Series maintain it and indeed stretch it? The gap always seems to be a few thousand subscribers, and doesn't last more than a couple of hours at most. Before by the end of the evening, PewDiePie finds himself maybe 15 to 20,000 subscribers ahead, and then we repeat. As day turns to night or night turns to day, depending on your perspective, PewDiePie has a lead that soon vanishes and now we find T Series once again in the lead. So what's actually going on in the 

PewDiePie vs T Series & the YouTube Algorithm

Now, you could maybe accept this happening for one or two nights in a row while some massive PewDiePie campaign of the likes we've seen before propelling him hundreds of thousands of subscribers ahead. But this type of subscriber fluctuation has been going on for months - almost as if it's being controlled on purpose to help each channel feed off of the continued media interest. It just doesn't make sense for T Series to catch up, and then still not be able to jump ahead of PewDiePie for longer than 24 hours. So what is going on here?

Well, I found a really interesting video by a chap called Mehditation, who talks about a 

. It's really brilliant stuff, and this is what he thinks is happening. We know T Series has been catching up PewDiePie for a long time, years in fact. Before this turned into a race, PewDiePie averaged 30,000 subscribers a day, while T Series would average in excess of 100,000 subscribers a day. Now yes, when it turned into a race PewDiePie got the occasional huge subscriber boost from the YouTube community. But, ultimately, they can only help for so long against a relentless T Series YouTube machine.

But as both channels grind towards 100 million subscribers, the rules of engagement seem to have changed. As if they are magnetized to each other, both channels averaging just under 140,000 subscribers a day. So, how might this happen? Let's go into conspiracy mode. Let's pretend that T Series has millions of fake accounts subscribed to their channel. And as they gather more and more real subscribers, they simply shave off the fake ones. Thus, controlling there ultra consistent subscriber count that they have had for months, if not years. Or, what if it's the complete opposite? What if it's millions of fake accounts that are being pumped into PewDiePie's channel? And as he gains new and legitimate subscribers, the fake ones are simply sliced off the top. Thus, keeping a subscriber pace that PewDiePie's channel has never been able to sustain for such a long period of time. It keeps both channels in the news, and both channels benefit from it.

Now, given the recent numbers, and how the subscriber rate has changed over the last couple of weeks, I find this theory absolutely fascinating with some plausibility. Do I think it's true or not?

In the race for the most subscribers on YouTube, T Series have taken the lead over PewDiePie on many occasions. But why can't they keep a hold of it?

PewDiePie Vs T Series: Why Can't T Series Maintain the Lead?

Want to download your own thumbnail from YouTube? When you are logged into YouTube you should see your channel logo in the top right hand corner of most YouTube screens. If you click on that you have the option to go to 

, this is currently in beta, but will become the standard as 2019 progresses.

To download a thumbnail from one of your own YouTube videos in the new Studio click on the Videos section where you will find all your videos listed with the most recent first. Click on a video to jump to the edit page and under the basics tab you should see a selection of potential thumbnails selected from the video and your current thumbnail if it is a custom one. There should be a box with three dots inside the current thumbnail. If you click on that you have the option to replace it with a new thumbnail or download the existing one.

When you click 'download', the image may appear in a new web browser where you can do the usual right click and save. One thing to note, it doesn't matter what resolution you uploaded the thumbnail as, it will always be downloaded as 1280 by 720.

Now that's how you download your thumbnails, but you can download any thumbnail from any YouTube video. To do this, the video has to be public and you will need the video ID. You can get this from the watch page URL and it will be a random collection of numbers and letters after the equal symbol. So highlight all of that and copy it. On a new browser tab you will need to type in the following URL. All you need to do is replace 'YouTube-video-id' with the actual video ID:

*https://img.youtube.com/vi/youtube-video-id/maxresdefault.jpg*

Once inserted, you should be able to press enter or click go and you should now see the thumbnail from that video. So that's how you download any thumbnail from any video on YouTube. But you have to be careful about why you're doing this. If you just want it for your own personal use, say to look at a larger version of the thumbnail and see if there are any good strategies and tactics you can use in your own thumbnails, that's fine. It's when you want to use it for broadcast or commercial purposes.

Remember, a creator's video is their own copyrighted material and the same goes for the thumbnail. So if you want to use this thumbnail in your own content then you should really ask permission from the video creator. Of course you could use the thumbnails in your content and claim fair usage as educational or transformative content, but that's a topic for another video.....

Did you know that vidIQ has an awesome custom thumbnail generator tool that's free to use? You can create and edit the best thumbnails for your YouTube videos to maximise your click through rates - more details on 

Everything you wanted to know about downloading YouTube thumbnails but were afraid to ask. vidIQ brings you all the details.

How to Download a YouTube Thumbnail (New Method)

PewDiePie has the lead over T Series, once again, in the subscriber race and indeed the chase to 100,000,000 subscribers. The combined subscriber count is approaching 190M and of course, there's absolutely no duplication in numbers here, because there's no crossover between PewDiePie's audience and T Series' audience. Nobody's going to subscribe to both channels, are they? Or, they are and then, they're going to unsubscribe from one channel to bring the numbers down. You can see the issue here.

Now, of course PewDiePie and T Series subscriber sources are private. We're not going to have access to that, but we can investigate where subscribers typically come from for a channel and then you can decide where you think both PewDiePie and T Series' subscribers are generally coming from.

PewDiePie & T Series: Where are Subscribers Coming From?

We're going to be using VidIQ as a reference point to find out all of the different subscriber sources there are and you can do that by going to analytics, clicking the "see more" link on any of the channel-wide graphs, and then selecting subscriber source. If you have your own channel, it might be worth doing this right now to follow along.

Now, where else could we start but with the YouTube watch page? This is when a viewer found the content so valuable that they were compelled to click the "subscribe" button as they were watching the video. PewDiePie's "

" dis-track has amassed 65M views in a week, which has helped him bring in over 1,500,000 subscribers in that time.

Now, not all of those subscribers are coming from one video. PewDiePie produces daily content, after all. But in the previous week, he got 950,000 subscribers. Logic dictates that valuable videos that connects with your audience will bring in more subscribers and it always helps when the video goes viral, even if YouTube never puts it on the "trending page."

Just to make sure we're fair and balanced on this - if we look at this purely from a views versus subscriber perspective, things do get really interesting. Last June, before the subscriber rates really got going, T Series got eight times as many views, but only five times as many subscribers as PewDiePie. If we fast forward to December, when the race was in full effect, PewDiePie doubles his view count, while T Series increased theirs by around 40%.

But when it comes to subscribers, PewDiePie has increased his count by almost 800%. T Series on the other hand, have increased their sub-count 50%. More or less, in line with their increased view count. I think all of this tells us something really interesting on both sides.

PewDiePie & T Series: Views vs Subscribers

First of all, T Series is terrible at converting views into subscribers and that is due to the nature of their very diverse content. You've got all sorts of music genres on one channel and if you've looked at T Series, their views spike depending on what type of video is being pushed out on their channel. As for PewDiePie, 200% increase in views, 800% increase in subscribers. Time for an eyebrow raise. Of course, we kind of have an explanation for that. It's all of these other YouTubers, such as Mr. Beast and Markiplier rallying behind PewDiePie, but just because he gets some subscribers, it doesn't mean he actually gets more viewers from it and build an engaged audience with his channel. In most cases, a channel will get most of its subscribers from the video watch pages.

On the other hand, there are a bundle of subscriber sources that generate virtually no subscribers. Those being, the "subscribe" button on your channel page, subscriptions from the search results based on queries, interactive cards and end screens within videos, and so on. But two subscribe sources that do deserve more scrutiny however, are ‘other’ and ‘other YouTube channel’.

What does ‘other’ refer to? T Series, being a massive Bollywood film and music label, has external ways to encourage people to subscribe to their channel. One such place being their official website. ‘Other YouTube Channel’ is another potential fountain of subscribers too. Again, T Series has the opportunity to combine the might of all of it's YouTube channels to create a network of subscriber opportunities and they do. We took a deeper look into this and it also seems that individual videos from other channels can push subscribers to you too.

Not quite sure how that differs to watch page subscriptions, but if we look at it from this point of view, the T Series channel pushes out three to four videos a day, that's in comparison to PewDiePie, who averages a single video a day. That means, more opportunities for T Series to get videos suggested on other videos and more potential subscribers from that other YouTube channel source.

How YouTube Channels Also Lose Subscribers

Now so far, we've only talked about how each channel can gain subscribers, but don't forget, you can also lose subscribers as well. You can of course, gain and lose subscribers from all sources, but there are only a few that generate negative numbers and of particular interest in the PewDiePie versus T Series race, closed accounts is likely the one that's abnormally high.

If you're familiar with the subscriber race, you'll have seen those moments where either PewDiePie or T Series gain or lose tens of thousands of subscribers in a single second, which is impossible, unless there is a subscriber purge or audit. YouTube do talk about this in their "help" pages, citing spam subscribers and channels that have been terminated. YouTube have done big purges, but you'll see fluctuations of 1,000 subscribers here and there happen on a near daily basis when it comes to PewDiePie versus T Series. Closed accounts are those terminated due to policy violations and spam subscribers are those subscribers gained through artificial means. I'll just say it one more time, 200% increase in views, 800% increase in subscribers.

Since PewDiePie is, once again at time of writing, ahead of T Series in terms of subscribers, we ask where do all these subscribers even come from?

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