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

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.

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 

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?

PewDiePie vs T Series: Where Do the Subscribers Come From?

It's no secret that YouTube has been dogged by controversy over these last two years, with questionable content that seemingly gets pushed by the algorithm. Now, it's been confirmed that the platform has been working on two new metrics and they are both designed around the concept of gaging and promoting quality content. So what are these metrics, and what do they potentially mean for video creators?

New YouTube Metrics: Engagement Watch Time?

The first one sounds like a jacked up super enhanced version of session watch time. It will track, not only time spent on the YouTube platform watching videos, but also time spent posting and reading comments. So while posting comments may seem like something that's pretty easy to gain (after all how many sub-comments do you have on your channel?), if YouTube is going to start tracking how long a viewer spends on a Watch page reading comments, that's an entirely different and interesting proposition.

This sounds like a metric that might be called Engagement Watch Time. But, on the other hand, earlier on in the year YouTube was forced into a sweeping blanket 

ban of comments on videos containing children

, and while YouTube are slowly resolving this problem, if you do have comments disabled on your videos, for any reason, how do you benefit from this particular metric?

The second metric is simply and mysteriously called ‘Quality Watch Time’ which as of now, nobody outside Google completely understands. However, 

 that the new metric aims to “spot content that achieves something more constructive than just keeping users glued to their phones or desktops.”

What this potentially means is that YouTube maybe starting to distance themselves from what is considered the most important metric on YouTube, raw Watch Time. With the consensus being that more outlandish, more risque content leads to more Watch Time which is something YouTube keeps being dogged by because of controversial content.

Bloomberg goes on to say “the changes are supposed to reward videos that are more palatable to advertisers and the broader public, and help YouTube ward off criticism that its service is addictive and socially corrosive.” Did you notice an important word there? Advertisers. Does that mean search and discovery of your content could be influenced by whether or not its monetized in the future?

Are you ready for a brand-new YouTube metric? One that could change the entire course of a platform and the fate of your channel. Here’s what we know about Quality Watch Time.

Quality Watch Time: YouTube's New Metric Could Change Everything

 Let's jump straight into this one with a question. What do the most impactful thumbnails have in common? The answer is, while they are all a very high-quality images, they are pretty simple with only two or three main elements. That means that when you shrink them down to 10% of their original design size, in other words: thumbnail preview size.

 The best thumbnails are custom - not just still frames from the videos. They are dedicated, professionally shot, professionally edited images, designed to tease you about what's inside the video.

 Unless you capture the perfect moment during your film, and the chances are you will need to create a prepared shot. If you're wondering how video creators get the YouTuber look, they often create poses in front of the camera, then create interesting foregrounds and backgrounds that contrast with each event. This way, you ensure the viewer directs their eyes to the things you want to highlight in your thumbnail.

 The next question you need to ask is, does the image show emotion and, or excitement? If you’re including a face in the thumbnail you’ll want to focus in on the whites of the eyes - that creates a better human relationship.

 Of course, not all thumbnails can convey emotion - particularly if there's not a person in the thumbnail. But they should all be able to tell some sort of story. If the viewer can take an educated guess at the content of the video from the thumbnail, then the thumbnail is doing its job. Custom thumbnails should create intrigue, entertainment or excitement, while teasing a simple, yet powerful message, that compels you to click and find out more.

 Another common trait of awesome thumbnails is consistency. And we're not just talking about quality. Each channel creates a style that you can see throughout their thumbnails. The goal should be to create thumbnails the viewer can instantly recognize as your thumbnails from your channel.

 A vibrant thumbnail is a great thumbnail. But this isn't achieved without a little work. Video creators edit their images to be more colorful and sharper at a smaller size so they pop out of the screen. In Photoshop, you can add an image adjustment layer on top of a simple thumbnail to increase the saturation to make the color pop just that little bit harder. The effect may seem subtle but when you throw it onto YouTube, where it's competing against everybody else's thumbnails, it can have a huge impact.

 Text should be used very sparingly. No more than two or three words. Remember, you have a video title to do that - and the last thing you want to do is regurgitate your title in the thumbnail. That’s a very common mistake. As with everything, there are exceptions to this rule. And if you are doing something that is very educational and needs to say exactly what it does on a tin, then it may be valuable to use a text. But try and keep it as limited as possible. Probably no more than five or six words.

 Always remember YouTube alignments. You cannot avoid this timestamp blotting your thumbnail. Just be aware that it is always on the bottom right hand corner of your thumbnail or you'll end up with a problem.

 Now there is something to remember about all of these thumbnail tips, tricks and guidance. Once you know them, don't be afraid to break them. Which brings us back to the most efficient thumbnail ever created on YouTube. One color, 17 million views. This is a disruptor. Something that follows no rules and because of that it stands out as something totally unique. It helps that the title is perfect too. It challenges your understanding and compels you to click, to get an answer to the question that's in your head, which is, what does this mean?

Here at vidIQ, our thumbnails have consistent branding, consistent themes, and consistent colors. Above are all the thumbnail guidelines we’ve started to follow more religiously in the last year. And the results speak for themselves. We've increased click-through rate (that's how many times people click on our thumbnails) by 100% in the last 12 months. If you're unfamiliar with how click-through rate works we cover this in detail with our thumbnails essential guide. Check the 

Here's my challenge to you. The next time you're on YouTube watching your favorite video creators, take a look at their thumbnails and ask yourself, why do I click on this content? Take those answers and spend twice as long as you usually would do creating your next thumbnail. Because as I said at the top of this video, better thumbnails lead to more clicks. Let's do this.

Awesome custom thumbnails lead to more views and more clicks. It's as simple as that. Here are 10 reasons why some custom thumbnails work and others don't.

10 Reasons Why Some Custom Thumbnails Work and Others Don't

On April 1st PewDiePie retook the lead for the most subscribed to Channel, in the 

' diss track which now has over 80 million views. PewDiePie went a few hundred thousand subscribers ahead, and then T Series slowly clawed that back. But that difference accelerated when T Series were about 50,000 subscribers behind, and then 24 hours later, they got to 80,000 subscribers ahead. A pretty significant difference, especially in T Series' favor. And what can we credit this sudden influx of subscribers to? Put simply, it's YouTube views.

Anything PewDiePie can do in terms of generating views, T Series can do more frequently and with a lot more resources. And although 

T Series is absolutely terrible at converting views into subscribers

, ultimately for this subscriber race that doesn't matter.

And now things have turned legal, PewDiePie's diss tracks have irritated T Series enough for the case to go to court. With those videos no longer viewable in India. Is this just the start of potential legal wranglings between the two? Now of course, as we all know you write off PewDiePie in the subscriber race at your peril. But for six months he was the one being chased and now the roles have reversed, the pendulum has swung. PewDiePie has to chase T Series down to 100 million subscribers. Everything seems to be flowing in one direction. But you know who we haven't heard from for a while? PewDiePie himself - don’t write him off.

While the title for the most subscribed to YouTube Channel flip flops between the two, we ask - how much longer can PewDiePie actually hold T Series off for good?

PewDiePie vs T Series- How Much Longer Can PewDiePie Hold T Series Off For Good?

How do you create a Playlist on YouTube? When you are logged in to 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 YouTube Studio (this is currently in beta, but will become the standard as 2019 progresses). Within the new Studio, click on the videos section that lists all of your most recent videos. Next to each video is a checkbox and if you click it more options will become available at the top. One of the new options is ‘Add to Playlist.’ If you click on this, you can add the currently selected videos to an existing Playlist or at the very bottom, you can create a brand new Playlist. Simply create a title and set the Playlist visibility. For example, you may want to set the Playlist to private until you have several videos in that Playlist.

Playlists are very much underused and undervalued by video creators on YouTube. A proven way to grow your channel is to get viewers to not only watch one of your videos, but a series of videos that are all related together, and that is where Playlists come into play (forgive the pun.) You want to create a binge watch mentality, so not only do you get Watch Time from one video, but session Watch Time from several of your videos.

At the time of writing, how to manage Playlists is a little confusing because the functionality is not yet available in the new creators studio. So if you point your browser to 

https://www.youtube.com/view_all_playlists

, you will reach a page where you can start to edit your Playlists in terms of order of videos, add description, and so on.

One more thing, if you have the VidIQ Chrome extension installed, we have a cool 

. It shows you loads of things about your channel, but at the very bottom of this report card, it tells you which videos on your channel are not currently in Playlists. All you need to do is click through the screens and that will take you directly to the video edit page for that video, where you can add it to a Playlist. Problem solved in no more than thirty seconds.

A proven way to grow your YouTube Channel is to get viewers to watch more than one of your videos - that's why setting up Playlists is a must.

How to Create a Playlist On YouTube 2019 [New Method]

Welcome to another in our exclusive series about getting the most out of 

, but what about the thumbnails you have used for the videos you’ve already published?. Your previous endeavors in the world of creating imagery probably wasn't that great. At vidiQ our thumbnails have certainly evolved in the past year - now we are more consistent with colors, and use much less text.

We know for a fact that our thumbnails are better than what they used to be because of data. If we look at our YouTube click-through rate analytics, it tells us that people are twice as likely to click on our videos now than they were this time last year. So, should you go back through your old videos and update the thumbnails to the skills you have now in the hope that you will get more clicks and more views? Well, this case study might answer that question.

Vevo: Updating YouTube Custom Thumbnails Generated Millions of Extra Views

Even VEVO, one of the largest providers of musical content on YouTube, 

admitted to their own failing when it came to custom thumbnails

. Nine months ago, they decided to embark on a hugely ambitious project to update the thumbnails on thousands of their videos, including this one for 

. The thumbnail went from looking like on the one on the left to the one on the tight:

The short term effect was quite staggering. After the initial surge of views things were starting to flatline, but that switch in thumbnail was just the injection the video needed. The switch-up gave the video an immediate jolt in views, as well as more evergreen momentum afterwards. Vevo confirm that the thumbnail change for that specific video resulted in a 4000% increase in views over a two week period.

Now, obviously a sample size of just one is going to give you some pretty extraordinary results, but what about if you do this over 4000 videos. Well, that's exactly what Vevo did and this is what happened. On average, there was a marked increase in views over a 20 day period, before leveling off to an improved rate of over 5%, compared to how the videos performed prior to the thumbnail change.

Why You Should Update Your YouTube Custom Thumbnails to Generate More Views

So, this is a no brainer, isn't it? I need to go through all of the terrible thumbnails I was making three years ago, update them all, and I'm guaranteed views. Not so fast. It's important to remember that pretty much every video Vevo releases comes with some traction of view velocity, so that even a few years down the line, that video will be getting hundreds of thousands or views.

For smaller channels who have less views overall, and less evergreen content, it's pointless to change the thumbnails on video that are not driving traffic and expect that to suddenly change. You need to think smartly and be selective. Choose the videos that already have evergreen value on your channel by checking your real time analytics in YouTube Studio. When you first open real time analytics, it will show you videos by most recent, but you can sort by which videos are bringing in the most views over the last 48 hours or 60 minutes. If you sort by either of these, you can soon pick out the videos that could be months, even years old, and still bringing in views. This is called evergreen content, and what you can do is identify videos that are still performing well but look like they have terrible thumbnails.

Uploading eye-catching custom thumbnails for your YouTube videos is vital, but will changing old thumbnails help generate more views? Check out these insights from Vevo.

How Updating Custom Thumbnails Generated Millions of Extra Views for Vevo

Do you know which video category your Channel falls under? To check, log into Creator Studio on YouTube, go to ‘Settings’ which you’ll find in the left hand navigation menu. From the pop-up, go to ‘Upload Defaults’ followed by the ‘Advanced’ tab. On this page in the top right hand corner you will find the category drop down which allows you to select from one of 15 categories. This is the video upload category default, but if you want to change the category of an existing video you can go to the ‘Video’ section in the Creator Studio, click on the video you want to adjust, click on the ‘Advanced’ tab and change the video category.

Why are YouTube Categories Important for Creators?

What's the point in confirming the right YouTube category for your video? That’s an interesting question because when you search on YouTube and filter, there is no option to sort by video category. Also, if you click on the trending page your category options are limited too. Also, to the best of our knowledge, there is no algorithmic boost or penalty if you do indeed put the video in the right or wrong category.

However, when it comes to advertisers finding the right videos to place their adverts on setting a video category is important. So to make sure you get football related adverts from your football content make sure to put it in the sports category so you get more clicks from those adverts and earn more money.

Now sometimes these categories will not be a perfect fit for your channel. For example vidIQ could be in the how to and style section, the education section, or even science and technology. Personally I think it should be in the comedy section, but as long as you put the video in generally the right category you should be fine.

YouTube creators who monetize their content should ensure they select the right category before publishing. We show you how to change your YouTube categories by default or from video to video.

How to Change Your YouTube Video Category: Easy Tutorial

In this post, we show you how to unlock every single YouTube feature. A good place to start is to find out what YouTube features you already have, and you can do this by clicking 

 which will take you to a page that shows you most (but not all) of the YouTube features available.

 The first thing you should do when you create a YouTube account is to verify it as this will unlock many of the basic YouTube features. It only takes a minute and you do it 

 Custom thumbnails allow you to turn random still images that YouTube selects from your videos into powerful works of art that draw viewers into your videos. The best news is that custom thumbnails require zero views, zero subscribers, zero watchtime. All you need to do is verify your account! Check out how to 

 By default you can only upload videos to YouTube with a maximum length of 15 minutes, so to upload longer videos, just like custom thumbnails, you don't need any views, subscribers or watchtime. All you need to do is verify your account.

 vidIq livestreams every week on YouTube, auditing your YouTube channels, and helping you to grow. As with custom thumbnails and 15+ minute uploads, this does not require a single view, subscriber or any watchtime, only to verify your account, although you may need to wait 24 hours before you can do your first livestream once you enable it.

Those are the rules for desktop, but for mobile livestreaming, it's a little more complicated. You cannot livestream directly through the YouTube app if you have less than 1,000 subscribers. However, you can still livestream to YouTube on a mobile device using third-party applications without a thousand subscribers.

 A custom URL is one of the first steps you can take to branding your channel and protecting your presence on YouTube. In order to be eligible for a custom URL, your channel requires 100 subscribers, to be at least 30 days old, and have a unique channel icon and channel art. Each channel can only have one custom URL. It cannot be transferred to another channel, but you can remove and change your custom URL up to three times a year.

 One of the most powerful ways to reach your audience is through the Community tab. We use it every day to engage with you, and we find that people just can't get enough of voting polls. To unlock the Community tab, you will need 1,000 subscribers. Once you reach that target, it may take up to a week before you have access to it and YouTube should send you a notification when you unlock it. Check out this video on 

how to build a YouTube audience through the Community Tab

 Probably the most important one of the lot for many of you, is monetization. I'm sure you've heard of the big two requirements for this before, but there are more besides. You will need 1,000 subscribers on your channel and 4,000 hours of watchtime over the last 12 months. As well as this you will need a Google AdSense account set up and linked to your YouTube account. Your channel must also be in good standing regarding community and copyright strikes and follow all YouTube policies. Not having all of this in perfect order can affect your application. Finally the YouTube Partner Program must also be available in your country.

Once you meet all of these requirements you can apply and must go through a review process. If you are rejected, you can apply again in 30 days. We know this is a huge topic with a lot of questions. We've made lots of videos that specifically address monetization, so click on this 

 Super Chats enable your fans to financially contribute to your livestream and prioritize their message at the top of the livestream chat feed. To allow viewers to Super Chat you, your channel must be monetized, of course, with at least 1,000 subscribers. You must also be over the age of 18 and be located in one of the countries that supports Super Chat.

 YouTube Stories allow you to capture micro-moments behind the scenes of your videos to share just like you would an Instagram Story. The Stories feature is currently in beta and available to all eligible channels with over 10,000 subscribers. It may take up to four weeks for Stories to show up after reaching 10,000 subscribers.

 There are many ways to make an income on YouTube, merchandise being one of them, and you may have noticed merchandise carousels appearing on channels. This is part of YouTube's direct merchandising feature, taking all of the pain out of setting it up yourself. As you might expect, being another income revenue stream, to get access to merchandising on YouTube, you must already be in the Partner Program and have 10,000 subscribers. You also need a clean slate when it comes to community guideline strikes.

 A channel membership allows the viewer or subscriber to become a member of that YouTube channel for a monthly fee, and it enables the channel to offer unique perks to those members. Think of it as a Patreon-type service directly tied into the YouTube platform. This YouTube feature has the biggest requirements list of the lot. Already in the Partner Program, 30,000 subscribers, over the age of 18, and available in your country. You and your multi-channel network, if you are with one, must follow the Terms of Service, including the Commerce Product Addendum, and your channel must have zero active strikes. And even if you do meet all of the above, YouTube is still rolling out this service, so it might not yet be available to you.

 If someone else is using your content on YouTube, it may appear in the Copyright Matching list. This allows you to review the match and then take appropriate action. As of now YouTube are currently rolling this out as a small pilot project to channels already in the YouTube Partner Program, so just keep an eye out for it in your Creator Studio.

 I'm sure you've seen this season-slash-episode format that appears on some video titles. They replace hashtags and locations, and when you click on them, they take you to the playlist. We’re calling these "YouTube Season Playlist" for now, and when I asked YouTube how to get this, they told me it was through YouTube invite only. These shouldn’t be mistaken for official series playlists, which are available to all video creators who have verified their account. This does not give you seasons or episode numbers, but does change how your videos are presented and discovered on YouTube.

Have you unlocked every feature available to you as a YouTube creator? We show you how to get access to some of the best features on the platform.

How to Unlock EVERY SINGLE YouTube Feature!

First of all, let's congratulate T Series, the first non-YouTube aggregated channel to surpass 95 million subscribers. That's quite a feat, and PewDiePie should achieve the same milestone soon, which is even more remarkable, for an individual video creator.

Second of all, that subscriber gap got big in a hurry, didn't it? In the short space of just seven days, T Series increased its lead by more than half a million subscribers. Seven days versus seven months of back and forth puts things into a little perspective, doesn't it? And we're now into a phase of the game where PewDiePie never really catches back up irrespective of the world clock. Day or night, T Series is storming ahead. At this rate, by the end of this week, T Series will be more than a million subscribers ahead of PewDiePie in this race, and at that point, do we even call it a race anymore?

So, what happened over the last week? Well, as we mentioned, on April the 19th, T Series launched their music collaboration with western rapper Pitbull, and in five days, it's amassed more than 66 million views.

The video gets a perfect vidIQ video score, a perfect vidIQ SEO score, most of the tags rank number one, and the video was running at over one million views per hour for a solid 12 hours. The data that vidIQ is collecting here (

which it does for every single video on YouTube

), presents the average data analyst with some remarkable numbers. But when it comes to T Series, they operate on an entirely different level to PewDiePie, where single videos, or single campaigns, can drive many subscribers.

With T Series, it's just sheer weight of numbers from the entire channel. Since the release of the Pitbull video on T Series, which brought in 63 million views, the entire channel has generated 534 million views, along with nearly 800,000 subscribers, and those are only the numbers when I recorded this video. By the time you read this, they'll be even higher.

Is PewDiePie Suffering From YouTube Subscriber Fatigue?

Another factor that seems to be weighing against PewDiePie right now is subscriber fatigue. The last time PewDiePie's channel got more than 100,000 subscribers in a single day was April the 8th. As for T Series, well, I had to do little bit of digging here and, with the exception of a massive subscriber purge in the middle of December, the last time T Series got less than 100,000 subscribers in a single day on their channel, was the beginning of October 2018. That just shows you the difference between the numbers and the channels.

However, ‘International PewDiePie Day’, which marks the YouTube channel's ninth anniversary on April the 29th, could be the catalyst for something extraordinary. And, of course, there is still the YouTube community at large, making videos and starting campaigns to get their audience to subscribe to PewDiePie, whether PewDiePie wants that help or not.

By this time next week, we'll know a number of things. First of all, we'll know whether or not International PewDiePie Day had any effect on the subscriber race. We'll know whether or not T Series is more than a million subscribers ahead of PewDiePie.

As T Series becomes the first non-YouTube aggregated channel to generate 95M subscribers, its lead over PewDiePie stands at over 840K. Is the race for the most-subscribed to YouTube channel finally over?

PewDiePie vs T Series...Is the Race for the YouTube Crown Finally Over?

At vidIQ we receive a lot of questions regarding click through rate (CTR) including “I have X% click through rate, is that any good”? It's a reasonable question if you’re new to YouTube analytics and one creators should certainly ask themselves. For instance, would you prefer a click through rate of 7.8% with 106 views or a click through rate of 2.8% with over 100,000 views? And what exactly is the difference?

, we’ve focused on the essentials of how to create thumbnails that people will click on, but what is the end result? That is the click through rate. It is one of the newest and most powerful analytics on YouTube, but it can be downright confusing and detrimental to the growth of your channel if not understood properly. Lots of creators get fixated on the CTR number and often compare themselves to other channels or to what YouTube is telling them is a good number. So when is click through important and when isn’t it?

In simple terms, click through rate is the number of clicks, divided by the number of thumbnail impressions, or how many times your thumbnail is seen on YouTube.

For example, if your thumbnail is seen 1,000 times on YouTube and 100 people click on it, that's a click through rate of 10%. Now that all sounds simple, but it gets pretty messy pretty quickly because it's quite complex to count all of these impressions. YouTube themselves admit they don't count every time a thumbnail is seen - for example, when it appears on an external website, through an email, or a push notification, of if less than 50% of a thumbnail is seen on screen.

So, when it comes to YouTube analytics, your click through rate, and your views, the math will never add up. This is, of course, beyond your control. If the numbers don't add up, just be aware that there is a margin of error.

So, what is a good click through rate? YouTube's official Help Center answer is this: 

half of all channels and videos on YouTube have an impressions click through rate that can range between 2% and 10%

. However, you need to be very careful about how you interpret these numbers. First of all, the smaller the channel or video, the smaller the numbers, the smaller sample size, which means that you can get bigger spikes, whether it be 30% click through rates or 1% click through rates.

Secondly, the age of a video can affect its click through rates. When you first release a video, it's hitting all of your subscribers and its getting an extra boost from YouTube, so you may get a higher click through rate. But what if your video starts off with a high click through rate and then all of a sudden you get a boost from YouTube, get lots of extra views, and the click through rate goes down? Is that what you want? Quite simply: Yes. As YouTube explains, if a video gets a lot of impressions, for example if it gets promoted on a Home Page or Watch Next, it's natural for the click through rate to be lower than for videos where most of the impressions are from sources like your channel page.

I mean, what would you prefer? YouTube to share your content amongst your friends, your family, your subscribers, your close-knit community who are more likely to click on your content or for YouTube to share your content amongst the entire platform's audience where they might be less invested in your content, but you're bound to get a lot more clicks. I know which I would prefer.

Also, another thing that video creators tend to do is panic when they see one analytical number and YouTube is suggesting they should have a completely different one. This is why magic numbers can be so dangerous. Imagine if YouTube revealed what the ideal, average watch-time for a video should be or the ideal audience retention percentage should be. Once there is an official benchmark out there in the world, everybody strides towards that number. And it doesn't matter where you are in your journey or how far you've got to leap to reach that number, if you don't meet it, you feel unfulfilled. You feel like a failure, so let's stop for a second. Take a step back and work out how we can set some realistic goals to improve click through rate.

Realistic CTR Goals for Your YouTube Channel

Let's start with this question: when it comes to YouTube analytics, who are you competing against? Is it the big YouTubers who inspired you to start your own channel? Is it channels who make similar content to you and that are of a similar size? Or are you competing against numbers that YouTube have recommended you should be hitting? If you said yes to any of these, I'm afraid you've got this all wrong.

The ONLY analytics you should be comparing against are your own because, put very simply, those are the only numbers you have complete control over. Now, just in case you don't know where the click through rate analytics are, let me show you. In the new Creator Studio, click on the Analytics section and from here, you want to click on the reach viewers tab at the top and then from these boxes, you can click on impressions click through rate and this will show you what it is for the last 28 days.

As you can see, our current click through rate is 4.8%, which according to YouTube, is below average. However, what they doesn't take into account was where we were this time last year. Back then, the click through rate on our channel was in a much worse state, averaging between just two and three percent. That's when we really started to focus on our thumbnail game - by assessing where we were and improving that number.

Getting potential viewers to look at your impactful thumbnails and reading your intriguing titles is so important. When it comes to CTR and 

, more is better, YouTube rewards you when you improve these two numbers.

How do YouTube custom thumbnails impact your click through rate? And when is click through rate important and when isn’t it?

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