Why You're Not Getting Views on YouTube (and How to Fix It)

If you're not getting views on YouTube, it is almost always a skill issue with the content, and only rarely the algorithm. After running over 50 channels and coaching thousands of students, I check things in this order: get to 10 uploads before judging anything, see whether the videos are getting impressions at all, then audit the idea, packaging, audio, intro and talking points against the channel you're modeling. That audit is about 95% of the reason people aren't getting views. A shadowban or a bad niche is the odd exception.

What Is in Your Control and What Isn't

This started as a quick guide and turned into an hour, because "why am I not getting views" is one of the most common problems I see with beginner YouTubers. I've made a few million dollars off YouTube, run over 50 channels (long-form, mostly faceless), and coached thousands of students over the past four years. This is everything that goes through my head when someone asks me that question.

Start with ownership. My biggest recommendation in business is to have extreme ownership and assume everything is your fault. There are a few cases where it really is out of your control, so here's the split.

SEO matters more when you're small. When you're bigger, good content carries it (I've had videos with basically no title still get 100,000 views). When you're starting, you need to point the algorithm in the right direction. If your first 10 impressions are bad data and nobody clicks, it confuses the algorithm and it takes you even longer to get results.

The idea, the thumbnail and the packaging are probably 80% of the results on a video. The quality of the content is the execution, and it's what makes people watch your videos over and over.

On the right column, the market changes fast. What worked three years ago doesn't work today. I've seen channels making a million dollars a month fall off because they got lazy and didn't adapt.

None of that is an excuse. I see people play the victim far too often ("it's the algorithm's fault"). Take ownership of everything, and further down I'll tell you when it makes sense to pivot.

Why Buying Views and Running Ads Won't Fix It

I see people look for gimmicks and ways around the system. If you cheat the system, you're cheating yourself.

I'm saying this from personal experience. My first ever YouTube channel taught people how to flip real estate, about six years before I recorded this. I wasn't getting views, so I went and bought views. I got a lot of views for a couple of days, and when they went away, nothing happened. If anything it set me back.

Subscribers are a vanity metric. Even views are a vanity metric to a certain extent. None of it matters if you're not making money and you're not getting better. So no bought views, no bots, and paying for ads isn't going to fix it either.

How Many Videos to Upload Before You Judge the Channel

First question: do you have less than 10 videos on the channel?

If you're brand new and under 10 videos, keep uploading. Some channels need around five to eight uploads before one goes viral. I've had many channels where the first video got a million views, so it happens, but five to eight is the safe bet, and around 10 is the cutoff where I start judging.

In the early stages, uploading a video and not learning anything from it is literally burning cash. Learning something on every upload is worth more than whatever that video pays you, so focus on skill acquisition over views and money at the start.

If you're a student in my program, this is when you get on a call with a coach and do a channel review, your videos next to the competitor's. I'd do it around upload five too.

Are You Getting Impressions? Shadowban vs. Skill Issue

Next question: are you getting impressions?

If you're getting no impressions at all after 10 uploads, you might be shadowbanned. In my experience that's typically a channel on the borderline of YouTube's community guidelines: violence, guns, a lot of swearing, nudity on screen. Think of a body cam niche. When a brand new channel uploads that kind of content, YouTube is a lot more hesitant to promote it.

The fix is to make your videos as PG-13 as possible. And I mean PG-13 like back in the '90s, because PG-13 today is completely different from what it used to be.

If you're in a more evergreen niche, be patient. I've had students upload 15 high-quality videos with maybe one over 1,000 views. They waited it out, and six months later one of the videos got 50,000 views almost instantly.

One thing that helps with impressions is changing the thumbnail. Every time you change it, you can get new impressions. When a video starts to die off, I swap the thumbnail (roughly every 1,000 impressions or so) and the video gets fresh eyeballs.

Don't change anything drastic. On a new channel, the difference between a million-view video and a 100-view video is often a few small tweaks.

How to Get Your First Eyeballs on a New Channel

At the start you're just trying to get out of the no-view zone. These are the things I use.

Community tab. When I recorded this, every channel had access to the community tab. Post a poll, a quiz or a meme a few times a week, every day if you can (you can schedule them months out). It runs on a different algorithm than your long-form videos. On other channels this has gotten me a few extra million impressions a year and around 10,000 additional subscribers a year.

Pinned comments. Every single video. I mostly use it for a call to action, MrBeast style ("subscribe and I'll give you a cookie"). Make it fit your niche. If you're talking to lawyers, it's "subscribe to pass your bar exam."

Comments on other channels. This is my one YouTube superstition: a new channel that never engages on the platform looks like a bot. So when I set up a channel, I leave genuine comments on a few channels in my niche. No "sub for sub."

Shorts. I focus on long-form because it pays well. But Shorts has a different algorithm, and I've had students clip their long-form videos into Shorts to get a seed audience (or get monetized) faster, then stop posting them.

Niche communities. Reddit and Facebook groups are pretty solid. If I'm running an ancient history channel, I want my video in ancient history groups, in front of super fans. Some communities are all for it, some aren't.

Other short-form platforms (weak for faceless channels). Someone scrolling TikTok, Reels or X is a different type of viewer.

I once had a guy who was big on TikTok build a page for one of my YouTube channels. We got around 400,000 views on TikTok in about two months. That turned into roughly 50,000 views on YouTube and something like $300 to $500. For a faceless channel, put all of your resources into making good long videos.

End screens are the best traffic a new channel can get

When I start a channel, I typically start it in a niche where I already have resources. If I have a channel getting 100,000 views a day in basketball, the best thing I can do is set up another basketball channel and end screen it from the popular one.

If you don't have a channel like that, an end screen from somebody else's channel tells you immediately whether your videos are good, because you get views and you get data. There's no established marketplace for it. It's usually a friendly favor, though you might be able to pay $500 or $1,000 for one. A lot of creators won't do it because they think they're creating a competitor.

End screen viewers just watched an entire video on the same kind of topic. They're the best viewers you can get.

The mental model is an organ transplant. If the kidney matches, the body accepts it as its own. If it doesn't, the body rejects it. If those viewers leave your video fast, the algorithm reads it as a channel people don't want to watch. So don't do it with weak content or a one-video channel.

How Closely Are You Modeling Your Inspiration Channel?

Apply the scientific method to YouTube. If you put one ingredient of a hamburger (a piece of lettuce) in a Petri dish, you know what the bacteria is reacting to. If you blend the whole hamburger and throw it in, you have no idea. You want the least amount of variables possible.

So rate yourself from one to five on how close you are to the channel you're modeling:

• One: the channel is a loose inspiration. You took a couple of little ideas from it.
• Five: it feels like you hired their production team.

As a beginner you want to be as close to five as possible, without taking their graphics, their exact idea or their actual video.

If they make "How Elon Musk Spends His Billions," you make "How Jeff Bezos Spends His Billions." If their intro is "Have you ever wondered how much Elon Musk spends?", yours asks the same thing about Bezos. If they cover Elon's backstory and then all his cars, you do the same for Bezos. They use yellow, you use yellow. They use a joyful piano song and a bold thick font, so do you.

You do this to get into the algorithm, and to learn how production works. Under 100 views, you could make the most masterful video of all time and never know it.

Get to where you're making $5,000 to $10,000 a month, around 100,000 views a video. Then start playing with variables and create your own style.

I go further into repeating one format in why your YouTube videos aren't going viral.

How to Audit Your Own Content (95% of the Problem)

Sunk cost fallacy gets a lot of people here. They invest a lot of emotion into the channel, and when you're emotional you can't make good decisions.

Audit as logically and unattached as you can. Pretend you just found this YouTube channel. Watch the competitor's videos, then watch yours.

Is your stuff as good as theirs? If it isn't, why should this video get views? That doesn't mean fancy editing or paying $1,000 a video. Does it give the same feeling the competitor's video does?

From the top down, these are the five things I check:

1. The idea. Sometimes I look at a channel and the ideas are weak.
2. The packaging. Theirs next to yours. Are they using yellow arrows? A stroke or a drop shadow on the arrow? A real photo or an animated version of the person? Smiling or frowning? What background color, and why? Titles should be pretty much one-to-one.
3. Audio quality. It has to be watchable. I've had videos that are boring visually and still do really well.
4. The intro. Does it deliver on the click?
5. The talking points. Interesting, or pretty boring?

This part is typically 95% of the reason people aren't getting views.

I know YouTube is a creative platform. I view it as a business. If the priority is making enough to quit your job and do this full time, go do what's already working first. Once this is your full-time thing, you have the luxury of being creative.

The analogy: a UFO lands in your backyard and you want to build another one. You take it apart, work out what every piece does, and remake it. Do that with the videos in your niche. The language, the tone, the font, the sound effects and how loud they are, where the clips come from. Then do it again and again.

If the thumbnail is where you keep losing, read the faceless YouTube thumbnail guide.

The Algorithm, Common Mistakes, and Metrics That Don't Matter

The algorithm prioritizes watch time, session duration and engagement. So ask yourself: are people quitting YouTube after your video, or can they not wait for the next one?

We call it viewer satisfaction. If you're not satisfied and obsessed watching your own videos, I doubt anybody else is.

The mistakes I see over and over:

• Inconsistent uploads. Five videos in a day, then nothing for a month. If you can make three a week, post Monday, Wednesday and Friday, not three on the same day. Posting all over the place confuses the algorithm and your audience.
• Not delivering on the click. If I say I'm giving away a Rolex, I need to actually give away a Rolex. Over-clickbaiting harms retention and long-term trust.
• Inventing a new thumbnail style with no audience. We live in a trust recession, and viewers don't trust new things. If they're used to clicking one style of thumbnail, give them that style.
• Skipping SEO on a small channel. Once I got bigger I got used to uploading with just a title, no tags, no description. When I tried that on new channels, the videos didn't get views. Now every new channel gets tags and a description until it has momentum.

How I do tags: a couple of broad niche tags, then the specific topic, then the channel name and a couple of competitors' channel names. For a basketball video on Michael Jordan that's "basketball," "NBA," "Michael Jordan." If LeBron James isn't in the video, don't put LeBron James in the tags.

CTR and AVD don't matter yet

I don't care about CTR or AVD that much. It's all relative. I care about views.

My most viral videos have around 6 million views. A lot of them have about a 3% CTR and a 30% to 40% AVD on a 10-minute video, which is pretty bad on paper. As a video goes out to a broader and wider audience, your numbers go down.

Keep them somewhat healthy, and don't chase a 20% CTR. Under 1,000 impressions, CTR and AVD don't matter at all. High numbers come naturally when you have good ideas and good execution.

For more on how the recommendation system works, see the YouTube algorithm explained.

Should You Start a New Niche?

Say you've uploaded 20 or 30 videos and you're not making money. Now the niche question is fair. Ask it precisely.

Are people who started three months ago making $30K a month in this niche, with videos that aren't that good? If yes (and they don't have a bigger channel or an audience on another platform promoting them), it's a skill issue on your end.

Are there no new channels, and the biggest ones are barely making $30K a month? Then it's probably not a good niche.

If you're a beginner, ViewStats is pretty accurate for seeing how much money a channel is making. My process for choosing is in how to pick a faceless YouTube niche.

Be careful of sunk cost ("I've put so much into this, I can't let it lose").

I've seen people totally bomb on one channel, start another, and make $10,000 in the first week on the new one. And if you're making a couple grand a month but you're stuck, you can start a second channel to test new ideas without abandoning the first.

What about aged or monetized channels?

If this is one of your first channels and you're not getting views, do not buy a monetized channel. It's a waste of money. If you have your own old channel sitting inactive, you can revive it with fresh content. If you're moving it to another niche, rebrand it and turn off the setting that posts new uploads to the subscriber feed.

Last thing. YouTube is a long game. Some evergreen channels take six months to get views on a video. If you're a beginner and the views aren't there, assume it's a skill issue. That way you give yourself room to get better.

Video Chapters

• 0:00Intro
• 2:19Victim mindset vs. ownership
• 7:16Don't buy views or look for shortcuts
• 10:45Initial self-diagnosis (under 10 videos)
• 13:44Are you getting impressions? Shadowbans
• 17:08Skill issues and testing thumbnails
• 20:43Community tab, pinned comments and Shorts
• 24:57End screens
• 30:07How closely are you modeling your inspiration channel
• 34:57Auditing your content
• 44:57The algorithm and viewer satisfaction
• 47:12Common mistakes
• 52:32Should you start a new niche
• 1:01:14Final tips: CTR and AVD

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