Your comments section is lying to you
This is the first newsletter I’ve ever written. So, I’ll take the opportunity to say welcome to the Hooked Newsletter and thanks for joining me on this brisk walk through the trenches of YouTube.
I had a call last week with a creator who’s been crashing out for a month. Mid-six-figure subscriber count, nearly a million views per video, unique style of creativity. He was convinced his content had gone stale based on feedback he was getting from the comments section. According to them, his topics were stale and he was burning his audience who were tired of hearing the same old story and themes.
Then we looked at the stats.
Eighty-plus percent of viewers on every recent video were brand new to the channel. Less than one percent were returning regulars. Fewer than 6% were actually subscribed to the channel. The thing he’d been losing sleep over was a problem to only a handful of people.
I see versions of this every week, so it’s worth saying out loud:
Your comments section is not your audience.
The people who comment are an exotic and vocal minority - they are, almost by definition, the least representative slice of the people you’re actually reaching. They are loud, and sometimes… not so nice.
Fun fact: in my 16+ years of working in YouTube, I’ve never left a comment. Ever.
YouTube doesn’t really distribute your videos to your subscribers. It distributes them to samples of new people, mostly through suggested and browse. A new test. Every time you upload. Your video shows up next to ten other thumbnails on someone’s feed. They click because the packaging worked, or they don’t. That’s the game.
Which means the creative anxiety I hear often is usually answering the wrong question - am I repeating myself, do they have a point, should I change everything based on a few complaints? The right question is whether the next sample of strangers will click and stay. They’ve never heard the bit before. They don’t know it’s your fourth video on the topic this year. They don’t care.
I’m not saying you should phone it in. Repetition for the sake of it is still bad content. But there’s a difference between making the same video twice and having a format you should keep running until the data says otherwise. Most creators who feel stuck are doing the second thing and beating themselves up like it’s the first.
A couple of things worth checking before you lay waste to a format you’re tired of:
Look at the actual returning-viewer percentage on your last ten videos. If it’s under 10%, the format fatigue story is mostly a story you’re telling yourself. Your regulars are barely the audience.
Read your top comments and your retention graph as two separate signals. The comments tell you what your most engaged 1% feels. The retention graph tells you what the other 99% did. When those two disagree the graph is the one that keeps the lights on.
And if you’re genuinely creatively done with a format, that’s a separate, real conversation worth having. But don’t let “my audience is sick of this” be the reason. Nine times out of ten, your audience just got here.
The hardest part of running a channel at scale is that the loudest feedback is usually the least useful, and the most valuable feedback is a chart on a screen that doesn’t talk back. The key is learning to weight those correctly. The risk of following the comments is rebuilding something that was working just fine.
Go get ‘em.
Reach out anytime to talk about YouTube!
16 years, no comments. You are the ghost of comment sections past