I have a Youtube channel with 4 subscribers and most of my uploaded videos appear to have no reach whatsoever, getting getting less than 50 views in a month, and only 3 views the day they're uploaded. That's fine to me because I'm using Youtube to host an auxiliary video version of my tutorials. However, I do find it quite intriguing, which leaves me wondering what I'm doing wrong.
Google loves to be a black box about how it works, and you get contradictory advice about how to grow your channel on Youtube everywhere, so I guess the only way to figure this out is to test it myself.
Hypothesis
First, it could be the content. Most of my recent videos about about basic Windows tutorials. So to test that hypothesis I uploaded a video about how to save money on Steam instead. The results were the same.
Second, I always include a link to the article that contains the video in the description of the video. I thought maybe Youtube was penalizing my videos for containing external links. That's not unusual, and it makes sense, since an unvetted external link could potentially contain viruses or try to scam the user.
Test
So I tried uploading a video without that external link, about how to move files on Windows 11. There doesn't seem to be any difference.
After a whole day, the video has 3 views. It had 76 impressions, and only one click through (1.4% CTR). Other basic Windows tutorials with external links had similar amounts of impressions. The Steam video which has an external link got 10 impressions and a 10% CTR.
Conclusions
Whether a video has a external link in its description or not appears to have no effect at all in the reach it gets, at least for a channel with almost no subscribers.
If you're trying to grow your channel from zero, having an external link in the description or not doesn't seem to matter.
Future Work
Insufficient Data?
It could be that if I had more subscribers the results would be different. It's likely that a channel with more subscribers enjoys special treatment from Youtube.
Notably, there was one website that estimates how many views a Youtube channel gets that wouldn't even let me test my own channel because I didn't meet a minimum requirement of 5 subscribers.
Funneling Users to Social Media
Considering how little reach I get on anything but TikTok, it may be impossible to grow a channel from zero relying only on the platform's algorithm, search engine, or the chance that someone will subscribe after watching the video embedded in another website.
It's likely that every social media requires a profile to have a minimum threshold of followers before recommending it, so you can't rely on that recommendation before meeting this minimum requirement, which means you must acquire your first followers from elsewhere.
In cases of websites like mine, I assume the way would be to link to the social media pages from the website, telling visitors to subscribe to "my socials" if they have an account there. This would prove the social media that the entity controlling a profile is someone notable enough to at least have followers, which might help in it making recommendations.
Is This Just Random?
I noticed one of my videos (and its Short) randomly started getting more impressions 6 months after it was published. Most of them seem to come from Youtube search. Maybe this Youtube thing is just random after all.