Compounders

I published this video 1 year ago.

Every week, it marches along. Collecting 200-300 views.

Its numbers will never rival a Ryan Trahan challenge or a Colin & Samir interview. But this is a sustainable model for YouTube content.

Building a library of compounders is a meaningful achievement for any YouTube channel.

Subscribers are a vanity metric. “Going Viral” is not a strategy.

Views with meaningful watch time, on the other hand, are the meat and potatoes of your video marketing.

When a meaningful percentage of viewers are satisfied with your video, YouTube continues to show the title and thumbnail to more people.

^ that’s how many impressions the video has earned. I didn’t pay any fee to increase distribution.

With a thumbnail / title combination that earns a clickthrough rate above 5%, the video will likely continue to do so for the next year (hopefully more).

More Than Just Views

To the contrary, views without watch time is another exercise in vanity.

Even Views can be juiced by a one time flash in the pan.

This video has nearly the same amount of views as the first one. But the quality of views are VERY different.

As far as we can tell, some newsletter or forum posted about this interview and sent us a 2 day rush of traffic.

Almost none of the views came from YouTube recommending the video to its users. Everyone came from an undefined external source.

No one stayed for long. And despite 200 hours of watch time, not a single subscriber was added.

Does the view count look better when someone sorts our channel by ‘Most Viewed’? Sure.

But, since our goal is to cultivate an engaged audience, this video will have no impact on our future outcomes.

The only thing we got was some fodder to write a useful lesson to our email list.

Happy Compounding,

Aaron

Warren Buffett has compounded capital for decades and become one of the richest men on the planet.

Albert Einstein once said “Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world.”

However, you have to pay taxes on your capital gains.

If you don’t want to pay any more taxes, then you might be interested in compounding your video marketing skills.

There is no better place to do that than the Piper Video Guild.