Why your YouTube channel isn’t growing (and what to fix)

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TL;DR:

• Growth problems come in a fixed order and the best approach is to fix them one at a time, in order.
• Under about 30 videos your numbers are noise, so fix volume and topic selection before you diagnose anything.
• “Fix your thumbnails” is well-worn advice but low impressions is more often a topic problem.
• Healthy impressions with a weak click-through rate is a packaging problem, and it’s the only one A/B testing solves.
• If every video performs fine but the channel stays flat, nobody is coming back, and your own analytics already suggest what needs to be fixed.

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Somewhere right now a creator is redesigning every thumbnail on their channel. New fonts, brighter backgrounds, more contrast… all the YouTube thumbnail advice.

That creator is wasting their time; the videos underneath those thumbnails were never shown to anybody in the first place and redesigning them won’t change that. This fictional YouTube creator is putting in a lot of effort, but it’s in the wrong direction.

That’s the problem with most advice you’ll hear about a YouTube channel that’s not growing: You get nine reasons, or nineteen, in a list, and you’re left guessing which problem is yours. You might put in a bunch of hard work but if you’re working on the wrong thing, nothing will come of it and you might conclude that YouTube is rigged. The thing is, the advice in these lists might be good… but there’s no order. If your YouTube channel isn’t growing, you don’t just need to know all the things that could be wrong. You need to know what to tackle first.

Which brings us to this post. If your YouTube channel isn’t growing, run through this list of fixes in order. When one fails, address that first because at this stage, everything else is a distraction.

TubeBuddy’s job is to turn whatever you find into a twenty-minute fix instead of another month of guessing. Creators who actively use the tools grow views 86% faster and subscribers 55% faster than creators who sign up and then go it alone, and we published the data if you want to check our work. Here’s the full TubeBuddy toolset.

So, open YouTube Studio. Set the date range to 90 days, and let’s get stuck in.

Also read: Why is my YouTube video not getting views? The 3 upload mistakes that kill growth

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Table of contents

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What’s the big idea?!

Get video inspo backed by data. Next Video Ideas analyzes your channel, audience, niche, and millions of YouTube datapoints to make your next video a #1.

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Start here: the four numbers, in this order

Here’s the framework in order:

1. Impressions
2. Click-through rate (CTR)
3. Retention
4. Returning viewers

Walk down the list, stop at the first number that looks wrong compared to your own channel, and fix that.

The order isn’t arbitrary. It follows the path a viewer takes to reach you:

1. YouTube has to show your video to somebody before they can click it (impressions).
2. They have to click it before they can watch it (CTR).
3. They have to start watching it before they can decide to continue (retention).
4. They have to watch it before they can decide whether to come back for more (returning viewers).

If you start out solving for CTR but your actual problem is impressions, you won’t see the results of your work. A channel with an impressions problem looks the same as a channel with a retention problem. I.e. flat.

Average YouTube click through rate

One thing to settle before we start, because it’s where most advice falls down. You will find posts telling you that a click-through rate below 2% is a problem. Others that say 4%. Others say 5% or 6%. They can’t all be right and getting hung up on average YouTube CTR is a fool’s errand. There are factors to consider: your niche, your video length, where your traffic comes from. A successful cooking channel and a successful software tutorial channel will likely see a very different click-through rate.

So every threshold in this post is your own. YouTube Studio will compare any video against your channel’s typical range, and that comparison is the only benchmark that can actually diagnose you. Broad ranges are still worth knowing for orientation. YouTube’s own answer is that half of all channels and videos sit somewhere between 2% and 10%, which tells you how wide “normal” really is. And YouTube publishes no equivalent range for average view duration at all. Treat these as information, not as standard.

The best advice for creators whose YouTube channels aren’t growing at the rate they’d like is this: compare yourself to yourself. Improve on your average CTR. Improve your impressions, retention, and returning viewer rate. Look at your niche as a benchmark but don’t get hung up on what everyone else is doing.

Gate 0: do you have enough data to diagnose anything?

Before anything else, you need to determine if you have enough data to make decisions.

A 6% click-through rate on 300 impressions tells you nothing. Neither does a 2% CTR, and for the same reason: at that volume the number swings on a handful of people having a slow afternoon. If you get hung up on this “data” you can reach a confident conclusion that is — as likely as not — wrong.

As a working rule, you want to have at least 30 published videos in your channel and a few thousand impressions across the last 90 days before you try to figure out where you’re doing well and where you’re not. Below that, you simply don’t have enough volume to give you trustworthy data.

So what do you do in this case?

Pick your next three videos with YouTube keyword research instead of instinct. Your instinct is probably fine. Topic selection just happens to be the only input that fixes Gate 1 before Gate 1 becomes measurable. If you choose subjects people are already searching for, YouTube has somewhere to put your video the moment you upload it. Start with the beginner’s guide to YouTube keyword research, then go find the gaps with low competition keywords and Keyword Explorer.

Where to go next while your data builds

Keep reading anyway. Knowing which number to look at first is worth more before you have the data than after, because it changes what you do with the next 30 uploads. But for now, focus your efforts on publishing more, and publishing with intent.

Gate 1: impressions – is YouTube showing your videos at all?

An impression means YouTube put your video in front of somebody. Officially it counts how many times your thumbnails were shown to viewers, though what the viewer actually sees is your whole package: thumbnail, title, maybe some of the description. It says nothing about clicks or watch time, only that the platform decided your video was worth a shot.

If impressions on your recent videos sit well below your channel median, that’s a problem. It means YouTube can’t figure out who your video is for. That happens when the topic is too broad, when it’s a subject nobody is looking for, or when it has drifted away from whatever your existing audience signed up for.

Confirm it with the traffic source report. Open a low-impression video, look at where the views came from, and check for browse features. Zero browse traffic means the video never entered recommendations at all.

A perfect thumbnail on a video that YouTube isn’t distributing is a beautiful sign in an empty field. The fix is upstream, in what you decide to make: topics with demonstrated search demand, tight enough that the platform can classify them, and close enough to your last few videos that your audience recognizes them. Run your next batch of ideas through Keyword Explorer and pick the ones with real searches behind them.

In short, fix the topic of your videos before you worry about the packaging.

Gate 2: click-through rate – they see it and don’t click

You’re getting impressions but people just aren’t clicking. That suggests a packaging problem.

When a video’s impressions climb sharply and the CTR falls, that’s normal and expected. It’s not a reason to panic. It means YouTube has pushed the video past your regular viewers into a broader audience. A cold audience who doesn’t know you. You have to expect this cold audience won’t engage at the same rate as your warm audience. A falling CTR on a rising video is OK. Good even. Your topic is on point and YouTube has a sense of the kind of viewer that might enjoy your video. It’s putting your video in front of more people. YouTube says this outright: videos with fewer impressions and views tend to have higher click-through rates and average view duration, because they’ve been seen by a narrower, more loyal audience. Land on somebody’s home page and a lower CTR is the natural result. Judge your CTR against similar videos at similar scale, and check search traffic separately from browse traffic. And remember that a viewer who types in a search query behaves very differently from a viewer who’s handed a suggestion for what to watch next.

When CTR softens, it’s easy to fall into the trap of assuming you need to rethink your packaging. But if you change four things at once and see a change, you have a new problem: you have no idea which change made the difference.

Test one variable and let the data answer. TubeBuddy’s A/B testing tools run competing titles and thumbnails against each other on live traffic and report which one won, so the guessing stops being your job. It’s available on the Legend plan, and here’s how to set a test up properly.

Two things worth bookmarking here. For the craft of packaging rather than the diagnosis, read how to optimize thumbnails and titles. And if this is one specific video that flopped rather than a pattern across your whole channel, you want why your video isn’t getting views instead.

Gate 3: retention – they click and leave

Impressions are good, CTR is fine, and yet your average view duration is lower than usual. That means people are seeing and clicking your video but they’re not sticking around. Typically, this means something in the first minute of your video is breaking the promise your video packaging (thumbnail, title, and to a lesser extent description) make.

Packaging that overpromises wins the click but loses the viewer. That’s bad enough but YouTube takes low retention as a verdict on the video. A great thumbnail attached to a weak opening will typically perform worse than a mediocre thumbnail attached to a strong opening. The first one over-promises and under-delivers. The second under-promises and over-delivers.

The first thirty seconds check

• Open the audience retention curve for your three worst recent performers.
• Find the biggest drop inside the first 30 seconds and note the timestamp.
• Watch what you actually said and showed in and leading up to that moment.
• Do the same for your three best performers at the same timestamp.
• Write down the difference in a sentence or two.

That sentence might be something like: “my good videos start with a hook, and my bad videos start with ‘hey guys, welcome back to my channel.’”

Viewers have little patience for openings that restate the title or do anything other than get to the point. Openings that begin paying off the promise immediately make viewers stick around. Two retention tricks that actually work has some great ideas you can adapt to your own content, and the TubeBuddy Videolytics tool puts the comparison data in front of you while you work.

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What’s the big idea?!

Get video inspo backed by data. Next Video Ideas analyzes your channel, audience, niche, and millions of YouTube datapoints to make your next video a #1.

✨ Try It Free ✨

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Gate 4: every video is fine and the channel is still flat

Here’s the case that breaks every listicle. Impressions are healthy. Click-through rate is normal. Retention is solid. Individual videos do respectable numbers. But still your YouTube channel graph is flat.

In this case, look at returning viewers, and at how many subscribers each video converts. If those are flat while everything else seems fine, you’ve found the problem.

This means that your videos are working individually but you’re not compounding your success. You’re basically earning a fresh audience every upload but not giving people a reason to care about what’s next. I.e. to become a subscriber or maybe even a channel member. This sucks for a bunch of reasons, not least of which is the fact that you don’t have a strong foundation on which to build.

This is an audience problem, not so much a performance problem. You’re making individually competent videos for people who have no particular reason to become a repeat viewer of you. Viewers subscribe to relevance, so if your last 20 videos have nothing in common beyond your face, there’s nothing for anyone to be a fan of.

Find your pivot target in your own analytics

• Sort your last 40 videos by returning viewers, not by views.
• Take the top eight and name what they share. A topic, a format, or a promise.
• Check whether that shared thing is what you’ve been making lately.
• If not… well, there’s your answer.

Few creators actually do this exercise, which is weird, because it makes a scary decision — picking your YouTube niche — into an obvious one. The advice to “niche down” usually means placing a bet on a category you’ve never tested. This doesn’t. You already ran the experiment across 40 videos, and the results are sitting in Studio waiting for you to sort the column.

There’s a catch: leaning into the content that keeps people coming back necessarily means retiring a format you may love or just enjoy making. But sometimes you have to kill your darlings. Take heart in the fact that you’re following evidence you uncovered yourself. You’re not guessing or throwing a Hail Mary.

For help with sharpening your focus on your target audience once you’ve uncovered it, check out choosing a YouTube niche and the most profitable niches.

What to do this week

1. Open YouTube Studio.
2. Set the window to 90 days.
3. Go through the four numbers in order: impressions, click-through rate, average view duration, then returning viewers.
4. Stop at the first number that falls below your normal range.

Spend your time fixing that issue before you do any other optimization.

If your YouTube channel isn’t growing the way you want it to, “fixing” issues that may not even be issues is a waste of time and resources. Find the problem that needs fixing and fix it before you do anything else.

And remember, if you treat YouTube like a lottery, you leave too much to hope. If you treat it like a system and optimize your content to excel, you take matters into your own hands.

FAQ: Why your YouTube channel isn’t growing (and what to fix first)

What’s the big idea?!

Get video inspo backed by data. Next Video Ideas analyzes your channel, audience, niche, and millions of YouTube datapoints to make your next video a #1.

✨ Try It Free ✨