What Happens When You Publish a YouTube Video? [Timelapse]

Have you ever wondered what happens to the analytics on your video in its first 12 hours on YouTube? Well, wonder no more! To understand certain traffic source trends, we recorded a video timelapse to see exactly what happens. If you have the time, watch the below YouTube Short a couple of times to catch all the percentages and traffic sources:

Did you see anything interesting? Here are three things we noticed:

1. In the first few hours, notifications from your subscribers are king. They made up 60% of our initial views, so be sure to make content your audience wants to watch.
2. After your video gets those early notification views, another traffic source comes into play: Browse features. An increase here means YouTube is testing your content in a more random fashion to see if people like it.
3. If a video is successful as browseable content, YouTube might start promoting it as suggested content.

vidIQ is a YouTube education channel, so we aim to create informative, searchable content. Within 12 hours, the video we studied for this timelapse was already being discovered via YouTube search - and that’s exactly how we planned it!

You can do the same thing. Keep reading our posts about how to succeed on YouTube and you’ll be one step closer to making it happen.

Want to Understand More About YouTube?

If you want to take your YouTube channel to the next level and make more money then make sure to download vidIQ for more video insights.

Join over 1 million other users and use vidIQ to help you research YouTube, analyze videos, audit your own channel, and take actionable steps today.

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