Ask any YouTuber and they will tell you that generating significant views and subscribers isn't easy. But with the right strategy and tools, any video creator can build an engaged subscriber base when they understand what those subscribers want to watch.

Appealing to an audience to watch content you are passionate about making is just the first step, you need to know how to reach them and get your videos discovered. Our guides to how to guide more views on YouTube will give you the best tips to succeed on the platform.

Getting Views

How To Get More Views on YouTube

Getting thousands or even millions of YouTube subscribers is a dream for most creators. In the articles below, we'll show you how to turn casual viewers into long-term fans. 

Subscribers

YouTube Subscribers

Do you want to make money on YouTube? Millions of creators are earning a very good living from monetizing the platform and uploading content that drives huge views and engagements. Whether that YouTube income is from advertising revenue, merchandise sales, or brand deals, or subscriptions, we keep you updated with best practices and ideas.

Monetization

How To Make Money on YouTube

Want to see how your channel is performing? Read these YouTube analytics articles to discover what's working and what isn't. You'll learn how to identify which videos have the most Watch Time, clicks, audience retention, revenue, and more.

Analytics

YouTube Analytics

Watch Time is arguably THE most important metric on YouTube right now, and creators won’t be able to monetize their content without 4000 hours of it. But what is it and how can creators increase the amount of Watch Time their videos attract? We keep you updated on the best practices around Watch Time, and how you can increase how much your video content generates.

Watch Time

YouTube Watch Time

YouTube Shorts content is set to explode! 

All the latest tips, tricks, and rock-solid advice you need for this new feature.

YouTube Shorts

Do you know how to do keyword research so you understand what videos people are actually searching for on YouTube? Do you know how to create a custom YouTube thumbnail? Do you know how to create a Playlist on YouTube?

vidIQ has a ton of tips that will help every creator maximise their video content. We publish content every week to keep you up to date with all the best practices.

Tips & Tricks

YouTube Tips & Tricks

At vidIQ we have incredible insights into what viewers are searching for on YouTube. Not only can we confirm the top keywords being searched for, we can also show you how you can leverage that interest to create content around trending topics and tentpole events. That's going to give you a clear edge over other creators!

Insights

YouTube Insights

Your In-Depth Guide to Building a Successful YouTube Channel

If you're grinding for hours on each video and still seeing 12 views, including your replays, you're probably wondering: is YouTube too saturated to grow anymore?

That question haunts new creators more than the dreaded "0 views" screen. You put your heart into a video. You meticulously script, shoot, edit, and upload—and then? 

 Meanwhile, big creators are burning stacks of cash for thumbnails, and you're wondering if there's even any oxygen left in the room.

In the video above, Rob talks about all of it. Not in theory. Not with sugar-coated optimism. But with the raw, data-backed reality and the tools you can use to beat it.

How to Build the Right Mindset for YouTube Success

Over 20 million videos are uploaded to YouTube every single day. 

It's not just your niche that feels crowded—it's the whole platform. Even established creators are feeling the heat. Channels that used to pull 500K views per video are now seeing half that. The landscape has shifted dramatically, and the old playbook of "just upload consistently" isn't cutting it anymore.

But here's where it gets interesting. YouTube is thriving. It just hit a historic benchmark—12% of all TV streaming time in the U.S. That's more than Netflix. More than Disney+. It's not that people aren't watching YouTube—it's that they're not watching your video yet.

On top of that, most new creators don't actually create—they copy. You see what works in your niche and replicate it, hoping for similar results. But what you're really doing is blending into the crowd. In a saturated space, sameness is a slow death.

The platform isn't dying; it's evolving. And that evolution means a different approach from creators who want to break through the noise. Stop asking, "Is YouTube Saturated?" That's the Wrong Question. Instead, ask "Am I doing enough to stand out?"

Let's examine how creators breakthrough in oversaturated niches. Take the content space—arguably one of the most overcrowded areas being YouTube. Yet some creators manage to grow rapidly even here.

The secret isn't revolutionary content. It's revolutionary consistency in presentation. Successful creators develop visual and emotional signatures that become instantly recognizable. They use specific color schemes, maintain consistent fonts, and develop a visual language that viewers begin to associate with quality content.

This isn't about expensive production values or professional graphic design. It's about making deliberate choices and sticking to them. When someone scrolls through their subscription feed, your thumbnail should feel like seeing a familiar face in a crowd.

: Open your channel in incognito mode. Scroll through your thumbnails like a stranger would. Do you look like everyone else? If so, you've got work to do.

We've all cursed the algorithm at some point. 

: The algorithm doesn't find viewers for your video. It finds videos for viewers.

Your job is to make content that keeps people watching. That starts with a clear hook, tight editing, and a reason to stay till the end. The algorithm watches how viewers behave with your content. So think like a viewer.

Would you click your own thumbnail? Would you stay past 30 seconds? Would you share that video with a friend? If the answer is "maybe not," start there. The algorithm isn't mysterious—it's responsive. It amplifies content that audiences engage with and buries content that doesn't hold attention.

A lot of creators hit plateaus not because they aren't talented—but because they're inconsistent. And no, we're not talking hustle culture here. This isn't about 4 a.m. wake-up calls and burnout-as-a-badge-of-honor. It's about clarity and commitment.

If you've only got 5 hours a week to give to YouTube, that's not a limitation—it's your blueprint. The key is being intentional about how you spend that time:

Stick to it like clockwork. Put it on your calendar. And tell someone. Accountability is underrated—post your goals publicly, join a community, even hire a coach. But do something to stay consistent. Because in YouTube, momentum isn't just helpful. It's everything.

Creative Compound Interest: The Secret Sauce

Viral growth isn't luck. It's the end result of compound creative effort. Here's how it works in practice.

Better thumbnail design leads to more clicks. More clicks generate more data about what resonates with your audience. More data informs better scripting and pacing decisions. Better pacing results in higher watch time. Higher watch time triggers stronger algorithm recommendations. And the cycle repeats, each iteration building on the last.

The 12 Best YouTube Thumbnails People Love to Click On

But here's the part most people skip over: It takes time. Most creators quit at video 4 or 5 because they didn't blow up. But here's the truth: You're still in tutorial mode. Give it 3 to 6 months. That's 12 to 25 videos. If you're not improving, reassess. But if you are? Then you're not a beginner anymore. You're a builder!

YouTube in 2025 is not the same YouTube of 2015. Back then, you could upload a shaky vlog or a basic tutorial and find an audience. Today, it takes more. More clarity. More consistency. More craft.

But also? More opportunity. The audience is bigger than ever. The tools are better than ever. The path to monetization is clearer than ever. The question isn't whether YouTube is saturated. Are you ready to do what it takes to stand out in the crowd? 

Man overwhelmed with endless streaming options

Is YouTube too saturated to grow in 2025? Discover the truth about YouTube saturation, why most creators struggle, and how to stand out in a crowded platform with branding, consistency, and smart content strategy.

Has YouTube Become Saturated?

Our YouTube analytics tool provides incredible insight into how your viewers are consuming and engaging with your videos across Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. YouTube creators love our insights so much, they requested that we allow them to export our data so they can perform their own analysis on it; so today we’re announcing YouTube CSV Export! Simply click the “Download data as CSV” button on the Video Dashboard and slice and dice our data to your heart’s desire!

We can’t stress enough how critical SEO is to your success on YouTube. vidIQ’s YouTube SEO tool takes the tedium out of tagging and enables you to choose the best tags for your video, increasing your visibility within YouTube’s Search and Recommended Videos. One request from our users was that while they love our channel-wide tag recommendations, they’d really love the ability to optimize the last video they uploaded for SEO on a video-by-video basis. So as of today, you’ll be able improve your video’s SEO in the video detail pane and see video specific tag recommendations in one convenient location.

Find the best tags for your YouTube video automatically with vidIQ YouTube SEO

Growing your YouTube audience and increasing your views and subscribers has never been easier. 

Sign up for vidIQ and grow your audience today!

Blue background with upward graph arrow and bold text "Per Video YouTube SEO" centered

"At vidIQ, we’re constantly on the prowl for ways we can improve our product and help you grow your YouTube audience. That’s why today we’re announcing that we’ve made some impressive improvements to two of our most popular features: YouTube Actionable Analytics and YouTube SEO.

Introducing Per Video YouTube SEO and CSV Export

Trying to keep up with your YouTube channel’s comments and engage with your community can seem like an uphill battle.

To the brands that have pleaded with us to make their lives easier by building YouTube comment moderation and YouTube management tools to satisfy their needs; we hear you! This has been a huge area of focus for us, and we’re making our YouTube tools better every day. Here are some of our powerful features that are making YouTube comment management less of a headache for the enterprise:

No community manager has enough time to respond to every YouTube comment made on a popular video – community managers want a simple way to find their best YouTube comments by the viewer who has the most subscribers. To solve this, vidIQ allows you to sort your YouTube comments by reputation in order to discover and engage with your most influential viewers – these viewers are what we at vidIQ refer to as your Top Influencers. These top YouTube viewers are the ones who you want to connect with and encourage to evangelize your video.

Don't try to respond to every YouTube comment – sort your YouTube comments by reputation and only respond to influential viewers

vidIQ offers advanced comment sorting capabilities that allow you to narrow down your YouTube comments to a specific time period. Rather than having to visit each individual video’s page, vidIQ takes the tedium out of YouTube comment moderation by allowing you to view all of your most recent comments across all of your videos in one convenient location, saving you time.

Some of the best YouTube marketers we’ve encountered prefer to reply to comments from a personal channel vs. their brand’s channel in order to reveal the human behind the brand and prevent their brand from engaging in distracting conversations. With vidIQ you can reply to comments from another YouTube account, making YouTube play nice with large brands.

Although YouTube already supports threaded / nested comments (which Facebook just introduced for Pages), they don’t provide you with the ability to easily find every comment a viewer has made or a viewer’s YouTube comment history. We do. Knowing the context of a viewers’ comment and whether or not you’ve had other interactions with that user in the past is critical, especially if you have more than one community manager.

See all YouTube comments by a specific user to see the user's comment history

Introducing Real Time YouTube Comment Moderation

No longer will you need to wait for a YouTube comment notification email to arrive – manage and respond to your YouTube comments in one place with vidIQ’s live comment dashboard.

YouTube real time YouTube comment moderation tool

To learn more about these features and others, visit vidIQ and grow your YouTube audience today!"

Dashboard showing 1,439 synced new comments under the Comments tab for social media monitoring

To further enable our users to build a community around their content, we recently announced Real Time Updates, which will allow you to use vidIQ’s advanced YouTube comment moderation tools to manage and grow your YouTube audience on a split-second basis.

How To: Moderate Your YouTube Comments Like a Pro

"And just like that we’re back from SXSW 2013!

During SXSW 2013 interactive, geeks from all walks of geekdom (myself included) descended on Austin like wildebeests at a watering hole. From Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal’s humorous and inspiring keynote on performance anxiety, to a presentation I attended by Thomas Pickens on Developing Meds in Space to Save Lives on Earth, there was an impressive array of discussions on technology and science that spanned every topic imaginable. Trying to document all the sights and sounds of SXSW here would be a nearly impossible feat, so instead I’d like to concentrate on an overarching theme I noticed during my time in Austin; YouTube is the next big thing in social enterprise.

Out of all the panels I went to see, nowhere was this more apparent than at the B2B Social Marketing: Blazing New Trails panel I attended where the VPs and Directors of Social at Salesforce, Xerox, and Cisco spoke about their craft. Since their inception, Facebook and Twitter have dominated the social conversation, so it was interesting to see that a majority of the time spent on this panel (and elsewhere) was around YouTube strategy. At this juncture, it is clear that VPs of Social and CMOs have Facebook and Twitter figured out; social media management software and audience development tools for these platforms have existed for quite some time (I’m looking at you, Buddy Media / Wildfire Interactive!) and the best practices are well documented. However, YouTube is still very much the Wild West, and marketers are scrambling to understand this platform as brands rush to double down on original video content.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in YouTube search, which, if you’re Salesforce, dictates how 60% of your content is discovered, according to Jamie Grenney, VP of Social and Online Video. SEO hasn’t necessarily been a factor in traditional social media marketing, but it has emerged as The Great Differentiator between winners and losers on YouTube. Which is precisely why we are investing heavily in YouTube SEO.

We couldn’t be happier to be innovating in this space at such an exciting time; our tools and best practices act as a democratizing force that empower YouTube marketers and ensure they won’t miss out in the scramble for YouTube.

Panelists speaking at SXSW Interactive 2013 conference in Austin, Texas, featuring laptops.

For every similarity that exists between YouTube and Facebook / Twitter, there are drastic differences that present unique challenges.

SXSW 2013 Recap: YouTube’s Big in Social Enterprise

Over the past 8 years my passion has been online video.

I’ve lived and breathed it for my entire professional career — and I’ve loved every minute of it. This has always been the most exciting area of technology for me, and there hasn’t ever been a more exciting time than now. It doesn’t seem like that long ago that I was graduating from college, going to work at Macromedia, and founding Viddler at 22 — since then the online video industry has changed a bit (to say the least). YouTube grew from relative obscurity to become the 2nd largest search engine in the world, and a critical destination for brands to develop and engage with their audience. Bettering this audience development experience for brands and helping them manage their YouTube presence and increase their views and subscribers has been my focus for the last year, and we’ve built something truly amazing. The best part? Now we get to share it with the rest of the world! Today we’re announcing vidIQ is coming out of beta! And we’re excited!

While we have your attention, we would like to give our thanks to a few people, whom without their help, vidIQ would not be launching:

The hundreds of brands, networks, and YouTube creators who have been giving us feedback every step of the way. The thousands of people who have signed up for our beta and have been patiently waiting until this moment. Our world class investors who believed in us very early on and continue to be an incredible source of expertise and guidance. For YouTube on having an awesome developer relations team and continually making APIs available for our team to build amazing things with. We feel extremely blessed to be innovating in this space and encourage you to sign up and check out vidIQ for yourselves!

Your In-Depth Guide to Building a Successful YouTube Channel

Has YouTube Become Saturated?

Introducing Per Video YouTube SEO and CSV Export

How To: Moderate Your YouTube Comments Like a Pro

SXSW 2013 Recap: YouTube’s Big in Social Enterprise

Welcome to vidIQ!