The most powerful idea I've ever heard on YouTube, and I've never heard anybody else say this, is to make every impression you have count. Almost everybody on YouTube only thinks about views, about getting somebody to actually click the video and watch it, and they'll often waste their impressions trying to get someone to click. For example, if you make a title that says, "I did this with my YouTube channel and that happened," you're basically wasting your impressions, because you're not communicating any genuinely useful idea directly in your title or thumbnail. My philosophy is the opposite: every single time my thumbnail goes out there and my title is seen by someone, I want to communicate value to them, even if they never click my video.
Views are tiny. Impressions are huge.
Here's a great example of how this plays out. I started a new YouTube coaching channel, and in the last 28 days it got a couple thousand views on regular videos, and once I started putting out shorts it climbed to around 6,800 views on shorts and 2,700 on long-form. On the surface, you might think a couple thousand views on a small channel is worthless. Why even bother? My top video in that window has 242 views, and the next one has 196. You'd look at that and think it's pretty worthless.
But here's the number nobody pays attention to: I've had 77,000 impressions. That means my titles and thumbnails communicated something to people 77,000 times. This is why, to me, your YouTube impressions need to carry a message. So when I'm making a long-form video, the question I ask is: how can I communicate a valuable idea to people directly in my thumbnail and title? Like this video, where I'm communicating the idea that on YouTube you need to make every impression count, instead of building titles and thumbnails purely to chase views. Make it so that every time somebody sees your thumbnail and your title, it could change their life.
I've had ideas land on me from videos I never even watched, because the title and the thumbnail communicated something useful on their own. I've seen videos talking about how dating is a humiliation ritual. I didn't watch them, but I thought about what the title and thumbnail communicated, and I could identify with it. I'm like, yeah, it does feel like that a lot of the time. That's the power of an impression.
Long-form videos are the easiest way to communicate ideas
This is why, when you're doing long-format videos, they're the easiest way to communicate the ideas you have. If you start thinking, "how can I communicate my ideas to people?", you'll find that almost every single channel, no matter how small, gives you an abundant opportunity to communicate in the raw impressions that get served. Even if your videos don't seem like they're getting many actual views, the chance for impressions is huge.
Look at another one of my small channels. I started all my channels within the last 90 days, because I deleted everything last year. This one isn't even monetized, and someone might pass right by it thinking, "it's got 9,000 views, not much happening here." And that's with me putting up videos most days throughout the month and starting to test shorts, even though for some reason shorts haven't worked that well on this channel. But it has 113,000 impressions. No individual video has more than about a thousand views, yet I'm communicating ideas 113,000 times.
One video on that channel is a perfect example. The thumbnail says my net worth is negative $200,000, and then it says I'm rich, and the title is "How I feel rich while my net worth is plummeting." What a valuable idea to hand somebody. It only got 825 views, but I communicated that idea 6,000 times. That's what you really want to think about on YouTube: what idea can I communicate to people, even if they never click the video? I'd encourage you to start making your videos with that in mind.
Hiding value to force a click is self-centered
It's pretty self-centered to hide things in your videos, trick people into clicking, and demand that they pour their time and energy into watching your specific video. What builds goodwill is communicating valuable ideas. Most people who see this are never actually going to watch my video, but if I communicated a useful idea, then the next time one of my videos shows up, they're more likely to click it. This is how you build a reputation with people before they ever click. A lot of the time people have to see your videos several times first, unless you've got some clickbait garbage title, and those are usually difficult to deliver on anyway.
I see so many people in the YouTube coaching space with absolute clickbait garbage titles and useless information in the video, the kind of tips Google Gemini could have given me in 10 minutes. I'm like, come on, man, you're literally just copying and pasting crap, slapping a clickbait title on it, and I leave your channel thinking you totally wasted my time. That's exactly what you don't want to do. Clickbait titles do work to get people to watch, but they don't make a good long-term impression. This is why you see YouTube coaches come and go so much. Somebody gets one video that goes up, they suddenly seem like an authority, more people start watching, but over time nobody keeps engaging because it's pretty useless. And then they're gone. There have been so many YouTube coaches who came and went over the last 10 years, people who had hundreds of thousands of views on every video and were selling courses, who are nowhere today. A lot of them were a fraud the whole time, just using paid ads to push their channels, with every video trying to sell them as an authority. If you want the longer version of why those view counts mean so little, I broke it down in why 99% of YouTube views are worthless.
Give the information away in the title and thumbnail
This is a different mindset. When you give people actual, useful information in every title and thumbnail first and foremost, you lay the foundation to build an audience that loves and respects you over time. Every time they see your videos it's like, "oh, Jerry gave me a valuable idea in that title and thumbnail. Even if I didn't watch it, Jerry cares enough about me to not hide the information inside the video, but to just give me the information directly."
If you look at most of my titles, this is exactly what I'm doing. In the short term you might write it off. I did one called "Solve the biggest problem for content creators," and sadly, while I get a few more views in the short term, that one didn't communicate a very important idea. But here's a better example: "The only YouTube strategy you need: upload daily." I got maybe 48 views on it, but I communicated that idea to almost a thousand people. Another one said to just upload a hundred videos even with bad titles and worse thumbnails, and that message reached one and a half thousand people. I've communicated ideas like how old videos can become a searchable content archive, getting AI to sell for you, and that your old videos are worth more than your next upload, and I intend to do this more.
Sometimes I've gotten into the clickbait crap myself. But here's one: "YouTube is for pros, Instagram is for amateurs," communicating the value of YouTube to 2,000 people. Another, "Stop making long-form videos, build a series," communicated that to 2,000 people. On every one of my videos, first and foremost, I think about the idea. For this kind of video I use the first frame as my YouTube thumbnail, which itself gives people a totally new way to think about the thumbnail, and that earned about 4,500 impressions. Here's another: "How Google Ads poisoned my YouTube organic traffic," which communicated that to a thousand people, and which I dug into fully in that post on how Google Ads poisoned my organic traffic.
Turn silent impressions into lifelong fans
So if you can make every impression count, you can stop obsessing over your views and your watch time in the short term and start thinking about how to communicate value to people. If you keep communicating value over and over again, at some point somebody comes in already excited to watch your videos, because you've already helped them five times in videos they didn't even watch. You gave them an idea they remembered, and when they finally do come in and watch one, you're likely to have a lifelong super fan instead of some casual viewer who got trapped in a clickbait title and can't wait to get out of your funnel.
That's the whole shift. Make every impression count, and you build an audience that respects you before they ever press play. If you want more of this thinking, I put my best YouTube videos together in my YouTube Coaching playlist.