10:32Nadine Sykora · Tutorial
YouTube was testing my videos wrong (so I fixed it)
Three reports inside YouTube Studio reveal whether the algorithm has any idea who your videos are for — and three title fixes that finally tell it.
June 1stThe argument in one line.
YouTube shows new channels to a tiny test audience until they earn trust, and posting once or twice a day for roughly a month is the fastest way to get through that gate.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- A new YouTuber who posted a handful of videos, saw 100 to 300 impressions each, and is close to deciding the platform is rigged against them.
- A creator with a niche picked out who wants a concrete posting cadence and timeline to test rather than more advice about thumbnails.
- Someone whose click-through rate and retention graphs look average and who wants to know whether that actually blocks growth.
SKIP IF…
- You want a tested, controlled study of the algorithm. This is one creator's experience across four channels in one niche.
- You can't realistically publish daily. The advice depends on volume and he admits it may take one to two months.
The full version, fast.
Jordan Barry argues that YouTube gatekeeps new channels, showing their videos to a very small audience until the channel builds trust, which he calls the trust door. On a new Warhammer lore channel he posted two videos and a short every day from early September, got almost no impressions for four weeks, then jumped to 66,000 and later 200,000 impressions in a day. He says repetition and a consistent standard of quality mattered more than click-through rate or retention, which were mediocre. He also advises picking a niche with a fresh personal take and using the account like a normal viewer.
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Create a free account →Where the time goes.
00:00 – 02:00
01 · Earning the algorithm's trust
Shows revived Warhammer channels with millions of views and promises how he did it.
02:00 – 04:30
02 · The trust door and near-zero impressions
A new channel got 100 to 400 impressions a day despite posting two videos and a short daily, which he calls the trust door.
04:30 – 07:10
03 · Niche, volume and the breakthrough
Picking a lore niche with a personal take, then about four weeks of posting before impressions jumped to 66,000 and then 200,000.
07:10 – 10:00
04 · Weak metrics, strong growth
Click-through rate and retention graphs were mediocre, yet the channel grew.
10:00 – 13:10
05 · 18 million impressions and the viral-video myth
90-day chart, then his earlier viral video that monetized a channel but did not sustain it.
13:10 – 14:12
06 · Give it a month and use your account
Post daily, ignore burnout warnings if you can, and use the account like a viewer.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- YouTube shows a new channel to a very small audience until it decides the channel is worth pushing, and the way through is volume plus consistent quality.
- Most creators quit after about four videos and 100 to 200 impressions each, which is the exact point where the gate hasn't opened yet.
- One channel got near-zero impressions for about four weeks of daily posting, then went to 66,000 impressions and 200,000 the next day.
- A 4.3% click-through rate and weak retention graphs still produced 18 million impressions in three months on his main channel.
- Every new upload is a fresh test for the algorithm, so more uploads mean more chances to get picked up.
- One viral video did not set up his channel for life. It got him monetized, then the channel flatlined until he started posting heavily.
- Niche plus your own take beats generic content, and original perspective matters more as YouTube leans on Gemini to judge originality.
- Using your channel's account as a normal viewer by subscribing, liking and commenting may add to the trust signal, though he presents this as a guess.
- His claim that 50% retention is required to be pushed is something he says his own channels contradict.
Volume gets a new channel through the gate
WHAT TO LEARN
A new channel gets a tiny test audience until it proves itself, and this creator says consistent, decent daily posting for a month or two is what opened it up.
- Near-zero impressions in the first weeks is normal for a new channel, so low early numbers are not proof that YouTube has rejected you.
- Posting more often gives the algorithm more samples of your work, and he credits two videos and a short per day for his breakthrough after about four weeks.
- Click-through rate and retention still matter, but his channels grew with a 4.3% click-through rate and poor retention graphs, so mediocre numbers should not make you quit.
- Pick a niche people already watch and add your own perspective, because originality is what separates your channel from the rest.
- A single viral video does not guarantee a channel's future, and he saw his own channel flatline after one until he committed to volume.
- Treat the channel's account like a real viewer account by subscribing, liking and commenting, which he suspects adds to trust but does not prove.
Terms worth knowing.
- Trust door
- The creator's name for YouTube limiting a new channel to a tiny test audience until the channel proves it is worth pushing to more people.
- Impressions
- The number of times YouTube shows your video thumbnail to viewers, regardless of whether they click.
- Click-through rate
- The share of impressions that turn into clicks on the video.
- Average view duration
- How long viewers watch a video on average before leaving.
Lines you could clip.
00:00
“Ultimately you have to earn their trust.”
11:30
“Every single new video is a new fresh test for the algorithm.”
Word for word.
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So if you want to get into YouTube's algorithm, ultimately you have to earn their trust. And this is something that I've been learning over the past six years of making countless different YouTube channels, having various levels of success like most normal people do, and realizing ultimately that blowing up in the algorithm with one viral video isn't really the answer at all.
As you can see here, I've recently blown up this channel that was actually dead, a Warhammer channel. You can see it's now making me $3 ,000 a month here and getting millions of views. And ultimately, it all boils down to really making sure that YouTube trusts you and finding the quickest way to do that.
For example, I've got an excellent example here of another Warhammer channel that I made using the exact same principles. And you can see here that it's finally headed into the algorithm. If I show you on my screen here, you can see that over the past week, four or five days or so, we have actually hit the algorithm here and are now getting thousands and 2 ,000 views an hour.
almost 100 ,000 views in the space of a month. And this is all to do with trusting YouTube, getting trust from them in return. Basically, you have to earn the algorithm's trust before you get pushed.
And there are some ways to do this. So I'm going to talk about it in this video because I'm sure you want to learn how I did this. I've replicated this now with three or four channels over the past few weeks.
And as an experiment, I'm doing it with another Warhammer channel here, which I have started uploading to and created yesterday or the day before, as you can see. And we're going to see how this one goes as an experiment.
So before I... continue to ramble on i'm going to tell you about what i've been doing so for example this this third warhammer channel i've made here i've just been basically identifying a niche which is incredibly important of course your youtube could be about anything but if you lock into your niche and make consistent content in that niche that people are quite familiar with but is also bringing your own fresh take perspective your style these are all things that are going to matter obviously and thumbnails and titles still matter but ultimately Most youtubers will quit before they ever hit the algorithm and this channel here is a good example I had a second channel for Warhammer which blew up after four or five days of posting and hit the algorithm straight away But this channel here doing exactly the same thing as I'm telling you here posting consistently every single day I was posting two videos or maybe three videos a day with the short every day as well Trying to get into the algorithm and earn the algorithms trust
And you can see here that this one actually took me a while. I think I started posting. Is this the first video that I posted here?
I made this channel, let's say, what is this, the 11th? I'm pretty sure that I actually started posting before this in reality. If I go back into September here, you'll see what I mean.
I actually posted consistently for, it's not showing me now the videos that I posted, but I did make this channel about the start of September. As you can see, I was getting some views here, but the reality was, for most people, You know, you're going to get 20, 30, 40, 50 views a day.
Even posting two videos a day and a shorter day as I was, I was getting no views at all. The algorithm was not letting me in. And if you go on content on your channel and then go on to your analytics in terms of your impressions of your channel, you will see something really interesting, which is.
Throughout this whole period I was getting you know 100 200 300 400 impressions here or there as you can see But basically not getting any kind of push from YouTube whatsoever really into the algorithm And this is what I like to call the trust door, which is essentially youtube gatekeeping your content and showing it to a very very very small audience until you build enough trust that it decides i'm going to show this to a wider group of people we know that youtube does this but the actual mechanism of it is something that i don't think actually people understand that much and really The only real ways that I've found to accelerate this process is consistently posting and posting as much as you can, giving the algorithm as many test subjects as possible until it decides, yeah, this person is the kind of person that will allow to have a bit of a YouTube career.
Because honestly, ultimately, most people will quit before they get to this point, won't they? It's a reality for most people that, you know, they'll make... you know one video a week for a month they'll make four videos in total all of them will get you know 100 200 impressions like this and then they'll give up and never go back and assume that youtube hates them and you know youtube is a scam and only there's only select people that can do youtube and all this stuff that you see in here but my experience is that this is actually a replicatable thing that you can do and the quickest way to do it in my experience is identify your niche Look in your niche at the kind of content that people like to consume.
For example, these Warhammer channels that I've been doing recently. It's just Warhammer lore, talking about the characters. The visuals are, you know, pictures of the characters with some nice effects and transitions.
Me narrating it and then having like some nice audio that makes me sound like a space marine. That's the niche that I've identified. And I've added my own little caveats to that.
I've added my own perspectives to the law, my own opinions, which is important with Gemini, as we know now. We'll be looking at originality of content as another reason to push it, which is another factor, I feel, for YouTube letting you into the algorithm. But you can see the proof is in the pudding here.
I posted two videos a day, which I know is a lot for most people, but this is the quickest way that I've found to do it. And I'm just telling you my experience of what can happen. Posted two videos a day here.
consistently and a short every day as well and it took about a month for this channel to hit the algorithm as you can see started about the first of september getting basically no impressions and then all of a sudden after about four consistent weeks of posting i get a few a few days of getting into the algorithm getting 66 000 impressions here which is you know 100 200 times more than what i was getting and then now you can see i've gone in with 200 000 impressions yesterday as of recording this video In terms of my click -through rate, I mean, it's not amazing.
In terms of my average view duration, not amazing either, making about 10 -minute videos. The reality is, these metrics that people obsess about, click -through rate and average view duration, they do matter. But I mean, look at the retention on my videos here.
They're not amazing. Look at the retention. These are not amazing retention graphs by any means.
But you can see that these are actually... you know, pretty bad really in terms of retention graphs. Everyone goes, you know, you need a 50 % retention graph or your video will never get pushed and all this kinds of stuff.
And it's, it's honestly just not true. from what i've seen personally i'm not saying that these things don't matter and i'm not saying that these things won't help you because if you have a 10 click -through rate and an average view duration say your videos are like 10 minutes long and your average duration is like six minutes i think the algorithm is definitely going to favor your content a lot more but i don't think this is the only thing that matters and i don't think that this is the be all and end all of your content you shouldn't go on your content and go oh no my click -through rate is only Only four percent.
I'll give up youtube. I'll know my average view duration is only three minutes on 10 minute videos I should give up youtube. I'll know by the end of my video only what is this 18 percent of people are watching And it should be 50 i'm going to give up youtube Lots of people do talk about these things and I do i'm not saying that they don't matter But what I am saying is you can still be successful Even when these metrics aren't up to the standard that everyone says that they should be ultimately here It does seem as though to me that the main things that have mattered that I have now replicated on four separate channels in the past few months is repetition of posting, continuously posting every single day.
The amount of times that you test the algorithm, the more chance you've got to get into the algorithm. Look at my 90 -day chart here. Let's look at the impressions on my main Warhammer channel here.
in terms of impressions. So the 90 -day chart, I was getting 2 ,000, 3 ,000 impressions a day, and then I got a nice little spike up to 40K here, as you can see. And then, you know, I was thinking, oh, this seems like it's working.
Maybe I'll start posting more than one video a day and work really ridiculously hard to get myself into the algorithm. And as you can see, it worked. I went from getting...
Two or three thousand impressions a day where I was posting one video every now and again and hoping I'd get a viral hit that would work. I've actually gone and got myself 18 million impressions in the past three months, which is an incredible amount. Something that I never thought I'd do, but it taught me a lesson, as you can see, from my content.
My average click -through rate is still 4 .3 % here over this course of period of time, but I've made myself a successful channel with a click -through rate that people would say is pretty bad or average at best. My average view duration isn't that much better either. I did start posting longer videos as a test.
As you can see, my average view duration did increase because of this somewhat, but I don't think that this was massively influential. All of these stats were on my success as a whole. You can see here some of my recent...
Videos look at the retention graphs on these they're pretty bad. I mean some these retention graphs are what you would consider bad You know everyone goes, you know, if your retention graph looks like this the hockey stick of death You're not gonna get your video pushed, but it's just not the case It's not the case for me and ultimately every single new video is a new fresh test for the algorithm So you really should be testing it as much as you can in my opinion That would be the source that I would leave you with today ultimately is if you want to be successful on YouTube, number one, you have to find a niche and you have to find a good standard of content in that.
Obviously, your videos have to be pretty good. I think this is pretty self -explanatory and obvious, but you also have to have the ability to make a lot of videos and persevere because it might take you one month or two months maybe to hit the algorithm like my channels have here, but they will hit the algorithm eventually.
And once they do, you will start seeing results like this. I mean, I've gone from in a week 684 impressions there to over 200 000 from a few of my videos getting finally picked up by the algorithm and ultimately this was just consistency of a good standard of quality over a long period of time testing youtube continuously testing the algorithm and eventually you'll earn that trust from youtube and then you'll start getting through the trust door which i've talked about and you will get yourself pushed Obviously, there will be exceptions.
There'll be someone who posts one video. Maybe it's an absolute masterpiece and it gets into the algorithm straight away. Maybe it's like a four hour long video that's like a film level of quality and it gets pushed by the algorithm.
There's lots of, I would say, you know, outliers to this. Everyone used to think one viral video will set up your channel forever. It probably really doesn't, to be honest.
I, very interestingly enough to this point, had a video about, let's go on my all time stats here and you'll see what I mean. This is the wrong channel. Got my all -time stats here for my videos.
Overview. Go on all -time. And you'll see I actually had a viral video last year in 2025.
I believe it was here. Is this 2025 yet? And this was a viral video that I got here that monetized my channel.
And I basically had like 200 ,000 or 300 ,000 views. My average views was like 3 ,000 or 4 ,000 maximum. before obviously the algorithm update with, you know, the views are counted as crazy now.
But you get the idea. Basically, I had a viral video back here and then off the back of that, I did get my monetization, et cetera, but it didn't set my channel up for life. And really, I gave up with the channel after this because I got monetized, as you can see, and then basically flatlined for a long, long time until I came back and gave my channel another go and learned what I've learned now with the algorithm as it stands today.
Right now, my channel is doing incredibly well because I'm posting a lot of videos. And really, in my opinion, if you want to have some consistent success with YouTube, you have to post as much as you can. I'm not saying that you should post five videos a day, but what I am saying is if you can, you should post more one video a day or maybe two videos a day, especially in the beginning when you're trying to earn the trust of the algorithm.
Because as you can see, it took me a while. It's not showing all the videos I posted here, but you can see it took me a while. But eventually I did get into the algorithm here for this channel.
And ultimately the reason is basically just that I kept posting and I got through the trust door by posting a consistently decent standard of content. And eventually you do get through the impression lock that seems to be on your channel. This is what I've learned personally.
And I do want to know your experiences down below. Make sure you do comment down there. If you would like more information about how I run my channels.
am going to be starting up one -on -ones pretty soon. So make sure you go down in the description and sign up if you're interested in that. Overall, I've been having a good time building my channels.
And as you can see, this is another one that's hit the algorithm here and that will get monetized pretty soon. You can see I've got, what is this, 1 ,100 hours of watch time here. I'm already basically nearly at the threshold instantly with this channel over the past few days.
So it shows you how quickly things can change with YouTube. And frankly, You should be considering all of this, I think, when you start YouTube.
Giving up too soon is, frankly, you know, a waste of effort. You might as well see it through. Give it a month.
Post as much as you can. Post daily, maybe even more than daily if you can. Work really hard and you will probably see some results from YouTube like this, in my opinion.
Obviously, loads of people will say, if you post more than one video a day, you'll burn out and stuff like this. I've never had this problem personally. I really like working and I will work as much as I can to get the results that I want for as long as it takes every day.
Lots of people aren't like this and you know, that's fair enough. But ultimately, the more that you test the algorithm, the more chance you've got of getting into it and building that trust with YouTube. And the more you post, I think the faster you grow that trust.
Another little caveat before we leave, actually use the YouTube account that you've made. Go onto YouTube. Subscribe to some channels, like some videos, watch some content, post some comments, be a YouTuber on your account, and it will build the score, in my opinion, that trust factor in the background a little bit more as well.
Recently, I've been using this account, which may be the reason why it's come into the algorithm, but ultimately, YouTube does gatekeep impressions for new accounts, and the fastest way to get them is to build trust by posting a lot of videos, good quality content, use your YouTube channel, and basically be patient because this may fluctuate, like I said.
between channels like and subscribe because i would really appreciate that let me know what you think down below and i'll catch you in the next video
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
He opens by saying the algorithm only pushes channels it trusts, then shows a once-dead Warhammer channel now earning $3,000 a month. The rest is his case that volume and consistency are how you earn that trust.
Named ideas worth stealing.
03:05concept
The trust door
YouTube holds new channels to a very small audience until enough consistent uploads convince it to show them to more people.
Steal forExplaining why a new channel's early videos get almost no impressions.
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
12:20link
“I am going to be starting up one-on-ones pretty soon. Make sure you go down in the description and sign up.”
A soft mid-close mention of upcoming one-on-ones, plus a course and Discord teased in the description.
