✌️ The YouTube growth matrix

Metricooler, see if any of this sounds familiar.

You post every now and then, the people watching your videos comment and leave likes, but you can’t get your views to grow.

Or maybe you’re posting twice as much as last year, and even so, your channel’s numbers stay more or less the same as before.

The real problem is that your own numbers alone sometimes don’t tell you what to do to improve, so you end up testing things “just to see what happens.” Two thousand views can be a win or a disaster depending on your channel’s size, and there’s no way to know which one if all you’re looking at is your own analytics.

That’s why we built a Claude skill for YouTube benchmarking, it pulls your channel’s data, compares it against thousands of real channels, and tells you where you stand and what you can do to improve.

We ran the skill on two channels that couldn’t be more different. Ours, a software tool with 27K subscribers, and Latasha James’s, a content creator who’s worked with us for a while now and let us use her channel’s 235K subscriber data for this analysis.

And yet, we both came out with the same diagnosis.

You can watch Latasha’s full run in video, from connecting the channel to the diagnosis, so if you’d rather see the skill working on a real channel before trying it yourself, start there.

After running the skill in Claude, you’ll land in one of these scenarios:

What it means. What you publish works with the people who see it, the issue is that not enough people are seeing it in the first place. It’s the most frustrating of the four scenarios, since you’re doing things right and still not growing the way you expected.

What you can do. The last thing you should touch is your content, since that’s the one thing the numbers say is already working. The work here is in how people find it, so start with your titles and make them answer something people are already searching for. And post Shorts to show up in the Shorts feed, since that’s where 61% of the platform’s organic views come from. For reference, search brings in 9% and your channel page another 3%.

What it means. People find you without a problem, but they leave before getting hooked. Reach isn’t the issue, what’s failing is what happens in those first few seconds.

What you can do. Work on the opening of every video to improve retention and drive more engagement through comments, likes, or profile visits. This is happening across the whole platform, average watch time dropped 37% on long-form video, and on Shorts it fell from 48 seconds to 16.

What it means. People aren’t finding you and they aren’t sticking around either, so it’s time to look at your content before worrying about distribution.

What you can do. Look at what topics channels aimed at similar audiences cover, how they approach their videos, and how they tell their stories. Narrow down what your channel is about before touching anything else. That’s what the channels that move up a category in the study have in common, and the clearest example is one that averages 107,000 views, 6.5 times the norm for channels its size, by posting only about fermentation.

What it means. You're doing well, and the decision now is how much more you can publish without hurting your numbers.

What you can do. Raise your posting frequency, but with a clear ceiling. For long-form video, the sweet spot is between 2 and 4 a week, and past 7 your total monthly views start to drop. On Shorts, the ceiling sits a lot higher, so there it comes down to how much you can produce without lowering the bar.

Both channels we ran through the skill land in the first scenario, so neither of us is going to change the type of content we publish.

Latasha posts 1.87 long-form videos a week, quite a bit more than channels her size, and gets 8% higher engagement with 84% fewer views. On Shorts, she posted one in thirty days, while channels like hers post 3.43 a week. Content isn’t the problem, her opportunity to grow lies in posting more Shorts.

Our case is similar but with different numbers. We get more than double the engagement of channels our size, and yet our videos get 16 times fewer views (729 on average versus 12,045). And we posted 4 Shorts in 90 days, while channels like ours post about 4 a week.

You’ve just seen what the skill turns up on two channels that couldn’t be more different, and it works the same way with yours, whether you have 500 subscribers or 200,000. It compares you against real channels that are where you are right now and tells you how to improve.

Download it, open it in Claude with your Metricool account connected, and you’ll have it in a few minutes.