600K Views Later: Inside Kaine’s Battle With the YouTube Algorithm
Since re-launching our channel in October 2025, we can confirm our channel has been viewed (both videos and shorts) 590,493 times, which equates to 2,301 hours of watch time. We had 1,132,850 impressions (people being shown our content), but our click-through rate remains low at 1.7%.
95% of all viewers were not subscribed to our channel, but we did pick up 671 new subscribers since the relaunch, giving us a total of 2600 subscribers.
How the “Swipe-Away” Trap Is Keeping Kaine’s 600K-View YouTube Channel From Making Money
Unfortunately, the watch time being so low, with the majority skipping out on videos/shorts, has meant we are way below the threshold to get the channel monetized. We will continue to work hard on improving our channel and content and try to encourage more people to stick with the content we produce on the channel, rather than swiping away or watching for a few seconds, liking it, and leaving! This tells the algorithm the content is not interesting to our target audience, which then means it is shown to fewer and fewer people, a trend we need to try to turn around and something we’re also experiencing on Facebook.
Our top video was the full album stream of Extinctions End, which was played 7,136 times and had 404.4 hours of watch time. Most viewers clicked away/swiped after the first 35 seconds, and those viewers who did stay only stuck with it for 4 minutes, which is essentially half of the first song, before swiping away or leaving the video. This is something we will have to improve on going into 2027.
You can subscribe/check out the channel here.
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