We hear this a lot from creators: “I’ve done everything, but my channel’s not growing!”

The truth is, you haven’t done everything. And that’s not a bad thing to hear. In fact, this just means there are more opportunities for you to grow.

Standing back and watching your own channel as a viewer, not as the creator, is one of the hardest skills on YouTube. To separate from your craft. This skill is what creates a gap between a channel that feels stuck and one that’s actually diagnosing their problems.

Comparing yourself to a competitor isn’t the issue. Instead, it’s not knowing what to do with the comparison.

“So how do I fix this?”

Let’s start with the basics of your packaging, which includes your title, thumbnail, description. Answer the questions below.

• Does your thumbnail complement your title, or is it just regurgitating the same thing? Does it stand out from all the other thumbnails in your niche?
• Is your title clear and searchable?
• Do the first two lines of your description support the topic of your video as well as the title? Or is it filled with unimportant text or links that take viewers off of YouTube?

Then take a look at your analytics to see if it matches your answers.

• Do you have low impressions? Then that could mean your title isn’t clear enough for YouTube, so it doesn’t know who to cater your video to. It could also be that the topic doesn’t have that much interest, so there aren’t a lot of people YouTube can put your video in front of.
• Do you have high impressions, but low CTR? This means YouTube has an idea of who to bring your video to, but the viewers aren’t clicking through.
• Do you have a high CTR, but your impressions aren’t going up anymore? Then this could mean YouTube has shown to all the potential viewers who might be interested in the topic.

A video can be genuinely strong and still lose because the packaging never got anyone to click.

If you’re ever feeling lost and need a second pair of eyes, you should consider joining a YouTube community, such as the TubeSpanner Discord server.

To be clear, TubeSpanner doesn't believe competitors mean enemies, but we're only using this term because it’s the industry term. 

Now, if you’re wondering why your competitor might be better, you might be too much of an expert. You might not be thinking about how a beginner would think, and so you don’t know what they’re looking for. And perhaps that’s what your competitor is doing.

“How do I keep an eye on my competitors?”

For one, you can subscribe to them to be notified. You can also use TubeSpanner’s Competitor feature that allows you to add in the channels of your competitors. It’s an agent that runs, keeps an eye on their channel, has a look at what they’re doing, and it’ll show you which of their videos have suddenly become very successful. It’ll also show which ones aren’t doing well.

However, this feature isn’t made so that you can rip off videos from your competitors. Don’t be somebody else. Be the best you.

Look at what they’re doing instead. What’s their cadence? What’s their top content? Analyze some of their strategies that you can apply.

There is value in talking about similar topics, but if you’re just recreating the video, then it becomes “human slop” at that point.

A saturated topic and a saturated niche are not the same thing. Viewers typically only watch three or four videos on a specific topic before moving on, which means the fix usually isn’t finding a brand-new niche, it’s finding a new angle inside the one you’re already in.

If ten videos already exist making the same point, the video that takes a different position is often the one that gets watched.

Put your own spin into the topic, but don’t lie to yourself or your audience just so you can have a “different take” from others.