Who’s Watching You? The 3 Viewer Types That Drive YouTube Growth

Last year, the platform’s team introduced an updated channel analytics feature in the Audience tab. And this wasn’t just another minor update that only a handful of million-subscriber channels would ever use — it’s actually a truly important improvement.

So if you still don’t fully understand how to interpret these charts in Analytics and ignore the fact that content should be created for different types of viewers, we may have just identified a weak spot in your channel.

Shall we take a closer look?

What’s the essence of the update: what was there before, and what has changed

For a long time, we had a rather rough tool for audience analysis: new, returning, and unique viewers.

These metrics showed how many people came during a selected period:

• New viewers — those who visited your channel/content for the first time during a given period

• Returning viewers — those who had already watched something on your channel during that period

• Unique viewers — the total of both groups within the selected period

But this picture was too superficial: we couldn’t tell how many people actually stayed long-term and how many showed up once every six months.

Now YouTube has decided to change everything.

Instead of these tabs, there are now just two: monthly viewers (all viewers) and subscribers.

It also introduced something that helps us build new promotion strategies: audience segments based on how viewers watch your content.

Let’s break down what all of this means:

• New viewers — watched your video for the first time during the selected period. Even if they watched before but more than a year ago, or deleted their watch history, YouTube still counts them as new.

• Casual viewers — watch occasionally: at least once a month, but not more frequently, for a period of one to five months over the past year.

• Regular viewers — those who watch your content every month for six months or longer. These are your most loyal fans and the most important metric.

These updated insights turn promotion strategy upside down.

Now we can work with different audience layers in different ways, instead of trying to please everyone at once with the same video.

An important point: this data is available not only for long-form videos, but also for Shorts and even live streams.

That means absolutely every format on the platform can be evaluated in terms of which audience it attracts and retains.

To truly rethink your strategy, you need to open the detailed analytics.

Go to Overview → See more → in the left menu select Sorting parameters → Audience segments by views of your content.

You’ll then get a graph (we recommend saving these analytics settings so it’s easy to return to them):

What should we look for there?

CTR
If regular viewers are leading — that’s good, because your core fan base should respond to content the most.

New and casual viewers may show lower numbers, since when reach increases (for example, with a viral video), CTR drops because the number of skipped impressions grows. That’s normal.

Average view duration
And once again, regular viewers should lead here — because if even they don’t like your content, there’s no one to push it to a new audience.

Сonclusion: first and foremost, we should encourage our fan base to watch more (and longer) and keep coming back to the channel — not just chase subscriptions and one-off views.

What strategies can be built based on audience segment analytics

Now we no longer have “all viewers in one pile,” but three categories. That means we can tailor our strategy more precisely.

• New viewers

They are attracted by viral topics, hype-driven formats, and eye-catching thumbnails and titles.
But if you focus only on new viewers, the channel ends up on an endless viral-content conveyor belt.
In the long run, this makes no sense, because there’s no content that actually retains the audience.

• Casual viewers

This is the “middle layer” that can be turned into regulars.
Video series, recurring formats, related topics, and themed playlists work well here.
Yes, once again we’re talking about series and playlists — those poor, overused tools. But today it’s simply ineffective to keep collecting more and more viewers who will just sit there as dead weight and watch you once a year.

Your viewers should want to keep watching you nonstop.

• Regular viewers

The most valuable group: they watch longer and are more likely to move on to the next video.
To strengthen this core, you need consistency and regularity (recurring formats, scheduled videos), streams, posts in the Community tab, personal interaction, special videos, and so on.
Balance is extremely important.

If you put everything into viral content, you’ll have to fight for traffic from scratch every month, and your existing audience will drop off, because each topic is just another viral hit.

If you work only for “your own” audience, the channel can get stuck in a narrow niche, with no inflow of fresh viewers.

By the way, in addition to giving us solid audience segments, YouTube now also shows which videos each segment prefers.

The platform has literally given creators a map for building a content plan — no more guessing or overthinking. You can look at the data and, at the right moment, create some videos for attraction, others for retention, and others for strengthening the fan base.

And even though all of this may sound easy, no one has given — or will ever give — us a magic pill. To build a sustainable audience ecosystem, it’s not enough to simply repeat what people already liked.

Yes, that will work for a while, but sooner or later you’ll still have to start thinking harder, analyzing, and coming up with something new.

That’s just how YouTube is.