YouTube Growth Explained: What Matters Beyond CTR and Retention

Many creators are convinced that for a video to take off, you only need to improve two key metrics — click-through rate (CTR) and average watch time (retention).

It sounds logical: the more people click on your video in recommendations and the longer they watch it, the more actively the algorithm will promote it.

Unfortunately, this popular and neat theory is complete nonsense, because that’s not how algorithms actually work.

Let’s break this down using two videos from our channel as an example.

Both videos have roughly the same length, but one received 6.5 thousand views, while the other reached 21 thousand.

Let’s dive into the analytics.

• The first video has an average watch time of almost 8 minutes, which equals 33%, with a CTR of 6.5%.

• Meanwhile, the second video looks slightly worse: the average watch time is only 6.5 minutes (under 30%), and the CTR barely reaches 6%.

And yet the video with fewer views has better metrics than the one that gained more views.

So if you focus only on a couple of “important” metrics, there’s no guarantee the video will take off.

How is that possible?

• The secret is that when promoting videos, the platform’s algorithms analyze not one or two metrics, but their combination and how they work together.

And besides CTR or retention, YouTube also takes into account viewer satisfaction — which is built from a huge number of signals.

And you know what else is considered?

•  How well your video performed compared to other creators’ videos released on the platform at the same time.

Back in 2021, YouTube managers told us that the platform takes into account more than 80 billion different signals when promoting content.

And considering that at the end of 2024 YouTube announced the introduction of a more advanced Artificial Intelligence model (specifically Large Language Models), the algorithms began taking into account an even greater number of signals — and it’s now hard to imagine how many there actually are.

• Therefore, the claim that simply increasing CTR or retention will instantly make your video go viral is incorrect.

Analytics gives us a lot of information about how the platform works.

A lot — but still not everything — so we can’t be 100% sure which metrics matter most.

What we can do, however, is analyze the principles behind how the algorithms work and try to adapt to them.

To do this, let’s return to our two videos which, all else being equal, resonated with the audience in completely different ways, and ask the question: why did this happen?

When you upload a video, YouTube doesn’t show it to everyone right away. It first shows the video to a small group of people — most often those who have already watched your content.

If they respond well, the platform begins expanding the reach. But if there’s little or insufficient reaction, YouTube simply stops promoting the video further.

And that’s the key point: the video that performed worse simply didn’t receive enough audience reactions during the reach expansion stage.

*Its higher CTR and retention are explained by the fact that it was shown to a much smaller number of people.

Meanwhile, the lower CTR and retention of the video that took off indicate that it successfully passed all testing stages and started riding the waves of recommendations, being shown to newer and newer audiences.

*Along with that, the likelihood of users skipping the click or stopping the watch increases, which is why the metrics go down.

💡So if you want a takeaway here, our advice is not to overcomplicate things and to focus on the content itself — and among all metrics, pay attention to views first.

That’s what ultimately forms the comprehensive “viewer satisfaction” modern YouTube algorithms are looking for.