Most Steem Post Views Come After Payout! #11

In Steem secret #11, we ask when publishing online how many views come within 24 hours versus how many come later and what impact this has on our posting strategy? Over 80% of my views on YouTube and on my blog posts on Steemit come after 24 hours with the majority happening after 7 days!

Meanwhile, most of us as authors, video producers, bloggers, podcasters and YouTubers get obsessed with the immediate response especially on Steem where we only get payout within 7 days of making a new post. This often blocks us from doing our best work and instead trying to always make whatever gets the most views or reads or opens right away which often minimizes our overall impact. According to my YouTube and Steem statistics, most readers and viewers are reading posts and watching videos much older than 24 hours or even 7 days.

This means the ideal content creation strategy is to aim for evergreen tutorials, videos, posts and podcasts because often it takes months just to get a video on YouTube ranked in search or a blog post showing up in Google organic search.

80% of Views Are After 24 Hours!


For planning video production, for writing blog posts, for making a podcast, this is extremely helpful information to know because it helps us be patient with our results and it helps us optimize, intentionally create posts, videos, podcasts that will be evergreen, that will be available and helpful for years in the future.

That's exactly what I do and I'll show you the inside of this system now where I go after the views that come a year, 2 years or 5 years after I've made a video. I want videos that are good indefinitely as much as possible because that's where the majority of the views are located.

If you’ve seen a lot of the comments on my channel or on my posts from people saying things like, “Oh Jerry, you're such a scammer, you just bought all your fans.”

I don't have to get upset with those comments because I understand what the commenter doesn't understand. I've made a video 24 hours ago, and yes it has 596 views right now.

I have 200,000 subscribers and you might call that video a total failure, a flop, a waste, “Oh my god, you’re such a … Oh, blah, blah, blah.”

You see, I optimize my videos to get a lot of views in the long term. If you scroll down, you can see my videos probably get a few hundred to a thousand or couple thousand views on each video within the first 24 hours, but then most of my videos continue to get the majority of the views going forward from there.

I made this cryptocurrency price prediction video last week or maybe it was this week, and it's got 11,000 views so far.

If I scroll back to find the previous video, that video is performing just about how the last one did and it has 86,000 views now.

I make videos that are aimed to get lots of views after 24 hours, especially things like tutorial videos. You might notice a lot of my videos don't immediately get many views right away, but if you go back you'll see some of these videos have a ton of views on them.

Here’s one with 7,500 views and a lot of these videos can just keep getting more and more views.

This video got a couple of thousand views the first few days and it continues to get more and more views.

I do my videos with the intent to just pick up views for at least a few months on many videos if not years.

This "What Do I Do Everyday" video has got 13,000 views. Now you might see that on a lot of the Happier People podcast videos I don't immediately get views, but those are good theoretically for the rest of my life.

If I continue scrolling down, lots of these videos just get a few thousand views, but some of them continue to pick more and more views up over time.

Now, if I go and show the very highest videos I have on my channel, these still continue to get lots of views today. I have this one video with 3.2 million views that I filmed in 2015, another one with 1.24 million views.

This League of Legends video, even though if I quit playing League of Legends and I haven't played in almost a year, this video still continues to get more views.

Then I have AdWords tutorials, Linux tutorials, that just continue to pour more and more views.

This "Ethereum mining" video I did just continues to get views. Even though it only got a few thousand views in the first 24 hours, it's now got several hundred thousand views after it's been uploaded about four months ago, it continues to just pick more and more views up.

The Facebook marketing tutorials that I do continue to just pick more views up. Here's one, "Best Facebook Marketing Tutorial," that I did almost a year ago and at the time it didn't get very many views, now it's got 147,000 views.

This applies also for posting on Steem. This is how I plan out everything I do. Let's have a look at my Steemit account.

A lot of us obsess about the payouts on Steem that all come within seven days, and most of the votes come within the first 24 to 48 hours.

It's easy to obsess over how much money a post is earning, but the real long term opportunity is to get views on the posts.

This is a post I made three days ago, and it has 1,613 views.

Now, I might even consider that a failure if I didn't look at it in the long picture.

Here's the same post format I did last month, this post has 25,000 views on it.

This is the "Cryptocurrency Price Predictions for September 2017" post compared to the "Cryptocurrency Price Predictions for October 2017!" post.

The idea is, I write posts that will pick a lot of views over the long term. I write posts that when users are googling, then my posts get found.

This allows me to essentially pull in ridiculous amounts of traffic when I keep doing this strategy over and over again.

The problem we have as content creators though, for the first several years in my business as you can see, my first video that has a lot of views is from 2015. Now, I was in business in 2011, and most of us get stuck in this constant trap.

We get stuck in this trap of trying to get the most views after just 24 hours right after we made something, and then we quickly forget, after that we don't even check it often.

I wrote another post like the one I showed earlier on Steem and it's up to I think about 40,000 views. I didn't even realize that it got all these views because I had to go back and manually check the post on Steem.

On YouTube, the same thing happens. If I show you my analytics right here, the videos that are getting the most watched time and the most views often are not new videos, these are older videos.

The most watched time is the video I made last month, it's got the most views.

Then, the second most watched time is the video I made a year and a half ago. The third one is a video I made last month. The fourth one is a video I made two years ago, then four months ago, almost a year ago and after that several months ago. These are the top videos on my channel.

Nearly almost every top video on my channel, most of the ones getting the most views are at least a month if not several months old. The problem a lot of us get into is we get trapped in this constant thing of wanting that immediate positive reinforcement.

We’ve got to have views right away and if it doesn't go viral right away we just forget about it.

For the first four years of my business, I was trapped in this mindset and I kept focusing on things that were not going to be helpful like I'd talk about some recent new story.

The thing is when you focus all the time on just today in terms of doing work without thinking, "How is this going to help someone in a year, or 2 years, or 3 years?" then it's hard to build a following, it’s hard to get the automatic traffic, it’s hard to get the ball rolling.

This is one big positive reinforcement loop. The more I make videos that get a lot of views over the long term, the easier it is to get those 24 hour views on my videos. Most of the watched time I get on my videos are from older videos and the videos I do today are designed to pick that watched time up the same way, to pick that watch time up over the long term.

Some channels do really well with getting a lot of views right away, but get almost no views after that first 24 hours. The key is to get videos that continue to get views indefinitely.

For example, I did this Bittrex tutorial four months ago and still within the last month, it's got 17,000 views.

What I aim is for just tutorials like this now as much as possible. The more I've seen this data, the more I try to optimize to just do more and more videos like this.

You'll see most of the things I create are aimed at long term views because this is essentially a luxury that most people with an established business get to do. Most of us hustle so much when we try to start a business and grow followers. We don't have the patience to aim for those really big long term successes.

I hope that in sharing this with you wherever you are at today, you can just start aiming at the same thing because this is the most powerful way to build a following over time, to make things like tutorial videos, to make posts on Steemit that have information that's really valuable.

Even within a few days, thousands of people are finding these posts on Google. Then give it a month and there are tens of thousands views.

This is the very best method, a huge power tip that works for me to get way more views.

If you see haters commenting about how little the views are in the first 24 hours, all you know then is that this knowledge is not there, and it's hard to hate someone when you can understand what piece of the puzzle the person is missing essentially.

I guide most of my videos towards long term usefulness rather than immediate watch time!

I hope this tip has been helpful for you.

I love you.

You're awesome and I hope to see you again soon.

Thank you very much for reading this post, which was originally filmed as the video below.

I appreciate you being here and I hope you have a wonderful day today.

If you found this post helpful on Steemit, would you please upvote it and follow me because you will then be able to see more posts like this in your home feed?

Love,

Jerry Banfield with edits by @gmichelbkk on the transcript by GoTranscript

Shared on:


PS: Witness votes are the most important votes we make on Steem because one vote for a witness lasts indefinitely! Would you please make a vote for jerrybanfield as a witness or set jerrybanfield as a proxy to handle all witness votes at https://steemit.com/~witnesses because when we make our votes, we feel in control of our future together? Thank you to the 1200+ accounts voting for me as a witness, the 500+M VESTS assigned from users trusting me to make all witness votes by setting me as proxy, and @followbtcnews for making these .gif images!

Vote Jerry Banfield Steem Witness

Or

Jerry Banfield Steem Proxy

Sort:  

sooo.. can we still get paid for those up-votes? :D

if you propose the change, you will have my witness vote!

Get paid for which upvotes?

I think @nocmt is referring to upvotes on "expired" posts (7+ days old). It would be encouraging if curation rewards were given for old and even "ancient" posts.

I think he meant the upvotes that we get after 7 days ! Because we create the content forever but we get paid just for 7 days, is that fair ?

You make excellent points in your post, here. You are right about your posts holding their appeal. I came to Steemit because of a link to a post I saw of yours in a google search.
Never worry about negative comments. Nine times out of 10, a negative post is a reflection of the poster, not the person to whom it is directed. Posters who take time out of their day to direct their own negativity at you are just jealous of your success. Their energy would be better spent in creating something worthwhile of their own.
Instant affirmation simply isn't realistic. This site is global. Some of your most loyal fans are probably asleep. It kind of makes a nonsense of the upvote rules with respect to the value of timing.
With so many users currently, it takes a while to separate the wheat from the chaff to uncover the nuggets of wisdom that we really want to read.
Cheers and happy Steeming

Katy thank you very much for demonstrating so clearly what I hoped to share here in the power of writing on Steemit to bring in readers, followers, comments, and earnings from Google search! What I love about every comment is that it helps the search engine ranking also!

Their energy would be better spent in creating something worthwhile of their own.

Yes and what an honor to have the energy directed at helping me!

Thank you, Jerry, for replying to my comment on your post, and upvoting. I follow you because you make a lot of sense and your posts are really helpful in being clear and easy to understand, as well as really informative on the topics they address. In other words, you know your stuff, and who wouldn't follow an expert in the field? Thank you for your good work :)

Sir how i can get upvotes . can you tell me secret of getting votes please. i shall be thankful to you Jerrybanfield

All of our work here is a long-term investment in gaining followers. As they trickle in, you can never be too sure where they came from.

Short-term thinking is usually a poor strategy.

I think a post payout should not be limited for 7 days
This can be unfortunate for posts which have the possibility to retrend upon certain events

Agree. Jerry makes very good posts. It's pretty stupid limitation.

it's not only about Jerry, it looks like you are obsessed with the man.. hahahaha

maybe an additional reward system can be implemented after 7 days?

  1. reward for number of views from search/social on a post and possibly resulting sign ups to steemit
  2. steemit users sharing old posts on social media with amount based the number of followers on social like steem power.

agrees

Steemit/DTube needs to get advertiser monetization, this would be on-going and solve the limited window for payout. It could then payout based on ad views.

Really, the concept of funding posts through inflation is kind of a flawed economic model if we use history and economics as a gauge. Would be better to fund posts based on the economic value of the post which is what ad revenue achieves, as opposed to diluting currency holders.

it shouldn't go as high, and it wouldn't, maybe using the dividing strategy, and cut the income in half after the first 7 days.. and the afterword 7 days cut again in half and so on.. i think that would be fair and safe

I am certainly not an expert on crypto-currencies. In fact, I am a raw novice. But here's the way I understand it: Crypto-currencies are not created out of thin air like the fiat currencies issued by our central banks may be. Rather, valid crypto-currencies require a corresponding amount of "work" to be acquired or "mined." The work required to "mine" Steem comes in the form of creation, curation, and commentary. That work produces a work product, although it is arguably of variable value.

If new issues of gold-backed currency are backed by corresponding new gold reserves, then inflation does not result. Correspondingly, if new issues of work-backed currency are backed by equivalent new work, then inflation should not occur.

The above thinking very much supports Jerry's call for more permanency in our currency. If the value of our work goes poof after seven days, then doesn't the backing for our currency go with it? We need our work product to have a long term, if not a permanent, value in order to consider that work product as a valid backing for our currency.

If a year from now the total value of our collective creation, curation, and commentary is 20 times what it is now, then a year from now, we should be able to have 20 times as much currency "in circulation" without inflation.

If I am wrong about any of the above, I am asking y'all to help me to understand it better.

This is valuable information Jerry.
I wonder if the Steemit team should consider looking into this.
I mean I know it has been discussed before about content creators having in the possibility to earn from past posts. I dont how how it could work but it is clear from these statistics that there is still earning potential from past posts. Perhaps it could be a so that a post that is over 6 months old could be reposted.
I think it is worth discussing at least.
You do an amazing job n here Jerry.

I have added your above video to a few of my YouTube video playlists including Arch Misc 170429.

This is a playlist of miscellaneous YouTube videos especially selected for Arch. If you are anything like Arch (Bless your heart!), you might like them too.

Performers and personalities include: Jake Paul, Jeff Foxworthy, Jerry Banfield, OldAlabamaGardener, Red Skelton, Rolling Stones, Sarah M. Jordan, Sweet Brown, and more.

Jerry, thank you so much for this break down.

I have been considering for a while now that the steem payout system isn't quite the right way to incentivize good long-term content. But it is a start and we are having fun!

I continually have to remind myself that I blog for myself, not for others, and not for upvotes. Its just that the crypto-rewards are so nice we can sometimes forget.

With considering long term content, the 7 day payout is definitely not ideal compared to YouTube for example which has ad revenue for all views the entire way. At the same time, I am not sure what kind of simple fix we could apply to allow upvotes on older posts also?

What I have noticed both as a reader and author that when I find a post I love that is older, I often will instead vote the newer posts up by that author. While this makes it confusing in terms of "why did my post about this get so many upvotes while others got less" the system is functioning to reward posts created a long time ago by getting new upvotes today. I often set authors on @steemvoter after finding much older posts I love to reward ongoing creation.

maybe a good way to go would be as @ecoinstant says to turn older posts into a faucet. But don't look at te upvotes anymore, but look at the views in stead.

I completely agree with your comment above, @ecoinstant. Out of millions of websites on the web, Steemit is currently ranked at 2,128 globally as per Alexa, and 1,458 in the US. This means that Steemit's power to pull in traffic is much more than many others in various niches. Inferring from Jerry's post, a blogger in the gardening niche, for example, has much higher chances of having his content seen on his blog on Steemit, than if it were on his own domain.

If you have good content in your niche, over the long term you will have many more followers by virtue of your content being posted on Steemit. So the "payout" could be considered in the form of having more followers over the long term, rather than the SBD and Steem payouts that are icing and cherry on top of the cake!

How about allowing the poster to set a 7-30 day slider for payout? What do you think? Would that work well?

To that I can only speculate, but knowing something about incentives I would suspect that if we want to incentivize more content like Jerry suggests, long-term useful information, old posts would need to become something like a faucet, they won't pay much but can still generate something for the author.

Hi.

This strikes me as something of an argument for NOT posting on Steemit? I have the same thing as you on YouTube with my Wordpress blog - my hit rate and thus my advertising revenue keeps going up and up because of posts I wrote months or years ago.

Given that, why should I post on Steemit knowing that I will only get rewarded in the first 7 days? There is no comparable incentive, hence why I have a different posting strategy here to over on sites where I get a slow-burn reward, which certainly has its advantages....not least for my mental health.

With over 500 posts on my blog and ad revenue increasing as well as organic traffic, I switched to posting on Steemit because the Google organic search ranking is WAY higher here by default. When I consider posting for the next several years here or on my blog, posting on Steemit is 10 times better because of the Google ranking, possibility of immediate rewards, and greater likelihood of social sharing.

Within two months on Steemit, my posts were getting nearly double the traffic from Google that years of combined work on my blog took to get. Even with $0 in rewards, Steemit is a better option to get readers. As the price of Steem grows and more users sign up, even $1 in rewards today is likely to equal $10 or $100 worth of Steem in a few years.

Steemit is the best option for the majority of bloggers in the world with one of the main reasons to avoid Steemit being lack of total control.

OK - Thanks for that detailed reply, that does make sense.

One thing I don't get though is why is 'the Google organic search ranking for Steemit posts way higher by default'? I don't understand why that would be the case?

On the 'lack of total control' thing - I really need to be able to update my posts year on year with my other blog - it's educational, and just for user functionality I need to be able to add in links to contemporary news items.

Steemit has its uses though, I think for personal posts, just not professional use for me! But hey, for monetizing 'myself' it's the best option for sure.

Do you find that certain days of the week or time of day are better for posting on Steemit?

This perspective doesn't take into account how much influence posts older than 7 days have on one's likelyhood of voting on a poster's newer content though.

For example, I first read Jerry's work in a crazy old post on a topic I did a search for, and immediately upvoted newer content of his that I found interesting, directly afterwards.

So the first post did have a payout long after a week had passed, just indirectly...

It's true, the 7 day character of Steemit is a short window... i guess i need to revisit the reasoning of why it was created like that.

It would be interesting to know, it doesn't make much sense... it must have something to do with the complexities of blockchain, peer to peer allocation, inflation and probably a whole load of other things.

Cool guys, so let's work together on this. Like I said I'm trying to get attention for this also and was looking for hosting content like music and video on #Decent or any other platform where there is either

  1. more time or,
  2. people can reactivate the time window by resteeming or something similar like linking to your music or videos so that they can earn curation awards and you additional author awards.

Valuable content should always be appreciated whatever the age of the post. For steemit, since it produces blocks based on periods and simplicity, it has implemented complex algorithm for this issue. I think developers and users should brainstorm a strategy to appreciate (upvote) old but gold post.

Thank you @jerrybanfield for this tutorial and blog post!

Sincerely,
@joeparys

good stuff jerry keep it going i wil ad you as a friend and like your stuf weekly