YouTube Video Marketing 2026 (346 Videos, 846 Views Each)

August 15, 2026 · Traffic
Prices and terms last verified August 15, 2026.

YouTube video marketing still works, but not the way it did. I have published 346 videos on the same channel since 2008. They have done 292,823 views between them, which averages 846 views per video. Thirty-six beat that average by 2x or more, and most of those went up over a decade ago.

Looking for YouTube video marketing advice from someone who will show you the actual numbers?

YouTube video marketing still works, but not the way it did. I have published 346 videos on the same channel since 2008. They have done 292,823 views between them, which averages 846 views per video. Thirty-six beat that average by 2x or more, and most of those went up over a decade ago.

846 views.

That’s the number nobody puts in a YouTube marketing post, and it’s the one that should shape what you do next.

What 346 Videos Actually Did

Here’s my channel, as of 15 August 2026, taken from its own public stats.

Eighteen years. Three hundred and forty-six videos. Fewer than nine hundred views each.

Not a typo.

I’m not embarrassed by that and you shouldn’t be discouraged by it. Those views converted, because they were the right people arriving with a question. But if you came here expecting somebody to tell you that consistent uploading turns into a hundred thousand views, that is not what eighteen years of my own data says.

What Actually Worked, According To My Own Catalogue

This is the part I found genuinely useful when I went back and counted.

Of the 36 videos that beat my channel average by 2x or more, 16 name a specific company or product in the title, and 10 of those are straight review-format titles. My single best-performing video ever is a two-minute review of a well-known affiliate network. It has done roughly 12,000 views, about 14 times my channel average.

Two minutes. One product name. Fourteen times average.

Here’s the deal…

The pattern holds across the whole set. Reviews of named things beat general advice, consistently, for over a decade. That’s the same reason the company reviews on this site are built the way they are, and why a page like the HBA review leads with the compensation numbers instead of opinion.

People don’t search for “video marketing tips.” They search for the name of the thing they’re about to buy.

Does YouTube Video Marketing Still Work In 2026?

Yes, with a caveat I’d rather you hear from me than find out yourself.

Twenty-two of my 36 best videos were published around 2013. Twenty-seven of them landed in the 2012 to 2014 stretch. Only three come from the last three years. My channel is carried by a back catalogue I built when the platform was emptier and the bar was lower.

That’s the honest read.

It also tells you what video actually is now: an asset that compounds SLOWLY, not a traffic tap. The videos I made in 2013 are still working today. That’s the good news and the bad news in one sentence, because it means the ones you publish this month are for 2029.

Think about that.

Everything on YouTube dates itself. Half of my best performers review products that no longer exist.

Video SEO, And What Died

Back in 2013 my titles looked like this: MLM Success - Proven MLM Success Tips, Tricks and Inside Secrets. Keyword, hyphen, keyword restated with a few modifiers bolted on. Twenty-one of my 36 outliers use that exact shape.

It worked then.

It does NOTHING now.

What replaced it isn’t a trick. It’s matching a real question and answering it fast enough that people keep watching. The old format optimised for a crawler reading a title string. The current one optimises for a human deciding in four seconds whether to stay, and for a language model deciding whether your transcript answers the question it was asked.

Three things that still earn their keep:

1. Say the keyword phrase out loud, early. Engines read transcripts, not thumbnails. If the phrase never leaves your mouth, it isn’t in the asset.
2. Answer the title question in the first thirty seconds. Not at 4:12 after the intro music.
3. Upload a real transcript. Auto-captions mangle product names, and product names are the thing people search.

One warning from my own archive, and it’s a live compliance problem, not a style note. Some of my best-performing old titles carry phrases like “6-Figure” and “Make Serious $$$.” Those were normal in 2013. They are not normal now. The FTC has gone after individual affiliates rather than only companies, and a title making an income claim is an income claim. If you’re publishing today, read what affiliates can legally say about income before you write your titles, not after.

I’d never publish those titles now. I’m leaving them up as an artifact and telling you why.

What Does It Actually Cost To Advertise On YouTube?

Straight answer first: I have never run a paid YouTube campaign. Not one, in eighteen years on the platform. Everything below comes from Google’s own documentation rather than my experience, and I’m labelling it that way because you should weigh it differently.

What Google does publish is how you get charged. What it does not publish is a price.

There is no rate card. YouTube ads run through an auction, so what a view costs you depends on who else is bidding for the same person. Any blog post quoting you a firm cost per view is estimating, not quoting Google.

So why does every article give you a number?

Because “it depends on the auction” is a worse headline than “$0.10 to $0.30 per view.” The second one is a guess wearing a decimal point.

Here’s how the formats bill, from Google’s video ad formats documentation, read 15 August 2026:

The mechanic worth understanding is when a skippable ad actually costs you money. Per Google’s CPV bidding documentation: you pay “when someone watches 30 seconds of your video ad (or until the end of the ad if it’s shorter than 30 seconds) or interacts with the ad, whichever comes first.”

Read that again. It’s the whole game.

Somebody who skips at five seconds costs you nothing. Which means your first five seconds aren’t a hook in the marketing sense. They’re a filter that decides whether you get billed. Google also notes that the target CPV bid “is optimized to charge you with the lowest amount available,” and that “some TrueView views may cost more or less than your target.”

That is genuinely useful and it is not the same as knowing what it’ll cost you. Nobody can tell you that until you bid.

Where This Falls Short

My sample is one channel in one niche. 346 videos in MLM, affiliate marketing and internet marketing, from 2008 onward. A cooking channel or a software channel would produce completely different numbers. Don’t take 846 as an industry benchmark. Take it as proof that somebody will show you a real one.

The dates are approximate. The per-video publish dates I worked from are derived from relative timestamps, so the year is reliable to within about twelve months and the exact day isn’t meaningful. When I say “around 2013” I mean it loosely, and I’d rather say so than print a false precision.

I have no paid advertising experience at all. The cost section above is documentation, not testimony. If you need somebody who has actually spent money on YouTube ads and can tell you what a lead cost them, that person isn’t me.

Views are not the point and I’ve used them as the metric anyway. 846 views that convert beat 8,000 that don’t. I led with views because it’s the number that’s verifiable from outside, but it’s the weakest measure of whether video is working for a business.

Being carried by a back catalogue is a risk, not a strategy. If YouTube changes how it surfaces older content, most of what’s working for me stops working. I don’t have a fix for that.

Who This Is For, And Who It Isn’t

It fits you if you’re willing to publish for two years before it pays. That’s what the data says it takes, and it’s the honest entry price. The compounding is real, and 846 views from people who searched a specific question is worth more than it sounds.

It fits you if you have products or companies you can review honestly. That’s the format my own catalogue says works, and it’s the one that also earns citations from AI assistants, because a sourced review is quotable and an opinion piece isn’t.

It does not fit you if you need traffic this quarter. Video is the slowest reliable channel I’ve used. Email moves faster and you own the list.

It does not fit you if you’re not going to say anything anyone can check. The videos that worked for me named things, priced things and reviewed things. General encouragement gets general results.

It’s a lot like prospecting for gold, and I mean that in the unglamorous sense. Most of what you pull up is gravel, you don’t know which pan holds anything until you’ve worked it, and the people who do well are the ones who kept moving dirt after the excitement wore off.

Start with the review of something you actually use. Say the product name out loud in the first ten seconds. Answer the question in the title before the two-minute mark. Then do it again next week, and check back in 2029.

More on the tools in tool reviews, the compliance side in compliance, and what these companies actually pay in the income disclosure roundup. Everything else is on the blog, and the background is on the about page.