When To Post YouTube Videos

Table of Contents

Last updated on June 14th, 2024

Here’s how to decide what days and times to post videos to your YouTube channel.

WHY DO THIS?

You will get more views if you post at certain times specific to your channel.

THE GOAL:

Get more YouTube views by publishing at the right time.

As with TV, publishing at the right time can get you more views.
Even though you may watch TV shows on a DVR after the show was aired, TV networks still release episodes once a week, because they understand the benefit of anticipation and building awareness over time.
Even though Netflix launches many episodes of a show all on the same day, Netflix has the ultimate power to promote videos on its platform. Your power to promote on YouTube is much more limited.
YouTube’s ranking puts high value on video “view velocity,” or how fast views grow in the first 1-24 hours after publishing.

Don’t use YouTube as if you’re storing videos on Dropbox.
Don’t just post it because the video has completed editing.
Instead, look at your YouTube watch time, filtered by day. Do you see patterns over time, for instance always peaking on weekends or weekdays? Those are good days to publish.
Look on a daily basis at your Realtime numbers. What times of day do you see the most traffic? Those are good times to publish.
Don’t publish more than one video per day. Viewers are unlikely to watch more than one new video from you every day, so the views of each will be diluted.
VidIQ has a good tool for predicting the best times and days to publish, but it might be skewed by your own upload behavior.
If you’re uploading for a tent-pole event or holiday, publish a few weeks in advance to get positioned by the algorithm.
If your current regular publishing schedule is unusual but it’s working well, keep it the same.

Now you have the best chance of publishing your videos at a time that gets you the most views possible.