I Stopped Tracking Views. Here Is What I Track Instead.

Everyone treats YouTube growth like it is a view count problem. It is not. I had a week where my views went up nine times and my watch hours went down, and if I had only looked at views I would have called that my best week ever. It was my worst week of the whole channel. 🔔 Subscribe for more real, unfiltered AI experiments:    / @samanthalearnsitall   📊 My video on retention, and why my most viewed video is my worst:    • My 50 View Video Beat My 800 View Video   🎬 My first ever YouTube live, which I talk about at the end of this one:    • Stop Waiting Until You're Ready To Go Live   🎥 Rob the Maritimer, whose tracker I copied:    • HOW Youtube Changed My Life (in 4 months) ...   So I built an Excel tracker this week and I am going to show you the actual spreadsheet. Four columns, rows are months. Videos published, watch hours, subscribers gained, and YouTube lives done. That is the whole thing, and it fits on one screen, which is the only reason I actually open it. If you are trying to figure out how to grow on YouTube as a small channel, the number you pick to watch decides what you make next. Views feel like YouTube growth because they move the most and they give you a hit every time you refresh. Watch hours are what actually get you monetized, and they move slower and quieter and they do not care how many people clicked. The part most people get wrong: YouTube Shorts watch time does not count toward the 4000 watch hours you need for the YouTube Partner Program. So my tracker ignores Shorts completely and counts long form only. If you are building a Shorts channel, flip that. Just know which one you are counting, because the wrong number will tell you a story that is not true. I built the whole tracker with Claude Code, which already has access to my YouTube data, so it pulls the numbers itself instead of me typing them in every week. I also use vidIQ. And at the end I get into my first ever YouTube live, which I did last week having never been live on any platform in my life. I was scared. I did it anyway. It moved my watch hours more than anything else I did that week. WHAT YOU'LL LEARN The four columns worth tracking for YouTube growth, and why view count is not one of them Why Shorts watch time does not count toward the 4000 watch hours How to get AI to build the tracker and pull your real numbers for you How to read the tracker to decide what to make more of What one YouTube live actually did to my watch hours About this video: I Stopped Tracking Views. Here Is What I Track Instead. The four things I measure on a small channel, why I cut Shorts out of the tracker completely, and how I built it with AI in an afternoon. CHAPTERS 0:00 Views are not the number that matters 0:43 The tracker I built this week 1:12 Where I got the framework 1:45 The things I am still trying to improve 2:22 The four columns I track 2:56 How the rows work 3:30 What the data actually tells me 4:02 How I built it with Claude Code 5:29 Why Shorts do not count toward watch hours 6:06 Using it to decide what to make more of 7:16 Quick recap 7:46 One bonus thing 8:16 My first live ever, and I was scared 8:48 Did the live move my watch hours 9:45 Close SHOUT OUT TO: @RobtheMaritimer, whose tracker this is built on and whose framework I am following. Link to his video above. TOOLS MENTIONED Claude Code: claude.ai vidIQ: vidiq.com #YouTubeGrowth #WatchHours #LearningInPublic #ClaudeAI #SmallYouTuber