YouTube Opinion When a creator's pitch gets a bit too much for the audience?

[Beanie Draws]

So I've noticed a few things over the months and years, and unfortunately Rosanna Pansino triggered this, as well as other conversations I've read, and it made me wonder about the delicate line between "engaging" the audience, and ANNOYING the audience.
The last few videos Rosanna Pansino has started doing her calls to action within the first few seconds of her videos, asking people to subscribe "we do all sorts of videos here so don't forget to click the bell, like the video. etc. etc. etc" she never used to do this, and it suddenly became quite pitch-y for me. Like a sales pitch, and I couldn't watch after the first minute because of how long her asking to subscribe took.

Something tells me her manager or publicist were like "hey, we know you have over 10 million subscribers... but you COULD have more... so we need you to start asking people to subscribe at the very start of the video" She would scatter her calls to action in among the content, and that was fine. I'd enjoy her content, and occasionally she'd ask people to subscribe, but once it was within the first few seconds, I couldn't handle it anymore and stopped watching.

There's channels out there who post daily, or even twice daily, and they hammer that "I want to talk to you all" "Subscribe" and the need to engage... but sometimes, as a viewer, I just want to be left alone to watch and decide if the content itself is enough to be worth subscribing to.

Nick Nimmin is a master of his "elevator pitch" at the start of his videos, it's a short 5-10 second line, then gets into the content, but there's creators out there who put so much emphsise on "SUBSCRIBE" "BELL" "DO THE THINGS" that it becomes overbearing and grating. I dare say, it comes off as desperate, and desperation for subs in your videos is NOT a good look.

So when you want people to subscribe, be careful how you do it. Provide a value pitch that isn't too long, subtle reminders here and there, and then get into the meat of your videos, and stop caring so much about the damned 1000/4000 monetisation stuff! Through your desperation, you might actually be putting people off instead of attracting people and you might end up losing subscribers more than gaining them.

We learn so much about "how to grow" but the more we get absorbed in data and retention and analytics... the more we forget how to be human... and humans don't like being sold and pitched 24/7. Keep it tasteful and don't be annoying about your pitch.

 

[Ater]

I actually did an experiment with call to actions during the spring of 2019 where I published three videos and tried different strategies to see what makes people sub and like. To make the numbers comparable all videos was similar types of videos inside the same niche, they where also published during a similar time of the year (just a few days in between each video). The numbers was based around each videos first three weeks. They all had similar audience retention and got about the same amount of views during does three weeks (around 7K views with the highest one beaning around 7.3K and the lowest 6.8K). One of them was shorter by a decent amount compared to the others.

Here are the results, comments are just the original comments, not counting replies.

	Video 1 (shorter video)	Video 2	Video 3
Like and subscribe?	Did not ask them to like and subscribe.	I asked them to like and subscribe at the end.	Asked them twice to like and subscribe, once a few min into the video and once at the end.
Audience retention	52.6%	45.6%	47.9%
Likes	140	176	306
Likes/view	0.021	0.026	0.042
Dislikes	1	4	26
New subs	16	51	78
Subs/view	0.0024	0.0075	0.0101
Comments	13	12	17

Now this is a small sample and other factors could be effecting the result but I would say that it is clear that a call to action effects the results and there are a big difference in the number of likes, dislikes and subs. Compare the number 0.0024 subs/view with 0.0101 subs/view, if you get 1 million views the difference is 2400 new subs compared to over 10K, that difference is huge! As you can tell I didn't test doing the call to action asap in the beginning, but I wouldn't be surprised if YouTuber you talk about have done similar testing and found out that doing the call to action early gave her more subs and likes then doing it late. So here choice to do it early my actually be based on data en statistics.

That said even with this result I will probably never ask for subs/likes twice in a video again since I find it annoying and I'm pretty sure that the reason my third video got so many dislikes compared to the other videos was just because of that. I also got a comment or two about it. But consider the way audience retention go down during a video it may be worth asking for likes/subs earlier on in the video instead of at the end, if you can find a way to do that without annoying people. Doing it asap in a video like she did would definitely annoy me.

I actually dislike begging for subs so much that I doesn't even do a call to action in all my videos (this may be a reason to why getting subs always been much slower then getting views for my channel). As an example when I do series I may do a call to action for subs during the first 2 maybe 3 episodes but then not at all for the rest of the series since I think that they got the message during the first two episodes and if they actually wanted to subscribe then would have done that by now.

 

[DamoΓÇÖs Paintings]

Yeah, I got rid of this part of my content, and the silly intro, and definitely noticed a difference, with the ΓÇ£subscribe to meΓÇ¥ part, I donΓÇÖt even make a mentioning of it now, rather I just play a graphic on the side, like a lot of other creators, while IΓÇÖm getting on with my video, I do talk about the reasons to subscribe but that is just before IΓÇÖm about to finish, and itΓÇÖs only quick, but I do put emphasis on the notification bell as itΓÇÖs believed that a lot of the viewers donΓÇÖt click on it, but other than that I try not to waste the viewers time with unnecessary stuff.

 

[Beanie Draws]

I actually did an experiment with call to actions during the spring of 2019 where I published three videos and tried different strategies to see what makes people sub and like. To make the numbers comparable all videos was similar types of videos inside the same niche, they where also published during a similar time of the year (just a few days in between each video). The numbers was based around each videos first three weeks. They all had similar audience retention and got about the same amount of views during does three weeks (around 7K views with the highest one beaning around 7.3K and the lowest 6.8K). One of them was shorter by a decent amount compared to the others.

Here are the results, comments are just the original comments, not counting replies.

	Video 1 (shorter video)	Video 2	Video 3
Like and subscribe?	Did not ask them to like and subscribe.	I asked them to like and subscribe at the end.	Asked them twice to like and subscribe, once a few min into the video and once at the end.
Audience retention	52.6%	45.6%	47.9%
Likes	140	176	306
Likes/view	0.021	0.026	0.042
Dislikes	1	4	26
New subs	16	51	78
Subs/view	0.0024	0.0075	0.0101
Comments	13	12	17

Now this is a small sample and other factors could be effecting the result but I would say that it is clear that a call to action effects the results and there are a big difference in the number of likes, dislikes and subs. Compare the number 0.0024 subs/view with 0.0101 subs/view, if you get 1 million views the difference is 2400 new subs compared to over 10K, that difference is huge! As you can tell I didn't test doing the call to action asap in the beginning, but I wouldn't be surprised if YouTuber you talk about have done similar testing and found out that doing the call to action early gave her more subs and likes then doing it late. So here choice to do it early my actually be based on data en statistics.

That said even with this result I will probably never ask for subs/likes twice in a video again since I find it annoying and I'm pretty sure that the reason my third video got so many dislikes compared to the other videos was just because of that. I also got a comment or two about it. But consider the way audience retention go down during a video it may be worth asking for likes/subs earlier on in the video instead of at the end, if you can find a way to do that without annoying people. Doing it asap in a video like she did would definitely annoy me.

I actually dislike begging for subs so much that I doesn't even do a call to action in all my videos (this may be a reason to why getting subs always been much slower then getting views for my channel). As an example when I do series I may do a call to action for subs during the first 2 maybe 3 episodes but then not at all for the rest of the series since I think that they got the message during the first two episodes and if they actually wanted to subscribe then would have done that by now.

Very cool experiment there and it's interesting to see the results from it. I do still include calls to action, but I do it organically at the start at the end, and I could probably do it better at the end. At the end I generally say "If you've got this far and haven't subscribed yet, hopefully you might consider doing that, and if you're not sick of hearing me talk, here's another video to watch"

I usually forget to do a call to action at the start, but I usually just say "and if you like this kind of content, consider subscribing" I have seen it done very well. But there's a clear differance between doing it for the sake of good practices, and doing it in a personable friendly way. it's an art in itself.

Yeah, I got rid of this part of my content, and the silly intro, and definitely noticed a difference, with the ΓÇ£subscribe to meΓÇ¥ part, I donΓÇÖt even make a mentioning of it now, rather I just play a graphic on the side, like a lot of other creators, while IΓÇÖm getting on with my video, I do talk about the reasons to subscribe but that is just before IΓÇÖm about to finish, and itΓÇÖs only quick, but I do put emphasis on the notification bell as itΓÇÖs believed that a lot of the viewers donΓÇÖt click on it, but other than that I try not to waste the viewers time with unnecessary stuff.

I'm a big fan of the graphic call to action. I like using it as an opportunity to put a fun quick little animation pop up in the corner. I've had a few comments on how fun my popups have been in the past. Again, when I ask for someone to subscribe or like, I like to give them a reason to want to do it

 

[kitchen c/o ammama]

I love this thread ! It has so much good information !!! Personally I had looong Intro's at the starting doing this stuff ... I saw the audience retention graph .. that part was skipped..

I myself feeel annoying seeing those video intro's now.

As of now , I tell at start " Subscribe and click on the bell icon "- 4sec and then at the end ( people don't stay till end .. Once they feel that the dish is about to get finished .. they just close the video).

Anyway ... totally agree to all the above points mentioned... Do not annoy audience .. engage them !!

 

[Deciden0w]

Interesting topic since I personally have been experimenting with this. For now I can't really say much but recently I haven't been saying the "YouTube Pitch" . @Ater 's experiment was excellent. I'm definitely going to consider all the points you made in the experiment

 

[DamoΓÇÖs Paintings]

I'm a big fan of the graphic call to action. I like using it as an opportunity to put a fun quick little animation pop up in the corner. I've had a few comments on how fun my popups have been in the past. Again, when I ask for someone to subscribe or like, I like to give them a reason to want to do it

Videoleap, which is what I use, has a few different subscribe graphics to choose from, including a bunch of ninjas jumping around the various buttons, just adds to the cool factor.