There’s a piece of advice that gets handed out in every creator forum, every Discord server, every comment section where someone admits their channel isn’t growing: just keep posting, and eventually it’ll take off.

It sounds encouraging. It sounds like the kind of thing a supportive community should say. And a recent thread in r/NewTubers pushed back on it hard, arguing that this advice, delivered without any actual look at the content in question, is often the worst thing you can tell someone.

The original poster’s point was simple: if you’ve published 16 to 21 videos over three to six months and barely anyone is watching, putting out another 16 to 21 videos of the same thing isn’t persistence — it’s the definition of doing the same thing and expecting a different result. At some point, “keep going” has to be followed by a question: keep going at what, exactly, and is there any evidence it’s working?

The advice isn’t wrong. It’s incomplete.

What made the discussion interesting wasn’t that everyone disagreed with the original post — it’s that almost everyone agreed with a caveat. Commenters kept arriving at the same refinement: “keep posting” only works as advice if you’re also reviewing what you make and changing something each time. One commenter put it well — there’s a difference between grinding to improve your craft and grinding the same slop into the void expecting a different result. Another pointed out that people quietly delete the second half of the sentence: keep posting and use what you learn to improve the next one.

Without that second half, “just keep going” isn’t encouragement. It’s a way of avoiding an uncomfortable conversation about whether the content itself is the problem.

But How Do You Know What “Something” to Change?

The answer is almost always understanding your data.  The most useful distinction that came out of the thread wasn’t about effort or luck — it was about what the numbers are actually saying.

A few commenters separated the problem into two very different diagnoses, and it’s worth sitting with the difference:

·       You’re getting impressions but no clicks. People are seeing your thumbnail and title and choosing not to open the video. That’s a packaging problem — the promise you’re making isn’t compelling enough to earn the click.

·       You’re getting clicks but your completion rate is low – viewers abandon your content within the first 30 seconds.

These require completely different fixes. If you don’t know which one you’re dealing with, “improve your content” is a shot in the dark. If you do know, you suddenly have a direction: rework titles and thumbnails, or rethink topic and niche, or figure out why distribution stalled before viewers ever got a chance to judge the video at all.

One commenter’s advice was blunt and, honestly, correct: watch your own video back like a stranger would. Not while editing, not remembering how much effort went into it — just hit play and ask, “would I keep watching this if it wasn’t mine?” That’s a free, brutally honest data point -but it is subjective and anecdotal.   

Strip the thread down to its most repeated, most upvoted takeaways, and a practical checklist emerges:

1.     Separate impressions from click-through rate from watch time. Each one tells you something different is broken, and they call for different fixes.

2.     Know your completion rate. If viewers leave some of your content after one minute but stick around longer for others, figure out what makes the difference..

3.     Don’t “guess.” Study your metadata to see what’s working and what isn’t. Engine Room Media can help you with that

4.     Ask what you’re optimizing for. But if growth is the goal, the data has to be allowed to change your approach. You can’t hold “I want more views” and “I refuse to change anything” at the same time.

The real point

“Just keep going” survives as advice because it feels kind, and because it’s sometimes true — new creators genuinely do improve with repetition, and a video really can catch on unpredictably. But kindness that doesn’t look at the actual numbers isn’t help — it’s a way of avoiding the harder, more useful conversation.

The creators who break through stagnation are the creators who rely on tools that transform their data into insights and deliver actionable recommendations for growth. They were the ones who changed a specific thing because the data told them to: a niche they narrowed, a hook they fixed, a packaging problem they diagnosed and solved. Volume didn’t make the difference. Paying attention to what the volume was telling them did.

If your content isn’t getting watched, don’t ask “how much longer do I keep doing this.” Ask “what does the data say is actually wrong” — and be willing to hear the answer.