What is happening after reaching 100 subscribers on our Youtube channel

Well, cucumbers happened...
（日本語のページはこちら）

I wrote in the other article that my mother and I started uploading recipe videos every week since 2015.

And, after reaching 100 subscribers on the channel on July 10th 2017, we are experiencing rather steep increase in the number of subscribers and views, so I thought this kind of information may be useful for people who are also uploading videos on Youtube and who have not yet reached 100 subscribers.

- Objective
To try to explain what happens when Youtube subscribers reach 100.

- Precondition
1. Category: How to and Style (recipe videos)
2. Frequency: once a week: 1100 JST on every Friday
3. Duration: Since September 2015, 117 uploads as of August 2017

- Result: Conjecture
Exposure in related videos increases.
As a result
1. The video uploaded on July 21st received 54,238 views as of August 13th 2017.
2. The channel subscribers increased to 435 as of August 13th 2017.
3. Last 48-hour channel views went up to more than 10,000 from about 100, and decreased to 4,000 as of August 13th 2017 (We think it is because it was the season for cucumbers).

- This article starts from here
I mentioned what my mother and I have been doing in "Days at home 1", my mother became all by herself at our house in a small island, where she doesn't have any relative when my father passed away in 2015.
I live in Tokyo, where 500 km away from the island, and I tried to figure out the way to talk with her periodically. But as you all probably know, even the closest relatives do not have so much to talk in common and sometimes it could be painful if you don't have something to talk about.
So I convinced her to buy PC parts and I assembled one, and we started to upload videos once a week since then.
(By the way, my brother calls her up every morning and evening, and I am impressed by that they could continue doing that even they have nothing to talk about with that frequency.)

The article I made a link above mentioned our channel because it was the 100th video, but it's about 2 years as of August 2017 since we started to upload videos periodically.
Since then, we struggled to come up with the ideas and to edit videos in several ways, and we came up with the aim of our channel to be:
1. to preserve recipes that are unique around our hometown.
2. to introduce unique recipes in Japan to abroad.

My mother's purpose I heard from her was:
To Japanese audience, she wants to help mothers who work and raise their children just like when she used to be a nurse and our mother of my older brother and me.
To audience outside of Japan, she wants to give some sort of ideas to ease hunger all over the world with unique Japanese recipes, that let Japanese people survive over so many years with scarce resources.

So, she keeps her studies and researches with the enthusiasm above, I guess. By the way, I really appreciate Youtube which gave us the opportunity to introduce these recipes.

Anyways, let us go back to the topic: so what actually happened when we reached 100 subscribers? The result could be graphically shown in a diagram below: The views of the above video increased drastically.


But it is weird that only the video uploaded on July 21st was skyrocketted although videos on July 14th and 28th have the same topic "cucumbers preservation" (we chose cucumbers around this period simply because her field generates so many cucumbers in this time of the year).

The diagram below shows the traffic source of our channel, and as opposed to my expectation, the large portion of the source comes from "related videos", not "Youtube search".


So, we could probably conclude that the actual change right after reaching 100 subscribers was the increase in the exposure to related videos on the right of other videos.

Then, why did only the video on July 21st increase so radically even though the others around the same period had the same topic? The graph below shows the number of views on other videos (excluding the 21st one), we could see the slight increase in views on the video that we uploaded in the last year since the end of June, and the traffic started to come largely from related videos since then. So we could guess that the exposure to the related videos actually started around that time period.
Also, the views almost doubled after July 10th, suggesting the exposure to related videos was strengthened after hitting 100 subscribers.

Therefore, we could also guess that the cucumbers videos probably exposed on the last year's one, and that in turn increased the views on July 21st one.

But, there is still one question left unanswered: why did the only one video experience the rapid increase even though all the other videos in July also related to cucumbers?

When we closely look into the names and the released dates of the videos, we may be able to guess what happened (I tried to translate exactly what Japanese names suggest in the below examples).

2016/08/26　きゅうりの甘酢醤油漬け (Cucumber pickled with sweet vinegar and soy sauce)
2017/07/07　簡単！きゅうりの焼酎漬け (Easy! Cucumber pickled with shochu)
2017/07/14　夏野菜（きゅうりなど）の甘口寿司酢漬け (Summer vegetables including cucumbers pickled with sweet Sushi-vinegar)
2017/07/21　長期保存！キュウリの醤油漬け (Lasts so long! Cucumber pickled with soy sauce)
2017/07/28　きゅうりのカラシ漬け (Cucumber pickled with mustard)

The video on July 7th probably didn't receive so many views just because the channel had not reached 100 subscribers.
On July 14th, I intentionally placed the word "cucumber" near the top (left) but it stated "summer vegetables" so people who wanted to use cucumbers probably hesitated to click on the video.
And then, on July 21st, I was wondering "Last so long"  (literally meaning "long preservation") may be too catchy, but I named it that way anyways:

The July 21st one was exposed nearly on the top on the last year's one (probably because it was the most recent upload).
↓
People who watched the last year's one also watched the July 21st one with high probability.
↓
As a result, this video experienced the steep increase in views that was abnormal enough to catch Youtube's algorism to set it to highly related to other channels' videos.
↓
The July 21st one was exposed on nearly the top of related videos in the videos of other channels, and in turn, it gained more views.

So my guess is like this. When we reached 100 subscribers and Youtube's algorism pushed our videos to slightly higher position on related videos, and we were lucky to name the video that was catchy enough to get users to click on it, and the rapid increase in views furthermore made the relations with other cucumber or pickles videos stronger.

We were probably also lucky in that the word "cucumber" was perhaps the high volume query in this period of the year because we normally have a bumper crop of cucumbers in July and August.

From the assumptions above, we may be able to conclude that things we may want to work on before getting 100 subscribers on Youtube would be:
1. To make videos that are intended to be exposed on "related videos" of other similar videos.
2. To make names and thumbnails that would be attractive to the viewers of other related videos.

As so many other people suggest, the result we got this time was also from that 1. we kept uploading videos in the same topic and 2. we kept the frequency (once a week) for so long. I think these are the essential part of the increase in views and subscribers.

I also think that the number in views would decrease after a bit while and all we got from this increase was a little bit of money. But we think it is worthwhile to keep trying.

You wonder why?
It was just cucumbers that happened. Thank you for reading this far!