How are people finding my low-view YouTube videos?

Question

Please note: this is not a question about "how can I get more views on YouTube" or anything of the sort. This is actually just for my own curiosity.

I have a YouTube channel that contains videos I made for a class that I'm involved in teaching. The videos are public on YouTube. They cover topics that many, many others have already covered, so I really only expected people with the direct link to be able to find them.

For the most part this is true - most videos have very few views (under 100) and most views were recorded during the time the class was running. What I'm confused about is how a few of my videos keep getting views even though the class has long since ended. This is typically about 2 per week, which isn't anything to write home about for sure. I should mention that the geography report puts these views well outside of my home country, so unless viewers are using proxies I'm sure that they are not my students. I'm happy that people are using the videos, but:

1. The videos are on such common topics that a cursory YouTube search reveals hundreds of videos, many with thousands of views
2. When I search for the exact video title I can't find them.

So I'm just curious as to how I'm showing up on a few people's search results every week. It's a bit of fun to keep seeing the views.

Answer 1

I will preface this with: Only YouTube knows the algorithms.

I create training videos for my company and post them to YouTube and have noticed the same thing you have, a spike when released and then a slow trickle. Curious I investigated to find out that a group of employees forget the material and re-watch them rather regularly.

I have no idea if this is what is happening with you but I thought I would share.

Answer 2

It could be automatic scans (by bots) for local copies of YouTube videos either in some informal repositories or in some countries with a walled Internet. Another option is collections of YouTube videos for research projects, training of algorithms, etc.

Answer 3

There are a lot of people on YouTube, so it's possible that when you had the class and it got 100 views from your students that YouTube made the video recommended to some people. Even though there are subjects that seem saturated there are people always looking for videos. It might also be from one of your students sharing the video, or crawlers from YouTube to check out the video. No way to know for sure, but those are some possibilities.