u/HeartMindFusion

I've been making YouTube videos for about six months. 23 longforms, 136 subscribers. The algorithm is recommending my stuff to cold audiences, but I'm hemorrhaging viewers almost immediately.

Here's the specific video I want feedback on: https://youtu.be/hUqAgRqyk-M

The video is a memoir piece about grieving my father. He died in 2024 after years of dementia. The day before he died, he told me one story from his childhood. That's the emotional core.

The video opens with a 53-second childhood memory of a motorcycle crash with my dad. A dirt bike, a stick in the road, losing control, my dad bleeding, yelling, "God damnit John, do I look okay?!" 87% of viewers don't make it to the one-minute mark. They're leaving during the crash itself.

I don't understand this. That scene is visceral and specific and 53 seconds long.

I know this is a memoir piece, and people don't know who I am yet. I'm not expecting people to watch to the end. I just want to know why they can't make it through a motorcycle crash.

Did you watch past it? If not, what stopped you? Is it my delivery? My voice? Something about the thumbnail that created the wrong expectation before you even hit play?

I'm not looking for general advice about growing a channel. I'm not changing my niche or my filming location. I want one specific answer: what is so off-putting in that first minute that people leave during a motorcycle crash?

https://youtu.be/hUqAgRqyk-M

The bottom of the first valley is right after the crash

5.5% CTR

I've been at this for about 5 months. 126 subscribers, 22 longforms, around 132 shorts. And most of my videos sit at roughly 30 views.

I'm not here to vent. I'm here because I genuinely can't see what's wrong from the inside, and I'd rather hear something uncomfortable from a stranger than keep guessing.

A little about what I make: I talk about perception, communication, relationships, and emotional clarity. How we misread our own internal signals and treat our interpretations as facts. I also talk about my aphantasia (I can't visualize anything mentally) and SDAM, a condition where autobiographical memory doesn't form the way it does for most people. That's not the whole channel, but it's part of my story and part of where my perspective comes from.

My one SDAM video has 515 views and brought in exactly 30 of my 126 subscribers on its own. Every other longform averages around 30 views. I've tried making more SDAM content but the follow-ups didn't land anywhere near as well. I think the original captured the experience so completely that there wasn't much left to mine.

The rest of my content is talking head, clean background, good audio and lighting. I put real time into scripts, thumbnails, titles, and metadata. I make clips from my longforms into shorts. The feedback I get from people who do watch is consistently positive.

But almost nobody finds it. And I'll be honest: it's a little deflating when I see posts here about 300 views being a disappointment. That would be a runaway success for me right now.

Screenshots of my video list below so you can see what I mean.

I'm open to hearing anything. Maybe it's the pacing. Maybe it's the framing. Maybe it's something in how I'm presenting myself that I just can't see from the inside.

If you want to take a look, I'll drop the channel link in the comments.

My video opens with a motorcycle crash and people bail out during it. What am I missing?

5 months in, most videos stuck at 30 views. Genuinely not sure what I'm missing.