Stop Losing Views: 5 Crucial YouTube Studio Settings Small Channels MUST Change for Growth
It’s a common frustration among small creators: you invest hours into filming and editing, launch a video with high expectations, but it barely scrapes past a few hundred views. The YouTube algorithm seems to ignore your hard work, and you wonder what you’re doing wrong. The truth is, often the problem isn’t your content, but crucial settings within the YouTube Studio that most beginner channels leave disabled or misconfigured. These minor adjustments can be the difference between stagnating at 500 views and hitting viral spikes.
Based on the experience of channels that have achieved millions of subscribers and multi-million dollar revenues, such as the Serum channel (known by creator Belmont), we’ve learned that the key to algorithmic favor lies in ensuring your content is as accessible and safe as possible for the widest audience. By enabling and optimizing the following settings, you remove invisible barriers that prevent YouTube from recommending your videos to a global audience. Prepare to unlock your channel’s true potential reach.
Feature 1: Maximize Reach by Enabling Shorts Remixing
YouTube is heavily invested in the Shorts ecosystem, and the integration between long-form videos and Shorts is paramount for growth. Many creators, due to misunderstanding or concern over content reuse, disable the remixing feature, making a critical mistake that severely cuts their viral reach potential.
The Strategic Importance of Shorts Remixing
When uploading a long-form video, under the ‘Details’ section, scroll down to ‘Shorts Remixing’. You will find three options. You must choose: Allow shorts remixing with video and audio. When you allow other creators to use clips from your video (or allow YouTube itself to generate clips), you are essentially giving the algorithm more opportunities to promote your content.
YouTube prioritizes channels that actively participate in the platform’s entire ecosystem. Disabling remixing is like telling YouTube: “I do not want this video to reach the maximum number of people possible.”
Remixing not only facilitates third-party short-form content creation (which, when viral, drives traffic back to your channel) but also allows the algorithm itself to organically create and test promotional clips. It’s a self-promotion mechanism that maximizes visibility across both feeds (Long-Form and Shorts).
Related Reach Killers: ‘Made for Kids’ and ‘Altered Content’
Alongside remixing, there are two other settings you need to check immediately, as they severely restrict who can watch your content:
- Altered Content: Unless you are using deepfakes or deceptively manipulating content, always choose No. Marking ‘Yes’ can lead to monetization restrictions and reduced reach.
- Made for Kids: Unless your channel is explicitly aimed at a children’s audience (which requires COPPA compliance), you must choose No. Content marked ‘Made for Kids’ suffers severe restrictions: no comments, limited notifications, restricted ads, and crucially, the algorithm has less data to promote the video, resulting in a massive view slash.
Feature 2: Protecting Your Audience Score and Mental Health (Blocked Words)
The safety of your comment section is a critical metric YouTube uses to determine the breadth of audience it can recommend your video to. If your comments are toxic or filled with profanity, YouTube will hesitate to promote your content to younger audiences, which represent a significant segment of the user base.
The Link Between Profanity and Age Gating
For YouTube, a comment section full of foul language or offensive slurs signals that the content is not ‘family-friendly’. By blocking these words, you ensure your comment section remains clean, allowing the algorithm to promote your videos to the massive ‘under 18’ demographic without restriction.
To set this up, go to Settings > Community > Automated Filters > Blocked Words and manually add any cuss word, slur, or offensive term you can think of. Do not underestimate the power of this list; it is your first line of defense against audience restriction.
Using the Block List for Mental Health
The utility of the Blocked Words list extends beyond YouTube compliance. You can use it to protect your mental health and that of your community. Add specific hate phrases, spam terms, or any word you simply do not want to see associated with your work. This fosters a more positive and professional environment on your channel.
Feature 3: The Engagement Sweet Spot (Default Moderation Level)
Comment moderation is a balancing act. You need to maximize engagement (comments are a strong signal to the algorithm) while filtering out spam and potentially toxic content.
Understanding Moderation Levels
This setting is found under Settings > Community > Defaults. You will see four main levels of moderation:
- None: The worst-case scenario. Allows spam, bots, and toxicity to flood your section, hurting user experience and channel safety score.
- Basic: The ideal starting point. Holds potentially inappropriate comments for review.
- Strict: A safer option for channels that attract a lot of spam or controversial content.
- Hold all comments for review: A grave mistake. While seemingly safe, it kills instant engagement and requires an unsustainable manual workload. Held comments do not count toward engagement until they are approved.
The goal is to keep the level set to Basic or Strict. This allows the majority of organic comments to post immediately, signaling to YouTube that your content is engaging, while the algorithm handles the initial filtering of dubious content. Make sure to always click Save before exiting this section.
Feature 4: Strategic Channel Keywords Optimization
Channel Keywords are the map you provide to YouTube about your niche and identity. If used correctly, they drastically speed up the process of matching your content with the right audience.
Setting Up Your Channel Keywords
Navigate to Settings > Channel > Basic info > Keywords. This section should not be filled randomly. It must follow a strategic hierarchy to maximize SEO impact.
YouTube places more emphasis on the keywords listed early in your field. Therefore, the order is crucial:
- High Priority: Broad, high-search volume keywords defining your main niche (e.g., ‘Gaming’, ‘Vegan cooking’, ‘Personal development’).
- Medium Priority: More specific terms or variants of your niche (e.g., ‘Call of Duty Mobile’, ‘Quick recipes’, ‘Productivity hacks’).
- Low Priority: Your channel name, common misspellings and very specific terms.
The VidIQ Strategy for Keyword Prioritization
To ensure you are using the most effective terms, it is highly recommended to leverage SEO tools like VidIQ. These tools provide search volume and competition data, allowing you to make informed decisions about which keywords to place at the front of your list. For instance, if you are in the gaming niche, placing the broadest and most popular term (‘Gaming’) first will ensure YouTube promotes you to a vast audience of gaming enthusiasts before refining down to specific game titles.
Feature 5: Smart Content Repurposing (The Secret Reach Tool)
If you are not turning your long-form videos into short clips for Shorts and other platforms (TikTok, Instagram Reels), you are missing out on millions of potential views. However, the process of identifying viral moments and editing them into vertical format is often exhausting.
Automating Viral Moment Discovery
The biggest hurdle for most creators is knowing which part of a 15-minute video is worth clipping and having the time to edit. Advanced AI tools, such as the one mentioned (NexusClips), have emerged to solve this problem.
These AI platforms analyze your long video, identify peaks in retention and engagement (the moments most likely to go viral), and generate optimized clips in seconds. They even add customizable automatic subtitles, an essential feature given that over 70% of users watch Shorts without sound.
The ability to consistently and efficiently repurpose content is not a luxury, but a necessity in today’s media ecosystem. It allows your long-form content to be constantly promoted via the short-form format, ensuring a cross-flow of traffic.
Integrating content repurposing, coupled with having Shorts Remixing enabled, creates a virtuous growth cycle where every piece of content feeds the next.
Bonus Tip: User Experience Optimization (Mobile)
While this is not a YouTube Studio setting, it directly impacts the experience of millions of viewers and is crucial for reducing friction.
Enabling Zoom to Fill Screen
On modern phones with longer screens, when you turn your phone sideways to watch a video full screen, you often get black bars. The viewer has to manually ‘pinch’ to fill the screen—a minor annoyance that, when repeated, causes frustration. You can solve this for yourself and encourage your audience to do the same:
Go to YouTube Mobile App > Settings > General and toggle on Zoom to fill screen. Though this is a viewer-side adjustment, creators who promote the best user experience earn audience loyalty.
Conclusion: Accessibility Is the Key to the Algorithm
Success on YouTube is not just about creating high-quality content; it’s about ensuring the algorithm has all the necessary permissions and information to promote your work without restriction. The five crucial settings—Shorts Remixing, Word Blocking, Default Moderation, Strategic Keywords, and Smart Repurposing—work together to make your channel safer, more engaging, and above all, more accessible to every audience.
Always remember one golden rule: Save your changes! Many hours of optimization work are lost because creators forget to click the Save button in YouTube Studio. Check each of these 5 settings today and watch your reach skyrocket.