The Inside Matters Podcast — YouTube Review & H2 2026 Plan
Executive summary
This is a review of the last 12 months on YouTube, plus a proposed content plan for the second half of 2026. It's scoped to YouTube specifically — that's where the data is easiest to pull cleanly. A LinkedIn and Instagram view would need separate exports, and is worth doing once this is underway.
The short version: the flat months this year weren't a discovery problem, they were a publishing-frequency problem — every spike in views lines up with a batch of new uploads, and every quiet month lines up with silence. On top of that, a large share of the raw view count comes from an audience that scrolls past in under 30 seconds and doesn't stick around. Both are fixable, and the plan below leans on what's already proven to work: gut health content, weight loss, and athlete guests.
Key takeaways
- 01Views track uploads, not luck.Every view spike this year lines up with a batch of new videos. 7 of the last 12 months had zero uploads — those are exactly the flattest months.
- 02A lot of the view count is scroll-past, not audience-building.40% of views come from the Shorts feed, averaging 26 seconds watched. Search and external traffic are a smaller share but 5–10x deeper.
- 03Subscriber conversion is under 0.5%.98 net subscribers from 20,905 views — this is the concrete number behind the "lots of posts, little growth" feeling.
- 04Gut health/microbiome is still the core asset.44% of all views. The relaunch should build on this, not move away from it.
- 05Weight loss and athlete content already outperform.Both run at 3.2–3.4x the channel average views per video — good evidence for where to lead in H2.
- 06GLP-1 content is thin but has the best click-through rate on the channel.Only 3 videos so far, but 5.1% CTR says there's real appetite for it.
Why views happen
It's a publishing-frequency story
The chart below is monthly views across the last 12 months. The three tallest bars — including the one on the far right, still rising when this data was pulled — are the three months with fresh uploads. Everything else is back catalogue ticking over on its own.
Bringing this to a fixed cadence — one shoot every few weeks instead of a burst followed by months of silence — is the single change likely to matter most in H2.
Where the views come from
YouTube doesn't split this per video, but the channel-wide picture explains the shape of the year:
What's working
Topic performance, based on the last 12 months of activity:
| Topic | Signal |
|---|---|
| Gut health / microbiome | 44% of all views — the anchor |
| Athlete / performance | 3.4x channel average views |
| Weight loss | 3.2x channel average views |
| GLP-1 | Best CTR on the channel (5.1%) |
| Longevity & AI | Tried at small scale, underperformed — needs a sharper angle, not more volume |
| TRT & peptides | No videos yet — genuine white space |
H2 2026 plan — 10 productions
A suggested running order for August–December, weighted toward what's already proven, with a few deliberate tests: