The Fish Are There. But Where? — The Fish Test: YouTube

YouTube seemed particularly interesting for the Fish Test.

Millions of people use it to learn how to do things, solve problems and investigate subjects they are interested in.

There is certainly no shortage of videos about affiliate marketing, online business, making money online and generating traffic.

But finding videos wasn't the test.

I wanted to know whether I could find evidence of the people I was actually looking for:

Were beginners and potential customers using YouTube to ask questions and describe the problems they were trying to solve?

My first searches produced plenty of content.

There were tutorials, reviews, demonstrations, success stories and videos explaining how to make money online.

Once again, finding people providing information was easy.

But simply counting videos or views told me very little about the potential customers I was trying to find.

A video with thousands of views might demonstrate interest in a subject.

It didn't necessarily tell me who those viewers were or what problems they actually had.

This became one of the more useful lessons from the experiment.

I had been concentrating on the videos themselves.

But the videos were only part of the evidence.

The people I wanted to understand were often underneath them.

I needed to look at the comments.

That changed the investigation.

In the comments beneath relevant videos, I began finding people asking questions.

Some wanted to know how to get started. Others were confused about traffic, choosing products or what they should do next.

These were much closer to the conversations I had been trying to find.

The important discovery wasn't simply that YouTube contained a huge audience.

It was that the right part of YouTube could reveal what some of that audience was actually struggling with.

That is much more useful to the Fish Test than a view count.

YouTube reinforced an important principle:

Where we look can matter as much as which platform we choose.

My initial search could easily have led me to conclude that YouTube was dominated by people teaching and promoting.

Looking underneath relevant content produced a different picture.

The fish hadn't suddenly arrived.

They had been there. I had been looking in the wrong place.

That distinction could affect how I investigate every platform from now on.

YouTube has passed the first part of the Fish Test.

I found evidence of relevant people asking genuine questions and describing problems.
What I haven't established is whether I can turn that knowledge into attention for my own content — and ultimately into website visitors, leads or customers.

That still has to be tested.

For now, my YouTube finding is:

The fish are there — but I had to learn where to look.

The experiment continues.