All information I am giving you now came from my longtime experience with YouTube. I have not copied any sentences from other sites and also do not intent any copyright infringement. I hope this information will help you with promoting your videos on YouTube. Now back on topic.
It has been discussed many times around the world and there are many tips to show you how to increase the views on your YouTube video. Sure, adding more tags, commenting videos of other people, sharing your video on different websites is nice, but that will increase the views only for a short time. I haven't studied Marketing or something similar, but if you have spent enough time on YouTube, you'll notice that something has become different.
After YouTube was founded in 2005, there weren't so many videos around like now. It was easy back then to gain thousands of views in a few days. In a month you were able to get 100'000+ views for your video, even it wasn't the most interesting thing in the world. But then YouTube became more and more popular and the number of registrations increased rapidly and it got more and more difficult to promote your own videos. Why? Because many other people had a video about the same thing with an almost identical title, the same tags and a similar length. The competition was getting bigger and bigger and you always had to find a way to make yourself more interesting. So what happened after? YouTube launched a partnership program which makes it possible to earn money with your videos. As opposed to the normal user, a partner has many more features to promote his videos like having ads, a banner for your channel, upload a custom thumbnail for your videos and many more. At the beginning, it was limited to the United States only. After becoming a success it expanded to other countries such as Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, Spain, United Kingdom and Czech Republic. There might be a few more countries, so I don't know all of them. Switzerland and Austria were and are still not involved into the program. The reasons are unknown.
If you as a normal user have the same video like someone else who is a partner, your chances to get more views than him would be slim. The reason is the thumbnail he has on his video. As a partner, you have the ability to use any picture you want as the thumbnail for your video even it doesn’t have anything to do with the subject. However, the normal user must accept one of 3 proposed thumbnails of your video which are chosen by YouTube. And most of them are really bad choices. As you can see, the title, tags, activity and embedding videos aren’t the only important factors; the thumbnail on the video is the probably most important thing to get many views for a long period of time. If your thumbnail doesn't look attractive enough, the visitor won't click on it! The thumbnail gives us the final decision to watch the video or not. Besides, a thumbnail can't simply be copied like titles and tags. It is something which will always remain custom and that's what the people want.
Let's make an example. I have here 3 pictures of one of my videos which were proposed from YouTube. Now assume that these pictures are of 3 videos which have the same title and tags except the thumbnail which looks different of course. On which one would you decide to click? You can leave a comment for your choice or send me a message, whatever you like. The choice is yours.
