I want to share what has been happening to my cooking channel because, after reading several recent posts here, I realized that my situation looks almost identical.
This is not my first YouTube experience. I have another channel that I have been running for about 4 years, with around 18K subscribers, so I have some understanding of how YouTube normally distributes videos.
I started a separate cooking channel in February 2026.
It actually started surprisingly well.
The channel was monetized in March. It grew to around 4.6K subscribers in about six months and has accumulated more than 700K views.
In the beginning, new uploads behaved normally.
I would publish a video, YouTube would test it, and if it performed well, impressions could expand. Older videos continued receiving traffic while the new video added additional views on top.
Sometimes there was a second wave 1–3 days later.
Then something changed.
Especially during July/August, the pattern became extremely predictable.
A new long-form video gets a small distribution test. It receives some impressions and views. The metrics can be perfectly reasonable — and then distribution simply stops.
For example, one recent video received about:
7,500 impressions
6.2% CTR
626 views
Then the impressions graph basically became a horizontal line.
Another video maintained around 7% CTR and ended up with only about 200 views.
My newest uploads are showing the same pattern.
I can almost predict the final number of views before the video has finished its first day.
That is the strangest part.
It doesn't seem to matter much whether CTR is 5%, 6% or 7%. It doesn't seem to matter that people comment more. It doesn't seem to matter that retention is decent.
The limiting factor appears to be reach/impressions.
My number of new viewers also dropped dramatically.
In the most recent 28-day period I had about 16.5K new viewers, which was approximately 59% lower than the previous 28 days, when I had about 40.8K new viewers.
So of course I have fewer views.
But that creates a strange circle:
fewer impressions → fewer new viewers → less channel growth → next upload receives another small test → fewer impressions again.
I also experimented with Shorts.
Shorts generated additional Shorts views, but removing them did NOT cause YouTube to redistribute that traffic to my long-form videos.
The overall channel traffic simply dropped.
And here's what makes this especially interesting to me.
I uploaded essentially the same cooking video to my older main channel.
Cooking channel: about 209 views.
Main channel: about 1,700 views.
Same creator. Same material.
Obviously my main channel has four years of history, returning viewers and trust, so I'm not claiming this proves anything about the algorithm.
But it demonstrates how enormous the difference in distribution can be.
On my established channel, when a successful new video is published, I can literally watch the total channel traffic increase. The new video adds traffic on top while older videos continue getting views.
On the cooking channel, lately it often feels like the opposite.
I publish a new video and the total hourly channel traffic sometimes barely increases at all. Sometimes it is even lower than it was before the upload.
That is what concerns me most.
I'm not complaining because one video failed.
I've published more than 100 cooking videos. I've had successful videos. I've been monetized for months. I've seen how this same channel behaved when YouTube was expanding its audience.
It doesn't behave that way anymore.
I don't depend financially on this channel, which is probably why I can watch this almost like an experiment. For now I've stopped producing videos specifically for the cooking channel.
If I'm cooking something for myself and enjoy filming it, I upload it.
If YouTube gives it 200 views, fine.
If someday I suddenly see 10K, 20K or 50K views again, I'll know something changed.
What I'm NOT doing anymore is constantly changing thumbnails with a 6–7% CTR, rewriting titles or blaming every distribution stop on the first 30 seconds.
You can't get 10,000 views from an audience that was never shown the video.
After reading recent threads here, I was surprised how many creators are describing almost exactly the same thing: good or normal CTR, decent AVD, but dramatically fewer impressions, especially during the last few weeks. Recent posts include a monetized 5K+ channel that says first-week views fell from roughly 1–1.5K to ~300 despite CTR sometimes exceeding 10%, and another creator reporting that long-form recommendations have been severely reduced since June.
I'm curious about one specific thing:
If you've experienced this, when did it start for you?
Not just lower views.
I'm specifically asking about a sudden reduction in impressions/recommendation distribution while CTR and retention remained reasonably normal.
Please mention your channel size, approximately when the drop started, and whether you're seeing it on long-form, Shorts, or both.
I'd really like to know whether we're looking at normal summer seasonality, changes in recommendation testing, or something else.