How often should you upload to YouTube? What 157,541 channels show

For most channels, the answer is one to two long-form videos a week. I counted every long-form upload from 157,541 creator channels over 90 days and compared that pace with how fast each channel gained subscribers. Growth climbs steeply from no uploads up to one or two a week. Past that point, mid-sized channels gain little extra growth, and each video starts getting fewer views.

How I measured it

For each channel I counted its long-form uploads from their publish dates over the 90 days to Sep 27, 2026, and turned that count into uploads per week. Videos of three minutes or less were left out, so Shorts are not part of the count. Videos too new to have a duration yet were counted as long-form.

Growth is each channel's subscriber change between Sep 7 and Sep 27, 2026, scaled to 30 days. I compared channels only with others of a similar size, because small channels grow faster in percentage terms and big channels would otherwise drag every average down.

Views per video use only videos at least 14 days old, so a channel that uploaded yesterday is not penalised for a video that has not had time to collect views.

Growth rises fast, then levels off

In every size band the jump from no uploads to a regular pace is large. At 10K-100K subscribers, a channel with no long-form upload in 90 days grew 0.35% per 30 days. Uploading less than once every two weeks took that to 0.77%, and 1-2 uploads a week to 1.23%.

After that the line goes nearly flat for mid-sized channels: 1.21% at 2-3 a week, 1.26% at 3-5 a week. Only the 5+ group moves up again, to 1.42%.

The 0% rows for large channels do not mean they stopped growing. YouTube rounds subscriber counts on big channels (1.2M, 843K), so over three weeks many of them show no change at all. Among 1M+ channels that uploaded nothing long-form, 82.3% showed no gain; at 5+ a week that fell to 49.0%, so pace still matters at that size.

Past two a week, each video gets fewer views

Uploading more does not come free. Up to about two long-form videos a week, the typical video gets roughly the same views. Beyond that, views per video fall in every size band.

Total reach is a different story. Because high-pace channels publish so many more videos, their combined views keep rising even as each video earns less. At 10K-100K subscribers, the videos a typical channel published between Jun 29 and Sep 12 added up to 0.41 views per subscriber at under 0.5 uploads a week, 3.34 at 1-2 a week and 11.34 at 5+ a week.

So the real choice is between two goals. If you want each video to do as well as it can, one to two a week is about as far as you can push. If you want the most total views and can keep quality up, more volume still adds reach.

Small channels gain the most from volume

At 1K-10K subscribers, growth never levels off in this data. It rises from 0.88% at under 0.5 a week to 1.80% at 1-2, 2.08% at 3-5 and 2.34% at 5+. The share of small channels growing 5% or more a month also rises, from 17.0% at under 0.5 a week to 30.2% at 5+.

Views per video still fall at high pace (1,332 at 0.5-1 a week to 678 at 5+), but when a channel is small, each extra upload is another chance to be found. For a new channel, output is a bigger lever than it will be later.

What this data cannot tell you

• It shows correlation, not cause. Channels that upload often may also be full-time teams with better editing, older catalogues or bigger budgets. Uploading more on its own will not guarantee their growth rate.
• It covers a short window. Subscriber tracking in our database started on Sep 7, 2026, so growth covers about three weeks. I will refresh these figures as history builds up.
• It is about long-form only. Videos of three minutes or less are excluded, and our catalogue holds few Shorts, so this is not a guide to Shorts pace.
• It describes channels in the TubeAI database, approved creator channels with at least 1,000 subscribers, not all of YouTube.