[ghaff]

There's some value in raw numbers, especially at scale. It's reasonable for a company to care about how many views a product page, how to, or topic page gets. And it's a proxy for a lot of other things that are really hard to suss out. (Though you can measure things like how far people read/watch, time they spend, etc.)

But for me personally, I mostly go by what I want to read and I don't really care if an SEO plug-in is telling me I should be writing at a sixth grade level--which is the level a lot of these tools work at. (And I'm often working with experienced editors who have a pretty good sense of what their audience/desired audience is looking for.) They're also not mostly ad-supported so there isn't a lot of incentive to go for pageviews for the sake of pageviews.

[bonoboTP]

What I had in mind was for example popularizing one's research as a scientist, or spreading your thoughts about your industry. In these cases it can be much more important to reach some people in your small niche, as opposed to a mass of a generic audience. Applying the same growth hacks as generic Youtubers may not be fitting in one's specific use case. Perhaps you could clickbaitify your content, and increase the raw numbers (makes sense in case of an ad-driven Youtuber) but if you're hoping for high quality feedback or getting to know other interesting people, you may better spend your time on catering to your special audience even when it's small. And instead of promoting it left and right, target it specifically through niche channels, like email contacts, etc.

This may seem obvious, but sometimes people can get caught up in cargo-culting the established trendy marketing strategies that are actually designed for another use case than yours.