Impressions per post, not just total impressions — so this isn’t a story about posting less. August 2025 and July 2026 both ran almost exactly 450 posts for the month; reach per post fell roughly 5x anyway. The biggest single-day spikes (300–460K impressions) landed on days tracking real national H-1B news moments — the fee/lottery reform fights in September 2025 and January 2026 in particular — which is a “riding the news cycle” signature more than a steady baseline getting throttled. The renewed dip from February through May 2026 coincides with running for U.S. Senate and a stretch spent upgrading recording equipment rather than posting — both of which pulled time away from the account directly, separate from anything the platform’s algorithm was doing.

X tracks video separately from overall post impressions. The pattern is the same shape, but the mechanism is clearer here: 19 of the year’s 30 X-native videos were posted in December 2025 alone, then posting nearly stopped (1 in May, 2 in June, 4 in July). The two best individual clips — 10,539 and 5,098 views — are an 11-second and a 17-second clip posted the same day, Jan 25, 2026, which is real proof that short vertical clips are the one format that has reliably outperformed everything else tried on the account. This is a supply problem more than a reach problem: the format works when used, it just wasn’t kept up.

Lifetime totals since the channel started May 12, 2022: 25,845 views, 448 watch hours, 301 subscribers, across 227 videos. Nearly all of that growth landed in the same Nov 2025–Feb 2026 window as the X surge — the same campaign-driven pattern showing up independently on a second platform. The traffic-source breakdown below is the more useful finding: YouTube’s own recommendation system (“Browse features,” the home feed) is the second-largest source at 34.6% of all views, run at a healthy 5.1% click-through rate — the algorithm is actively distributing this content, not burying it. “External” (39.1%, the largest single source) is traffic from links shared elsewhere — meaning reach still depends heavily on personally driving people there. The one genuine weak point: “Suggested videos” gets shown 25,089 times but converts at only 0.9% click-through, the lowest of any source — the algorithm is offering the exposure, the thumbnail/title isn’t winning the click in that context.

Four things stand out. “jobs direct” (#2) drove 51 of the channel’s 301 total subscribers — 17% of every subscriber the channel has ever had, from one video, despite a mediocre 2.2% click-through rate; whatever is converting viewers there is worth understanding and repeating on purpose. “346,000 Texas Kids” (#6) has the best retention by far at 70% average view completion on a 20-second clip — a hook that holds people to the end. “How to use the state map…” (#1) has the best click-through rate at 9.0%, double the channel average. And “Between Foreign Workers and American Workers” (#10) shows the opposite problem: 457 views but only 5.4% retention — people click and leave almost immediately, the clearest example on the channel of a title/thumbnail overpromising what the video delivers in its first few seconds.

Reach on both platforms tracks two things more than anything else: how much time was personally spent posting, and whether H-1B happened to be a national story that week. Neither platform’s data supports “the algorithm is hiding this” as the main explanation — YouTube’s own recommendation system is actively distributing this content at a solid click-through rate, and X’s biggest spikes line up with real news moments, not a stable audience getting cut off. What the data does show clearly: short video is the highest-leverage format on both platforms, a small number of specific videos already prove a winning formula (hook, thumbnail, subject) exists, and the 1,000-subscriber threshold that’s felt so far away is much more a function of posting consistency than of any ceiling being imposed from outside. That’s a more encouraging problem to have — it’s one a steady posting cadence can actually solve.