Correlation vs causation

A channel changes its thumbnail style in November and views climb. The thumbnails might be the reason. So might the school holidays, a competitor going quiet, one video getting picked up by an outside site, or the plain fact that anything measured after a bad month tends to look better. Analytics show what happened alongside what else happened, and that is all a dashboard can give you. Isolating a cause needs a change made on purpose, held steady long enough to read, with everything else left alone. Most creator advice is built on the weaker version, where somebody did a thing, numbers moved, and the thing got the credit.