Back in 2019 I ran a little gaming channel and tried the same thing, putting a 15 second countdown before every reveal. First two videos did great, one hit 40k views which was huge for me at the time. Then the next eight just died, like 200 views each, and my average watch time tanked hard. Turns out the timer worked on the curious crowd but regulars got sick of waiting and bailed before the good part. YouTube doesn't really "punish" you on purpose, it just stops showing your stuff to people who keep leaving early, and that adds up fast. So yeah six videos is nothing, you could get totally different results next month just from one upload getting picked up. coray70 is right that the sample is way too small to know if the trick is actually working or if you just got lucky once.

Kept the server up because a UPS gives you actual battery time, not just surge protection, so it's doing way more than a power strip ever could. Just don't count on it covering a long outage if you're running a big load.