Watch-time and percentage watch-time: Know the importance

Know the ultimate truth about your channel’s growth

If you are a new YouTuber, then you should realize the importance of average watch-time of your YouTube videos for recent time (like last 28 days). Watch-time and percentage watch-time are a direct indication of the quality of your YouTube videos and channel. That’s why these two terms are a lot more important than SEO of your videos.

Definitely you need to SEO your videos, but you should focus on the quality of your videos too. This quality depends on what sort of content are there in your videos. So the content has to be really nice and attractive to the general viewers. If your video content is really unique and exceptional and also useful to viewers in any way, like education, entertainment etc., then your videos will likely go viral.

My experience on average watch-time that I couldn’t but share

Here I like to share my experience on watch-time. When I first started YouTubing almost one and a half years ago, I had no idea about the importance of watch-time and SEO. Within just a couple of months I realized that in order to grow the channel in views and earnings, I must upload content that would be appreciated by viewers, so that average watch-time would increase. That’s when I started to think what sort of content I should upload. After thinking and experimenting for a couple of weeks I finally found my particular type content that I was able to create and would increase my average watch-time. In short, I just found the niche of YouTubing that would suit me the most.

YouTubing niche: Choose a nice one

At this stage some might ask me what my niche was. Well, the thing is that every YouTuber’s niche doesn’t necessarily need to be the same. That’s why I prefer not to mention mine. I just can tell you this, to find your YouTubing niche you have to look inside your heart. Ask yourself what you’re good at and what sort of content you would be able to create easily. You know, as a YouTuber you are supposed to create your own content and not steal someone else’s, unless you plan to work on creative commons videos.

Factors YouTube considers to decide whether to promote a channel

When YouTube compares between two channels and finds that their average watch-time for recent times is almost equal, then it considers percentage watch-time. In this case, YouTube’s automated system naturally chooses the channel with greater percentage watch-time. Then again when two channels have the same level of percentage watch-time, the one with greater size of recent average watch-time gets preferred by YouTube.

There are many new YouTubers out there who say that they SEOd their YouTube videos, but still no good results and they hardly get views. Well the thing is that SEO of your YouTube videos is a secondary thing to consider when it comes to the question of your videos being viral, at least your channel getting significant number of views. The primary thing that is considered here by YouTube’s system is recent average watch-time. Once your recent watch-time improves, you can expect that your videos will get significant views from that point onwards.

Learn in brief what you need to do to have good watch-time

So my suggestions to you new YouTubers is that you focus on the quality of your YouTube videos. To ensure this quality ask yourself whether your videos are really useful and unique to viewers. If not, then try to change the type of content/niche of your videos. Once your channel starts to get significant views, try to develop or at least retain the watch-time size. Suppose for a couple of days your average watch-time is good, then you should get a lot of views in this period. Later, if your average watch-time falls down, then you may not get enough views as before. Even if your watch-time remains fairly constant, you might lose views if your competitors are somehow able to increase their watch-time.

Come to know why number of views might reduce drastically

I experienced this phenomenon at least twice in my YouTubing career. In one of my channels, I had significant views for almost one month. Then all of a sudden the number of views declined drastically whereas my average watch-time was fairly constant. The thing is that my competitors on YouTube were able to develop their average watch time while I was not. The same thing happened to another of my channels two months later. So the bottom line is that if you want your YouTube videos to go viral, then you must somehow increase the average watch time for them. And once your channel is established, try to increase your average watch time even more. It’s the only way you can sustain in YouTubing, unless you have a lot of subscribers.

If you have a lot of subscribers like at least 50k, then your views per day will remain fairly constant unless it increases. So keep uploading quality content until you reach a big milestone of subscribers. Lastly for your information, when I mentioned about my competitors, I meant the YouTubers who used to upload the same kind of content that I did. Like, YouTubers who all upload funny videos and contents on their channels are competitors to one another. One uploading educational content should not be a competitor to another uploading funny/amazing videos.