Page 13 - The Ultilmate Youtube SEO Cheat Sheet

17. Boost “Watch Time Minutes” To Fast Track Growth

As we talked about briefly in the “open loops” section, audience retention is a key driving
metric for the growth of your content, your channel and your business.

However, it’s important to note that while the percentage duration of your content gives
you a good insight into how much viewer’s like your content, the percentage itself is not
what YouTube really cares about. What they want to see is large numbers of total “watch
time minutes”.

For example, a 60 minute video that has a 10% retention rate will receive an average of 6
watch time minutes. Whereas a 6 minute video that has a 50% retention rate will only get
an average of 3 watch time minutes.

Therefore (all thing being equal) the longer video with the lower retention rate will be
more favourable in the distribution algorithm, simply because is keeps viewer’s glued to
the platform longer.

Think about it from YouTube’s perspective, if their goal is to make money by showing
more ads on your content, which video is going to give them more opportunities to show
ads? That’s right - the longer one!

So you need to optimise your content to maximise your total watch time minutes.

18. Schedule It To Maximise Subscriber Views

If you’re getting started and you only have a few subscribers just publish your videos at
the time that suits you best.

At this point it’s more about consistency and conditioning your viewer’s habits to expect
your content at a particular time.

If you’ve ever been hooked on a TV show and you've organized your personal schedule
around the airing of the latest episode you’ll know exactly why this works.

However, if your channel does have a lot of subscribers and traffic, you’ll be gathering
accurate real time data in your Analytics that’ll enable you to make better decisions about
the best time to publish for your channel.

What you want to do is publish 3 hours before your peak time. Doing so will allow you to
capture the largest portion of your subscribers at the beginning of their viewing session,
boosting the likelihood that they’ll watch your content before someone else’s.

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