How To Get More Watch Time On YouTube? Top 5 Strategies.

If you want to get a lot of views on your YouTube videos, the one most important metric the YouTube algorithm looks at is watch time. If you get a lot of watch time, your videos will be shown to many people. But if you don’t get a lot of watch time, YouTube will hide your videos somewhere and it will just get a couple of clicks. So what is watch time and how can we improve it?

And what is watch time exactly? Well, before 2013, YouTube mostly looked at clicks as their main metric. If a video got a lot of clicks, the video would be shown to more and more people and would get more clicks. This led to a lot of YouTubers misusing this system. They use the most outlandish titles for their videos and would get a lot of clicks on them just for people to realize that they were misguided and that this video was not at all about what the title promised. So YouTube changed its main metric from clicks to watch time.

Watch time — clicks multiplied by the video’s average view duration. So if one person watches your video for, let’s say, five minutes, the second person for two minutes, and a third person for three minutes, this equals ten minutes of watch time in total. With this new system, these bad videos were not shown to as many people anymore. What does this mean for you? Well, if you want to be seen by thousands or even millions of people, you need to create videos that people not only click on, but actually watch. And I see a lot of small creators being very guilty of this.

They create content that is just not that interesting. And big companies, even more so, they create videos that are just about themselves and that are frankly not interesting to anyone else except for themselves. And this leads to people not clicking on the video in the first place or clicking on the video and leaving rather quickly. Your video needs to actually have a benefit for your viewer. They need to be entertained or they need to learn something or it needs to provoke emotion or just anything that’s of value.

Here are five proven strategies to improve the watch time of your videos so more people see them. We already talked about step number one, add value. This is the basis for all the other strategies. If you don’t add value, none of the other strategies are going to work.

Step number two is to increase your audience retention. If someone leaves your video after ten seconds, this is not going to help you. So make sure to absolutely nail your first fifteen to thirty seconds of your video. This is your first impression. So make it count! Because most viewers either leave within these first fifteen to thirty seconds or stay for the entire length of the video. This part is crucial. To do this, use these two steps. Step number one, make sure that they know that they will get what they came for. If someone clicks on your video, they have a certain expectation. Make sure that they know that this expectation is met. Step number two — show them what they will gain by viewing the video: what they will learn, which problem you will solve. Keep them entertained from the beginning on and so on. And after these first fifteen to thirty seconds, make your video really interesting. Write a script, cut all of the boring parts, learn from your old videos. You can see your audience retention graph for every video and learn what doesn’t work.

Strategy number three is to simply create longer videos. Imagine two videos, one four minutes long and one eight minutes long, and both get audience retention of fifty percent. This means that the first video gets two minutes and the second gets four minutes of watch time. This holds true because watch time is measured in absolute values. But of course, your viewer sees the length of your video before they click on it, so keep it to a reasonable length, otherwise, they won’t click on it in the first place.

Strategy number four is to get more subscribers. Subscribers are great because these are usually the first people who click on your video and give it the first watch time. And subscribers usually watch your videos for longer because they know what they’re in for and they know that they will enjoy your videos. To get more subscribers use call to actions in your videos. Either tell the viewer to subscribe to your channel or use a visual element. And create consistently good content. So there’s a reason to subscribe to your channel. What if you don’t have a lot of subscribers yet? I would recommend to promote your videos externally.

And strategy number five, double down on what works. Some of your videos will always get more views than others. Learn from them and learn to create good content repeatedly. Here’s how to do it, go to your YouTube studio, into your analytics, click on show more and sort the videos by watch time you will see which video performs best in the time frame you chose. Know what your top three to five videos have in common in terms of topic, in terms of your target audience, the video length, video title, and thumbnail, SEO, format, style, and visuals of your video. Now you know what works best for your videos and what you can replicate in the future. If you take these five steps and add value to your videos, get longer audience retention, create longer videos, get more subscribers, all views externally. And if you replicate what worked in the past, you will get longer watch times on your videos and you will have more and more videos that perform really well in the YouTube algorithm.

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