- The most watched video on YouTube, "Baby Shark,"
now has over 10 billion views,
but I've got a question for you.
How many views did it get in the last hour?
I'll give you three seconds.
(digital timer beeping)
Wrong.
The answer is 210,000.
210,000 views per hour.
That's nearly 5 million views per day,
five years after it was published.
Yes, we need to learn a little bit more
about views per hour, don't we?
The demise of public dislike counts on YouTube in 2021
left vidIQ with a little bit of a dilemma.
For years, we have displayed the likes to dislike ratio
next to videos to help you make an informed decision
about the value of a video before you even click on it.
It was a great tool.
Everybody loved it.
And most importantly, it was free.
And then YouTube took the data away from us.
And suddenly, every video on YouTube
was rated a perfect 100%,
and that really wasn't going to work, was it?
And so in response to all of this,
we decided to pull a little bit of a Ross Geller.
(studio audience laughing)
- Pivot!
- And offer something completely new,
a very high value to creators,
views per hour.
Let's face it.
We're all little addicted to this screen, aren't we?
Real time views for our own channel.
And our craving for these metrics
only magnifies to truly epic proportions
when we publish a new video.
And so what we decided to do
was to take this concept
and apply it to potentially every single video on YouTube.
So what does this tell us?
Well, probably the fact that another 56 people
have just collectively lost their minds
over the fact that YouTube has removed dislike counts,
and this video's gained another 56 dislikes.
On a more serious note,
the Views Per Hour Tool
is designed to give you a clearer picture
of the YouTube landscape,
showing you the VPH for videos on the home page,
search pages, channel pages,
and the suggested videos on YouTube Watch Pages.
And yes, I can confirm
that everything you've just seen is completely free.
You can also dive into the historical views per hour
on a video's Watch Page, as you can see here,
and you'll see this views per hour number appear
on other vidIQ screens, such as the Most Views Tool,
Competitors Tool, and Subscriber Analysis.
To put this into basic terms,
views per hour tells you what videos are trending right now,
irrespective of when they were published.
And to demonstrate what I mean,
we're all going to unblock a toilet.
(Rob sniffs) (Rob gags)
This is an example
of where the value of a content is timeless.
In an emergency,
people still need to know how to unblock their toilets today
as they did 8 years ago, 80 years ago.
But you know what can change?
The quality of a value of a content,
which means it's never too late to make a video.
In this example, we have, in YouTube terms,
two very old videos, well established
at the top of each search, with millions of views.
And yet this video, made just over a year ago,
gets more views per hour today.
Now, why is this, I hear you ask?
Well, I would argue that the thumbnail
is more modern and more eye-catching.
It's a shorter video, providing a quicker solution.
And the title offers a fresh incentive.
This would seem to suggest
that the video likely offers a more attractive,
better solution to the viewer.
And I wouldn't be surprised
if this video tops the search rankings in years to come.
And we've learned all of that from views per hour.
So surprisingly, views per hour
can reveal opportunities to you
that you didn't even realize were there.
However, it can also show you where the current nut
may be too tough to crack.
You would think
that this is a fairly good search term to try and rank for.
And it's no surprise that we find Think Media
at the top of the list, but here's the thing.
This video, today, this very hour,
crushes all of its competition by a factor of 10.
A hundred views per hour
versus 8 and 11.
To me, this reveals a few things.
First of all,
Think Media spotted a gap in the search markets,
and they capitalize on it.
Well done, them.
What it also seems to suggest
is that in two terms of best YouTube camera,
YouTube only needs one high quality video.
And it's gonna serve that video
up to all viewers who search for that term.
And that kinda means three things.
Either there isn't enough demand
for this type of search content,
or YouTube is already happy with the supply
it has on YouTube,
or YouTube has found the perfect video for that viewer.
So it's gonna use that,
and it may prove to be a very difficult search ranking term
for you to try and muscle into.
On the other hand, iPhone 14 is a search term
with plenty of room for lots of different videos
from lots of different creators.
That's how they're getting
hundreds of views per hour right now.
Now the problem with this, of course,
is that large creators know this,
and they are constantly flooding a topic with content.
Views per hour can also give you an intriguing glimpse
into the YouTube recommendation system.
Take these two videos as an example.
Both appeared on my YouTube home page,
but have very contrasting view counts.
I can assure you, I have no previous history
or interest in the tallest and shortest people in the world.
My only guess is that this video
from over four years ago
has had a sudden surge in views per hour,
and now YouTube wants to recommend it to everybody.
So why on earth would YouTube put that video
against this Creator Insider video
that only has 66 views per hour?
Because it's based on personalization as well.
YouTube already knows
that I like to watch YouTube education content.
So even though this Creator Insider video
has been out for three hours,
and it's only getting 66 views per hour,
it's likely that I'm gonna watch it
if YouTube puts it in front of me.
And so let that be a lesson to you.
If YouTube can understand your content,
it can find an audience to put that video in front of.
You will always get a chance.
There is one final party trick VPH has under its sleeve
I want to show you.
It's almost second nature at this point
to sort a channel's videos by most popular,
but with vidIQ's Trending Tool button,
you can sort by highest VPH.
In other words, what's most popular
on the channel right now.
And so in the case of MrBeast,
he currently has videos on his channel
from over three years ago
that still get over
three and a half thousand views per hour.
(bell dings)
While this tool can be fun to use
with YouTube's rich and famous,
it does have practical real world use.
As I'm about to show you,
our good friend Nate from Channel Makers
has been crushing it recently
within the YouTube education space.
So I decided to run our VPH tool on his channel.
And I came across this highly successful video,
getting loads of views a month after it was published.
So what I decided to do was, as you might say,
take inspiration from this idea
and create my own interpretation.
Now, fair play to Nate.
He beat me to the punch on this one,
and his video is still getting twice as many views per hour,
but I'll happily take a quarter of a million views.
(bell dings)
The ultimate truth is that all videos on YouTube
have a limited shelf life.
Sometimes it's a few hours.
Sometimes it can be years
Sometimes videos get a second life, and are resurrected.
And as per usual, the truth behind all of this is data.
And as I've said before, the data never lies.
And when it comes to research,
arguably, views per hour can be just as important
if not more important than keyword research.
So the next time you do have a spark of inspiration,
you can validate that idea
by seeing how the videos that are already on YouTube
are performing right now.
But what if video ideas themselves are not your jam,
and you really struggle to come up with some?
Well I highly recommend you watch this video,
because you'll come away
with at least 1,500 video ideas a month.
That can't be bad, can it?