- Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,
children of all ages, are you ready
for a brand-new YouTube metric?
One that could change the entire course of a platform
and the fate of your channel.
Yeah, I thought you might be interested in this one.
- [Man] VidIQ.
- [Woman] VidIQ.
- [Man] VidIQ.com.
- What a quality intro that was.
Quality passion, quality energy, quality verve.
This video is guaranteed watch time,
because of it's sheer quality.
There has never been a video with
so much quality in the first thirty seconds.
YouTube's algorithm is listening
to all this isn't it?
It's reading the captions, right?
Good.
Hello everyone, welcome back
to VidIQ, I'm Rob
and by now you should know that we love
to talk about YouTube analytics.
And when this YouTube analytic story rolled
across our fictional news desk,
it was certainly an eyebrow raiser.
Because you see, YouTube is working on
some new metrics, two in fact,
over the last two years, and they
are both designed around the concept of
gaging and promoting quality content.
It is no secret that youtube has been
dogged by controversy over these last two years,
with questionable content that
seemingly gets pushed by the algorithm.
So what are these metrics, and what do
they potentially mean for video creators?
The first one sounds like a jacked up
super enhanced version of session watch time.
It will track, not only time spent
on the youtube platform watching videos,
but also time spent posting and reading comments.
So while posting comments may seem like
something that's pretty easy to gain,
after all how many sub-comments do
you have on your channel?
If youtube is gonna start tracking
how long a viewer spends on a watch page
reading comments, that's an entirely
different and interesting proposition.
This sounds like a metric that
might be called engagement watch time.
But, on the other hand, earlier on
in the year YouTube was forced into
a sweeping blanket ban of comments
on videos containing children,
of course YouTube are slowly resolving this problem,
but if you do have comments disabled
on your videos, for any reason,
how do you benefit from this particular metric?
The second metric is simply and mysteriously
called quality watch time which as of now,
nobody outside google completely understands.
The best quote attached to quality watch time
so far comes from a Bloomberg article
which reads as following, to spot content
that achieves something more
constructive than just keeping
users glued to their phones or desktops.
What this potentially means is,
that YouTube maybe starting to distance themselves
from what is considered the most important
metric on youtube, raw watch time.
With the consensus being that more outlandish,
more risque content leads to more
watch time which is something Youtube keeps being
dogged by, because of controversial content.
Bloomberg go on to say, The changes are
supposed to reward videos that are
more palatable to advertisers and the broader public,
and help YouTube ward off criticism that its
service is addictive and socially corrosive.
Addictive and socially corrosive?
I don't know what YouTube's talking about
(loud ominous music)
Also did you notice another important word there?
Advertisers.
Does that mean search and discovery
of your content could be influenced
by whether or not its monetized in the future?
And for those whose content is going to be
marginalized by these YouTube changes,
you're going to hear that familiar phrase,
freedom of speech being suppressed on YouTube.
Just like Facebook, YouTube is
struggling under the strain of being
considered a responsible adult of the internet.
Sometimes they have to make the
tough calls that don't please everybody.
Friend of VidIQ, Tom Martin, had
this to say on quality watch time,
If true I think that this is another sign
that YouTube is favoring big media
companies and TV, movie content.
Great news for me, my clients,
and older colleagues, but less
for independent video creators.
Also, another interesting thing to consider,
is that although we don't fully understand
the metrics yet, its rare to know about
something that's going to happen on YouTube
which hasn't yet happened, as far as we know.
Over the last 18 months, YouTube have
been more transparent about what they do,
but does that extend to algorithmic changes?
The cat is effectively out of the bag.
(angry cat meow)
So does that mean YouTube will share
this information with video creators,
and help us leverage these new metrics,
or will they tell nobody, flick a switch
and chaos descends?
Also does that mean cat videos
are still considered quality watch time?
And that's the point, at which I'm just going
to throw this over the fence for you to tackle.
We and everybody else would love
to hear your thoughts on these new metrics
how they might affect YouTube,
and of course your channel, but do bear
this in mind, with these new changes
we want every single one of you who watches
this video to comment and not only that,
we want you to write dissertations,
white papers, case studies on the subject.
And then we want you to read all of the
other comments and respond in detail,
because that's exactly how we want to test all of this.
Ha, what a quality outro.
(outro music)