- Whatever today's day is go back 12 months.
Anything a viewer has watched on your channel
that it is publicly available counts as watch time.
(upbeat music)
Folks, all I need from you is a number
and that is how many hours you've earned
on your channel in the pursuit of 4,000 hours
of watch time to monetize your YouTube channel.
Let us know in the comments below,
and if you don't already know how to do this
I'm gonna show you in this video.
Hello, I'm Rob, welcome back to vidIQ.
And yeah, a lot of the questions we often get
on our channel are how do I get 4,000 hours of watch time?
And we're going to answer some of those right now.
For example, what does it mean
by 4,000 hours of watch time in the last 12 months?
And I can't put it simpler than this.
whatever today's day is go back 12 months,
anything a viewer has watched on your channel
that is publicly available counts as watch time.
Also, it doesn't matter when the video was published.
For example, you could have published a video
over 10 years ago,
but if somebody watches that video last week
that watch time counts towards your 4,000 hours.
Also, the good news is this requirement does not reset.
For example
if you started your YouTube channel exactly one year ago
and you got 3,400 hours of watch time, it doesn't reset
to zero and you have to start all over again.
It is simply the last 12 months
of watch time on your channel.
Hopefully when I put it like this
it sounds relatively straightforward.
And it is
with a few exceptions that we'll get add onto in a second.
But right now I want to show you exactly where
you can get this information in the YouTube studio.
So from any YouTube page, you should be able to click
on your channel icon in the top right-hand corner.
And you'll have a couple of options here,
the one you want to choose is the YouTube studio.
This takes you to the dashboard
of a YouTube studio and down the left hand navigation bar
you will see an option called monetization.
Although you're not yet monetized,
it will show you the requirements you need
and your progress so far.
of course, another requirement
for monetization is 1000 subscribers.
And that's relatively straightforward
because you just need 1000 subscribers
and you have as much time
as you need to to get those 1000 subscribers.
But on the right hand side
you will see your public watch time hours.
But before we talk about public watch time hours
I just want to show you this cool free little tool
that you get when you download vidIQ
but it's going to help you
with your monetization requirements.
This number in amber shows you the same number
on the monetization screen of a YouTube studio showing us
that we have 448 hours of watch time.
If you roll your mouse over this number
it will show you a breakdown
of that watch time in the graph below,
along with this tool tip
just explaining what the requirements for monetization are.
In this example, the channel is around about six months old
and as you can see it's likely not going
to hit 4,000 hours of watch time
but we'll talk about why that is a little later.
When you hit 4,000 hours of watch time
this number turns green
and when you exceed 5,000 hours of watch time
it disappears completely because he don't need it anymore.
Now, the real cool thing about this feature
is that not only does it show you watch time
it shows you many other channel analytics
and it works on pretty much every single YouTube page.
So even while you're watching content
you can see how your channel is performing.
We call this the real-time start spot
and it continues to be my favorite vidIQ tool.
And as a reminder, this isn't a sales pitch
it is completely free when you download vidIQ.
Now then, it would be absolutely wonderful
if everything you publish on YouTube counted
toward your watch time for monetization
but that simply isn't the case,
so let's dig into the details.
YouTube has a monetization support page
that I'll leave a link to
in the description just below the light button
and it does cover public watch time hours.
It simply stays valid public watch hours
as watch hours gained from videos you set to public.
So with that being said
what's not included within the scope of public watch hours
any video that is currently unlisted
any video that is currently private
any videos you have deleted,
none of the watch time from any of those videos will count
towards monetization requirements.
And to be clear on this as well
if the video was previously public, but you set it
to unlisted or private,
none of a watch time will count,
the video has to be public for that watch time to count.
Now then let's take a look at this video,
all seems good here
over 4,000 hours of watch time
the problem is almost none of it's going to count
because it's watch time it's been bought and paid for.
That's right, you can't cheat the system
with YouTube ad campaigns.
This is all tracked as a traffic source in the analytics
and none of it counts towards the monetization requirements.
Also, even if you were able to cheat the system in this way
there's no point in doing it because once you are monetized
nobody's gonna watch our content
because you haven't actually built up an audience.
Unless of course you want to pay
for adverts to be put on your videos
of which YouTube we'll take a 45% cut leaving you with 55%
of what you just paid for to put an advert on your video
doesn't really make any sense, does it?
And I don't think that's even technically possible.
All right then,
let's move on to the different video formats,
starting with short form content.
YouTube stories do not count towards watch time.
YouTube shorts,
that's a little bit more tricky to explain
it all depends on how the video is viewed.
Take this as an example
I'm going to watch this content through the video tab
on a channel page on the YouTube mobile app
the video is played within the normal YouTube player app
and this would be classed as watch time
but does count towards monetization requirements.
However, because this video is less than 60 seconds
and as in vertical video format
it is eligible to be a YouTube short.
So if I watch that same video from the shorts shelf
it's played through the YouTube shorts player
and the watch time doesn't count towards monetization.
What this leads to is a bizarre situation where
your YouTube channel analytics say you have a certain amount
of watch time hours while your monetization screen says
you have a completely different number of watch time hours
for monetization requirements.
And unfortunately, the more views you get
from YouTube shorts, the worse this situation becomes.
We've got an extreme example of this, where one channel
got tens of millions of views and didn't even
reach monetization requirements,
definitely worth checking out.
To make this situation even worse,
if you are monetized, you can't actually earn any revenue
from YouTube shorts views.
Again, just those views that come
from the regular YouTube play.
Now, there is some good news on all of this,
YouTube do plan to monetize shots in the future.
So if you are going to mainly be a YouTube shot's creator
for now, I would just forget about monetization.
It's a mess, the current YouTube partner program
is not going to work for you.
So focus on organically growing your YouTube shorts channel
to its maximum potential so that when YouTube does
monetize shorts, you can benefit.
And finally, any live stream not converted
into video on demand content
will not count towards public watch time.
What does that actually mean?
So I actually had a little back and forth
with team YouTube on Twitter to get the answer to this.
And now I think I understand what it means
but I'm still not 100% sure.
Basically none of the watch time
from the live stream will count
until that live stream has converted into video on demand.
So let's say for example, you get 250 watch time hours
from the live stream and then another 50 hours
from the video on demand portion of a live stream
then that's all gonna count
but you need to leave that live stream slash video
on demand, live stream public.
Yeah, that still sounds really confusing.
I think the reason for this is because
if you have a live stream that's longer than 12 hours
then it doesn't turn into a video on demand
because YouTube will just eternally try to process it
or at least that's what's happened in the past.
And also maybe it's to prevent some people trying
to gain live streams by having them run forever and ever
and have maybe bots watching them.
There must be some reason why YouTube have included this
in the public watch hours.
If this is true, then technically speaking
the monumental watch time from all of those
at 24 seven music live streams would never count
towards watch time requirements.
So I still feel YouTube could do a better job
at clarifying watch time from live streams.
That's how to get 4,000 hours
of watch time on your channel,
technically speaking.
If you want to learn more
about how to grow your channel
and what content to make, to reach our requirements
then check out the video over here.
If you have any questions about 4,000 hours of watch time
then join us on our Wednesday webinar
where we'll show you a vidIQ tool, and then we'll spend
over an hour answering all of your questions.
Thank you very much for watching
and enjoy the rest of your video making day.