- If you want to know how to monetize your YouTube channel
by earning 4,000 hours of watch time, well,
this is the way.
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♪buh da bum bum bum, buh da bum bu da dum, ♪
♪ buh da bum bum bum ♪
All right then for everybody who hates star wars
let's get down to business
because 4,000 hours of watch time is a Herculean task.
If that's your first goal
when you start your YouTube channel.
Yes, that's right for regulars here at vid IQ.
You're probably familiar with this term
which I always use, patience.
Remember from the moment you start your channel
you have 12 months to achieve 4,000 hours of watch time.
And then your last 12 months of watch time
if you don't do it in the first year
12 months in YouTube land is a long time.
So to put it simply, accept
that you have this time available
to you and allow your channel to build momentum, to help you
out with this, let's break down those numbers a little bit.
Do you have any idea how 4,000 hours goes into 12 months?
Well, to hit 4,000 watch time hours over 12 months
your channel needs to average 10 hours
57 minutes and 29 seconds of watch time
per day to break that down even further.
It's the equivalent of 200 views
per day with each viewer watching
on average three minutes, 17 seconds
of one of your videos, 200 views, three minutes, 17 seconds.
That feels a lot more digestible.
Doesn't it?
But let's keep perspective here.
On day one it's unlikely that you're going to get 200 views.
Let alone keeping somebody on one
of your videos for over three minutes.
That's a task in itself.
every day your channel falls under the average
it's going to increase because the time is shortening.
So by three months into your YouTube journey
you may need to average 14 hours
of watch time every single day.
But once you're 6, 7, 8 months
into your YouTube journey and you've remained consistent
you'll have a big catalog of content on your channel.
And if you do apply the strategies that we
and other YouTube creators advise you to do
and you dedicate yourself to improving your YouTube craft
then you won't be getting 200 views a day.
You'll be getting 500 a thousand possibly even more.
You won't just be earning 10 hours of watch time.
Every single day, you'll be earning 20, 50
possibly even over a hundred hours every single day.
But all of that comes with practice,
persistence and patience.
Oh, and as a side note, if you are aiming to get 4,000 hours
of watch time, don't bother with YouTube shorts.
Yes. YouTube shorts are a good way to
build subscribers very quickly, but almost
no YouTube shots watch times counts towards 4,000 hours.
And even if they do, it's such a minuscule amount
that you'll be slogging away for ever.
If you want to learn more about the intricacies
of what 4,000 hours of watch time is
on YouTube then do check out this video over here.
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fun fact, if 200 of you get to this point in this video
when I've hit my average watch time hours
for the day to get 4,000 hours
of watch time over 12 months thank you.
But obviously in order to get all of his watch time
one of the biggest challenges
that small creators have is getting your content discovered.
So what you need to do is spend a bit
of time figuring out what helps you get discovered.
The most that you're going to need as much data
as possible on a little dive into YouTube analytics.
Again, if you're a regular here at vid IQ
you will know that I preach
by the philosophy of nothing beats experience.
So use your first three to six months on YouTube
creating videos, making mistakes, gaining experience
figuring out what you enjoy doing
and how your audience reacts to it.
The more videos you make, the more shots you have
at the target and more crucially more data you have.
Now. I'm not saying that you shouldn't go into YouTube
not having a plan, but don't overthink anything
get videos out there and see what happens on YouTube.
My general recommendation is to make 25 videos
in your first six months.
That's once a week, 50 videos, brilliant, a hundred videos.
Now that's some real passion from all of this data.
You can start to make data driven decisions.
And while this may seem so obvious
this is something creators so often overlook
on YouTube analytics where viewing our watch time hours
in advanced mode, increasingly time period
to 90 days to get a good dataset.
Now let's look at the top five performing videos.
These literally are the topics that generate the most
watch hours for your channel.
Now I would be happy making followup content about any
of these topics, but what I'm going to do now
to help myself is add the average views duration metric.
And now we can see not only what our audience
likes to watch, but also what they are willing to watch
for the longest period of time.
And well, now here's a coincidence.
A video we previously made about 4,000 hours.
Watch time is one of our top performers.
Can you see now while we're making this very video
you are watching now.
This is the way.
Now, if you think this approach is too simple
and stupid to work well, we just adopted it
in this video from a subscriber perspective
and it gained over 1000 subscribers in less than a week.
And we documented that story in this video.
These are both well worth a watch to prove this tactic.
Essentially, what we are encouraging you to
do is make more content based
on the content that has previously been successful
on your channel.
very own channel audit tool does a fantastic job
of showing you the best performing videos
for different categories, such
as views per hours, subscribers gained.
And yes, total watch time hours.
If you wanted to take a completely different approach
to this, you could look at the search terms
drive the most traffic to your channel
and make more content based on these topics.
Now, this is a point at which creators get a little wary
about making similar content
to what they've already made before, because they feel
as if they're going to alienate their existing audience.
Well, there's two things to consider there.
First of all, your existing audience probably found you
for a particular thing and they want to learn more about it
from you as long as it's not exactly the same information.
Secondly, and this is far more important.
Whenever you release a video on a topic
you're likely reaching this amount
of the intended target audience
whereas you have this much potential
in the same target audience.
Remember the more shots you have at the target
the more likely you are to hit the bullseye
of the target audience.
I mean, let's be honest here.
This is not the first time vid IQ has talked
about how to get 4,000 hours of watch time.
And it certainly won't be the last
but we always find new ways to talk about the topic.
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Since it is so hard to get discovered on YouTube.
The last thing you want to do is scare those
new viewers away from your channel.
Ultimately, you want them to become return viewers again
regular viewers here
at vid IQ will be familiar with this metric.
It shows you how often people return
to your content and is a strong indicator of channel growth.
Obviously, whenever you publish videos
viewers are going to return to your videos
but it's the significant climbs in the purple line
that you should really be paying attention to.
This is a strong indicator that you've perked interest
of your target audience again, so
that you're not just getting one view per person.
You're getting multiple views from the same person
and they will continue to pump more.
Watch time into your channel.
In this example, you can see that how
when we made a video about getting 1000 subscribers
it brought our audience back to our channel.
So we made a nother video
on the topic and the audience came back yet again.
Now, although we can't prove
that these return viewers are strictly subscribers
by the very fact VR returning to watch our content
they are behaving like subscribers.
Many of you will know
I have a fairly low opinion of this metric on YouTube
but the one thing this will show you is just
how more loyal subscribers are
versus any of the viewer on your channel.
Subscribers when they do watch our
content tend to be more invested
in you as a creator
and a more willing to spend more time watching your videos.
The evidence here is clear subscribers watch for way longer.
My argument is that return viewers are pretty
much exactly the same type of people.
They just haven't necessarily press that red button.
I mean, it makes no sense whatsoever
for a viewer to watch one of your videos
and then return to a nother piece
of content and watch for less time, they are invested.
They are loyal, continue to serve your returning viewers.
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There a common myth that the YouTube algorithm
only starts to work for your channel
after you've made a certain number of videos.
Well, fortunately, that's simply not the case.
In actuality, the YouTube recommendation system
isn't working for the creator and the video it's working
for the viewer and their preferences.
If you remain skeptical well, YouTube explained how
their recommendation system works very recently.
And we've got a couple of videos on the topic over here.
Don't just make five or 10 videos
and expect YouTube to do its thing.
Put simply make more videos.
I know that's a really simple thing to say
but the more videos you make
for more you learn about being a creator.
The more often you remind it, YouTube that you
have content that is available to serve to an audience.
And the more you remind your existing audience
that you have new content to watch it is this consistency
in all its forms, from creating content
on a regular basis to consistently creating content
for the same target audience that will lead
to a channel momentum.
I have learned over the years as a content creator
but I have a certain level of relentlessness.
I am so passionate about this topic
of YouTube education that I will put all of my heart
soul and energy into a video as I'm making
having said that a few hours after I've pressed publish
and I've read through the comments, I'm onto the next thing.
How can I help my audience next?
Now that's not to say, but I'm just making videos
for videos that say every couple of weeks
sometimes every couple of months
I'm going to go deep into my analytics
and try to identify patterns and make data driven decisions.
As you've seen from these strategies in this video
what I never want to do is obsess
over the success or indeed the failure
of the latest video I've published on YouTube.
When I do it's paralyzing and crippling
I just can't move on to the next project on my channel.
At the same time, I'm not going to pin all
of my hopes on one
or two videos that performed really well a few months ago
hoping that they're going to pull me
across the line of my next milestone.
I mean, folks, we are getting close.
We are getting really close to 1 million subscribers
but I ain't slowing down i'm speeding
up because I want to help you get there as well.
You always want more and I always want to make more.
And over the first 12 months of your YouTube journey
after you've made 50, a hundred videos
you should find that you're getting more views.
You're getting more watch time.
And almost before you know it you'll race
across that 4,000 hours of watch time milestone.
And for those
of you wondering what the secret vid IQ code word
for this video, pretty obvious really isn't it.
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