(clock beeps)
- All right folks, pay attention
because this one is super important.
Why?
Because YouTube wants you to get as much of this
as possible in every single video that you make.
However, for your intro,
you need to keep it as short as possible.
(clock beeps)
Just like that.
Under 15 seconds.
Thank you very much.
- [Man] vidIQ.
- [Woman] vidIQ.
- [Man] vidIQ.com
- Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know what some of you've just done.
You've paused the video and you've posted in the comments,
no Rob, your video intros actually
19 seconds long, ra, ra, ra, ra.
You're still watching, aren't you?
Hello everybody.
I am Rob, and welcome to vidIQ,
the YouTube tool and channel that aims to educate you on
your YouTube journey, and channel that success through 2019.
In this series, our aim is to help you get more views,
and more subscribers, and more watchtime in this case,
to ultimately grow your channel.
To watch the full playlist, click over here.
And if you want to see more awesome vidIQ stuff,
along with helping us to get up to 300,000 subscribers,
make sure to click that button, and the notification bell.
Oh, and before we move on, a lot of people
ask me this question, what is this?
It is a LaMetric Time.
Search for it on Amazon, and then slowly back away
when you realize how much one of these costs.
(cash register dings)
Somehow the set just doesn't look
complete when it's not there.
All right, watchtime.
For those who've never heard this term before,
it is generally considered the
most important analytic on YouTube.
Basically it is the physical number of minutes and hours
your content is watched for by people on YouTube.
But why is watchtime more important than views?
Well let's take a look at it from this perspective.
Views represent clicks, or visits,
but they don't tell you for how long somebody is
on the YouTube platform or on the mobile application.
The more watchtime YouTube has from its audience,
the more adverts they can sell to the audience,
making more money for YouTube,
and more money for the video creator.
So it stands to reason that the more watchtime
you can create from your videos,
the more YouTube is going to reward you,
and share your content with more people.
But also bear in mind that you don't have to
monetize your content to benefit from this.
The search and discovery engine is
separate from the monetization engine.
Let's do a simple example here.
You've got a video with 1,000 views,
with an average view duration of one minute.
That gives you 1,000 minutes of watchtime in total.
But you've also got a video with 500 views,
with five minutes of watchtime,
which gives you a total of 2,500 minutes of watchtime.
Which do you think has got the better chance
of doing well on YouTube in the long run?
(ding)
Yeah, it's probably video B.
Now that is a really simple example,
but YouTube have stated themselves,
generally when it comes to watchtime, audience retention,
and all that sort of stuff, more is better.
That is their own words.
But there are a lot of ways to get more watchtime,
and that's what we're gonna explore right now.
Let's look at the numbers first.
If you haven't already seen our
beginner's guide to analytics,
I recommend you watch that video at some point to help
with navigating around these screens more confidently.
With that being said, on the creator studio dashboard,
click on analytics, and then at the top of the graphs,
click on the interest viewers tab.
You should now see an average view duration box
and if you click on this, it will show you
a graph of on average how long your videos are watched for.
This is useful from a channel perspective,
and as we've already said, more is better.
But this graph doesn't take into account
how long each individual video is.
So to improve watchtime, you really want to start by
scrutinizing every single second of a single video.
To do this, click on the videos link to the left,
which lists all of your videos.
Then choose a video you want to analyze.
Click now on the analytics section,
and on the first screen here,
you should see this audience retention box.
Because you see, here's the thing,
you can make a video an hour long if you want to,
but if nobody's watching it after a single minute,
that's going to send some
pretty negative signals to YouTube.
Audience retention is all about keeping that viewer
interested throughout the entirety of your video.
Keeping them informed, interested, intrigued, entertained.
And you want to try and get that audience retention
to as close to 100% as possible.
Generally speaking, that's very difficult to do.
So a general benchmark is somewhere around about 50%.
And this box will tell you all that,
the total length of the video,
and the average view duration converted into a percentage.
To really drill down into this data,
you can click on the see more button,
and then watch the video to see
where there are peaks and dips in your content.
At 48% audience retention, this video is okay.
We do lose 40% of the audience in the first 30 seconds
of the video, which is not uncommon,
but does suggest that the intro didn't quite deliver
on the promise of the title and the thumbnail.
For the next two minutes, things level off,
which is a good indication that the
remaining audience is invested in the content.
But then there is another alarming dip
in the final 20 seconds.
That suggests the outro of the video was too long,
and people knew the valuable part of the video
was over long before it actually finished.
There's always loads of useful stuff
you can glean from audience retention graphs.
Take this one for example.
What on earth happened here?
Audience retention actually went up
30 seconds into the video.
This happens when viewers are rewinding a certain section
of the video and watching it over and over.
But holy smokes, the video falls off a cliff
a third of the way into the video.
Why?
Because this video is all about how to delete a video
on YouTube, and I gave the audience the answer right here.
According to the audience,
the rest of the content is absolute fluff.
So you already have a lot of data
on your channel to analyze.
To tell what you're doing right,
and what you're doing wrong, to eventually get more.
Because as YouTube says,
get out of me way.
All right, let's talk about how important video intros are,
six minutes into a video about watchtime.
You are always going to have a sharp drop off
in viewership as soon as the video starts.
For some people, it's just not gonna click,
and they will turn off instantly.
And then there's gonna be another bundle of people
who are gonna stick around more maybe 15 or 30 seconds
to try and determine whether this video
delivers in some way from the thumbnail and the title.
That's why there needs to be some sort of hook or payoff.
A way to entice a viewer to invest
a few more minutes into the video,
and hopefully keep them engaged
for the entirety of the video.
You can look back at pretty much any video on vidIQ,
and you'll see me trying to entertain, inform,
or intrigue you in those first 15 seconds
before you see the vidIQ splash screen.
That is my attempt to get you to watch longer,
and I think it works, generally speaking.
Over how to educational videos will give you
the final result at the beginning of the video,
and then the rest of the video is about how to get there.
For compilations or stories, there may be an epic part
of the video that's used at the very beginning intro,
and you don't actually see that part
until maybe four or five minutes into the actual video.
It's kind of like teasing a story
before you watch the beginning of it.
So if you've not tried this before,
experiment with a dedicated intro to your video,
and try to keep it to 15 seconds or less.
So when this thing. (claps)
- [Man] vidIQ.
- [Woman] vidIQ.
- [Man] vidIQ.com
- Your branded intro should be no longer than five seconds.
(clock beeps)
All right, this next bit might be a little excruciating
for you as a viewer, and it may well damage my watchtime,
but I need to do it to prove a point.
What you're watching right now is me not making
any editorial changes to the video.
I'm just gonna let it run with this timer,
because what you will usually see right now
is a change of angle, or a zoom in, zoom out,
maybe an audio interrupt, or something
that excites a viewer a little bit.
Because as you well know, the average audience
attention span of a YouTube viewer is less than a goldfish.
So how do you fix that?
You do something called pattern interrupt.
(clock beeps)
So for the first seven minutes of this video,
and for the rest of this video,
I'm implying pattern interrupts like this.
For those 40 seconds there were no changes at all,
and I'm sure you can appreciate the different
tone, style, and pace of the video at that point.
I don't know if you noticed,
but I cut the music at that point at well.
Think of pattern interrupts as attention reset buttons.
You still know what the videos about,
but there's something new to look at on the screen.
They help explain how I can get my clock back up on
the shelf in an instant, and how you never see me fluff up
my lines because believe you me, I do it all the time.
I try to have a pant--
(beep)
I try to have a pattern interrupt
at least once every ten seconds,
including something like this subscribe animation down here.
But other video creators do pattern interrupts
every two or three seconds.
Now, there is one huge drawback to the video creator
when you use pattern interrupts, and that's editing.
It adds hours to the process.
So try not to go overboard, which is something I often do.
But fortunately, I love the editing process.
At the very least, start to watch video creators
who operate in your space on YouTube with a critical eye
to see if they adopt pattern interrupt strategies,
and how often they do it.
You should start to notice that the best video creators
in your space adopt a certain style and tone
through pattern interrupts that you should be at least
aware of if you're not trying to follow in some way.
Also, along with pattern interrupts,
you should consider something called B-roll,
which is pattern interrupts in itself.
This is where you have a voiceover, like I'm doing now,
but there's over footage put on top of me
actually writing out the word, this is B-roll,
but it's kind of tricky to sync these two together
because I don't know how much time there is in the
B-roll section of the video along with my voiceover.
Did I get that right?
We're gonna have to see in the edit.
No, it didn't.
I was way off.
All right folks, we're now 10 minutes into the video,
and if you're still watching, thank you very much.
Give me a #imstillwatching in the comments below.
The question is, why are you still watching,
and I think the answer is because I'm still on topic.
You wanna know how to get more watchtime,
so that's what this video is solely about.
This is the same as having
too many topics on a single channel.
If you're gonna try and cover many topics in a single video,
at least tell the viewer in the title or the video intro,
or do another dedicated video on that topic.
Stay focused, edit ruthlessly.
The most important currency on YouTube is time.
You want as much watchtime as possible,
but your viewer wants to spend their time
on YouTube as efficiently as possible.
Just because YouTube says this, doesn't mean
you should make longer videos to get more watchtime.
You're pandering too much to an algorithm,
and doing a disservice to your audience.
Now, I appreciate the irony here.
You may be asking me, Rob,
why are you making such a long video on watchtime?
My answer and intention with this video
is that I want to give you as comprehensive a video
as possible on watchtime, so you don't have to
spend more time watching other videos about the topic,
and it will save you more time as a video creator
in all of the future videos you're going to make,
which are gonna be tighter, more succinct,
and they serve your audience better.
Fingers crossed.
Now, remember when we were looking at audience retention,
and we saw at the end of the video
there can be a big drop off when
the audience realizes the video is ending.
And that could also be because you say
trigger words such as thanks for watching,
or I hope you enjoyed this video,
or that's it for this video.
So to avoid that, try trimming off the last 30 seconds
of a video when you say thanks for watching.
(ding)
Or continue to provide awesome advice
until the end, like this.
Thanks for watching.
See you later.
(beep)
Phew!
That was abrupt, but you get the idea.
And while this is a comprehensive beginner's guide
to watchtime, there's a lot more
we can tell you about a topic.
We'll save that for later on in the series.
Enjoy the rest of your video making day.