- So, you wanna get 4,000 hours of watch time
and 1,000 subscribers,
so you can monetize your YouTube channel
and you have to do it within 12 months to qualify.
No problem,
at least not after this video.
Today, I'm gonna give you six simple steps
and this is real, actual advice
on how to get 4,000 hours of watch time
so that you can monetize your YouTube channel.
I have a great sponsor for today's video, Epidemic Sound,
but more on that later.
So, step number one
is probably the easiest part of this process.
And that's gonna be breaking this down
into a very reasonable goal.
So, we actually have a system
for getting 4,000 hours of watch time
and 1,000 subscribers on YouTube
by setting a 12-month goal of getting 100,000 views
on your videos,
we can actually make everything else more manageable
and I'm gonna tell you exactly how we do that.
In a previous video
about getting your first 1,000 subscribers,
I introduced a lot of creators to the 1% rule.
The short version is that 1% of our total views
usually translates to how many subscribers
we end up getting;
at least in the initial stages of our YouTube career,
zero to 10,000 subscribers.
This won't prove true for 100% of content creators.
Your results may vary,
but this is about as close to average
and what is normal as it gets.
Okay, so that helps us with subscribers.
What about watch time, though?
Well, 4,000 hours of watch time,
when you break it down into minutes,
which is actually really important,
is 240,000 minutes of watch time.
When you know that you have 100,000 views as your goal,
then that can tell you
what average view duration you actually need.
In this case, a safe average for us
is gonna be at least three minutes of average view duration.
So, now that we have that as a reasonable goal,
we can actually start to make a content strategy
for our videos,
knowing that you want to get 100,000 views
in the course of 12 months,
so we can start to think about
how many videos we might need to upload.
We know that it's gonna help us get our subscribers
and we know how those videos need to perform.
They need an average view duration
of at least three minutes.
So, that takes us to step number two,
our content strategy.
And so our content strategy for this is going to be...
wait for it,
no random videos.
Yeah, I said it.
If you want to do YouTube full-time
or if you want to start making money on YouTube,
you have to start treating it like a career
and treating it with that same level of respect
and what that means is no random videos.
Now, if you're just doing this for fun,
then maybe you don't worry about getting monetized
or whether you meet those requirements,
and you can just make whatever you want,
I have no issue with that.
But if you're saying you wanna make money,
then we have to take it seriously.
And the reason we're not doing random videos
is because we have to make a plan here.
If we want an average view duration
of at least three minutes,
then it's gonna be very hard to do
if you're making five-minute or six-minute videos
because the average view percentage for most YouTubers
is not gonna be people watching the video
50% of the way through or 60% of the way through.
People like MrBeast work very hard
to get a 55 or 65% average view percentage.
That is what high-performing YouTubers get.
For most content creators,
it's usually closer to around 30%.
Again, this is gonna help you realize what's normal
and what okay looks like.
So, it's about 30, 35%.
If you know that,
then it means that in order to get
those three minutes of watch time,
your videos are probably gonna need
to be somewhere between eight and 12 minutes,
which is actually also gonna help you
because now, with the 4,000 hours of watch time,
once you are monetized,
people can now add mid-rolls to their YouTube videos
and post rules,
as long as the videos are over eight minutes in length.
It used to require it to be 10 minutes.
So, just making those longer videos
is going to help you in the long run anyway,
and I'm not saying pad your videos
or make them longer than they need to be.
I'm making this point
because I want to set you up for success
and I'm just gonna tell you the real numbers
instead of trying to validate you
around the content you want to make,
I'm gonna tell you what's gonna be successful
by the numbers.
You should also know that YouTube Shorts,
which can help you get a lot of views
and it can help you grow your subscribers really fast,
as much as people love that,
it does not help you get the 4,000 hours of watch time
because YouTube does not count that
toward your watch time requirements for monetization.
The watch time you get from YouTube Shorts
does not count towards your monetization goal.
So, now that we know the math
and now we know we have to approach this strategically,
we know that we have to make content formats
that can be a little bit longer, if possible,
to be able to get
that average view duration of three minutes,
so that we can qualify
to get those 4,000 hours of watch time
across 100,000 views
since that's what's gonna hopefully give us
those 1,000 subscribers we need.
We need to move on to making that content quality,
so that we can get a higher average view duration
and a higher watch time percentage.
Now, a lot of people confuse quality and value,
and I will get to value
for step number five down the road here.
But when it comes to value,
value is about what we click on
and why we click on it, okay?
So, that has more to do with things like topics, and titles,
and our expectations.
Quality, however, is the experience we have
once we decide to watch something.
And the quality and the experience that we have
is dictated by things like:
the visual aesthetic, the sharpness,
the focus of the video, the lighting,
the audio and sound design,
the editing and pacing, storytelling aspects of it,
and, of course, on-camera performance.
Both performance and production, as well as personality,
end up dictating what quality is.
And you've probably never heard a YouTuber
actually give you a definition of quality content
and make it more about how the video looks and sounds.
It's also performance and it's also personality.
All of these things have to work together
in order to make quality content
that people wanna watch for longer periods of time.
And so, you don't always need
the fanciest camera gear in the world.
You can do it with some very basic things,
but you should, in my opinion,
make audio more of a priority when it comes to your videos.
And that actually leads us to today's sponsor:
Epidemic Sound.
I've been using Epidemic Sound for years
and one of the reasons is because I just don't wanna worry
about copyright strikes on my channel,
which is one of the things
that can keep you from getting monetized on YouTube
even if you get 4,000 hours of watch time
and 1,000 subscribers,
you still have to end up being free of copyright strikes
and issues on your channel.
And with Epidemic Sound,
I can go ahead and have great music for my video content,
but I can also have sound effects
that allow me to enhance things like overlays,
fly-ins, and pop-ups,
and graphics that I put up to just
draw people a little bit more in
and give some more context to the video.
These types of pattern interrupts can help make sure
that your video is flowing properly
and that it just makes the video feel like
you put much more effort into it
and viewers tend to appreciate that.
Epidemic Sound has an extensive library
of music across various different genres.
And like I said, I've been using them for years
and I'm very happy with the results.
A lot of you even ask, like, where I get my music
and I always link to it into description,
it's Epidemic Sound.
One of the other things I appreciate
is that I can download the stems from the music
and if I want to just take the instrumental of a track
with no vocals, I absolutely can
and then I can edit that into my video
exactly the way that I want.
I also love that they directly integrated
with Adobe Premiere Pro,
since that's my video editing software of choice.
But you can use this with any software
that you happen to favor,
whether it be Final Cut Pro, Filmora, or even iMovie.
For a lot of viewers,
the audio experience is sometimes more important
than the video production
and how fancy the color grading is.
If you can't listen to a video, you can't really watch it.
So, Epidemic Sound makes that a lot easier and affordable.
Thanks again to Epidemic Sound for sponsoring today's video.
Make sure you're checking them out.
Link is in the description down below.
Speaking of editing,
let's talk about editing for higher levels of watch time
and average view duration.
When it comes to your editing and your pacing,
things like good sound design,
things like B-roll, and cutaways, and motion graphics
can just help a viewer stay engaged with the content longer,
especially when you're changing up things,
like the background music and those audio cues
to represent things like a shift in tone
or shift in a scene.
This can be especially helpful
if you're doing commentary-style videos
or talking head, or tips videos, or DIYs.
All of those are formats
where there are long takes on camera,
so breaking it up with B-roll,
as well as sound design is really important
to just keep people interested and invested in the content.
It's also important that you eliminate anything
that is just unnecessary or distracting from the video
in order to keep people watching longer.
This can be anything from your "ums" and "ahs"
to long pauses
or even to mistakes,
as well as just anything that you think
is not for the value of the viewer.
Step number five is going to be to get more views
to help lead to more watch time
and engagement in the first place.
Easier said than done, though.
The way we're gonna do this
is I'm just gonna introduce you
into a very good framework for it
the same way we set up a system for you at the beginning,
we're gonna set up a system for you now.
There are three things you need to focus on
when it comes to getting more views on YouTube.
We talked about quality,
but quality is that experience we have,
especially in the first 30 to 60 seconds of a video.
So, what about value?
Value comes down to topic, title, and thumbnail;
could also be timing, number four.
Okay, the 4Ts ultimately dictate viewership on a video,
your subscriber count does not,
hate to break it to you.
It comes down to: are we, the casual viewer,
interested in a topic?
Have you communicated that topic well with the title?
And did you get our attention with the thumbnail,
so that we can see that for ourselves?
And you also have to remember that sometimes,
there is an element of timing
that makes a topic more relevant
or a title have a different context.
Those things determined as clicking on a video
and then giving you
10 to 30 seconds to get and keep our attention.
And finally, tip number six,
this ties back to why we're not making random videos.
Make videos
that are evergreen and have replay value if possible.
I know some of you want to do topical things,
news, commentary, and trends,
but you could miss the timing on those
because the odds are if you're watching this,
you're not a full-time YouTuber
with unlimited time and energy or resources
to be able to jump on things right away
and knock out a video.
You're just not there.
You may not have the experience as an editor
to turn around a video very quickly.
You might still be spending hours upon hours upon hours
of what little free time you have,
especially if you work a nine-to-five job,
or you go to school, or you have a family.
If you're essentially a working class creator,
you can't really keep up.
But the good news is that if you're doing content
that will be as relevant as it is today,
six months from now or a year from now,
especially in your monetization window,
then that actually can keep getting your views,
keep stacking watch time, and keep stacking subscribers.
And if it's focused instead of random
on a specific area, or niche, or set of topics,
then there's a chance
that viewers will become repeat viewers
of your overall library of content over time,
you have more options for people to discover you,
and you can just compound and stack your views.
This is not gonna be as sexy as going viral,
but it is a long-term strategy
and that incrementalism
probably has the best track record of all time
of actually working.
It's not sexy, but it gets the job done.
So by having a focused content strategy
and also building into the video's replay value,
something that might be worth watching more than once,
then you can actually get more watch time
than somebody who's making a video that's a one-and-done,
or that there's no follow up to,
or no reason to subscribe
and keep watching more content like that.
So, just remember, one-off random videos,
even if they explode,
may not have any longevity and value
that gets you to your goal.
It's more reasonable to make evergreen content
that's going to last
throughout at least six months to a year
and still be relevant and useful
or entertaining and worth watching.
It's also worthwhile to make follow-up videos
that people can flow through,
but make sure they can come in at any point
and still get value out of them.
It doesn't need to be dependent
on them watching the previous videos.
It's that they could get more value by doing so.
It's about adding value, as my friend Nick Nimmin would say.
And there you go, six simple steps
for getting 4,000 hours of watch time on YouTube.
I've told you exactly what you need to do
in order to get monetized
and to take one of your first steps
for being a full-time content creator.
Question of the day,
what was the most helpful tip you got from this video?
Let me know in the comment section,
I'll reply to as many of you as possible.
Thanks again to Epidemic Sound for sponsoring today's video.
If you enjoyed this video,
then you might wanna check out this video
on how to get your first 1,000 subscribers on YouTube,
I'm gonna link to that in the description down below.
Also, you might wanna check out my playlist for YouTubers
who are under 1,000 subscribers,
I hope you get some value out of it.
As always, thank you so much for watching
and don't forget,
go out there and create something awesome today.
Take care.